Wrestling with Religion

  Harrison Road near my house--an old two-lane highway that's now a suburban traffic artery--has a posted speed limit of 40mph, but if you drive that speed, a line of cars collects behind you. Logically, speed limit ought to mean the fastest you drive, but, in effect, it means the slowest. Hardly anybody drives below 40mph on Harrison, and they're a hazard. The norm is between 45 and 50. In American culture, everywhere but in speed traps, "40" on a speed limit sign means "45 or a little faster." A Criminal Justice instructor told me that he taught this. "We don't want people staring at their speedometers." Rules of behavior seldom mean literally what they say. Speed Limit 40 doesn't mean, Drive slower than 40mph , but the logical opposite: Drive somewhat faster . A cop never tickets for 45mph, and may let 55mph off with a warning, but surely tickets 70mph. The wording is rigid, but enforcement flexes at the discretion of officers within ...

  E dward T. Hall In his 1976 book Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduces extension transference , a term that is both profound and simple. It is a doorway into the paradox of a fish asking another fish, "What is this thing they call the sea?" Extensions are things--tools, ideas, words, and customs--invented to improve survival or comfort. Once fully adopted, they tend to become invisible, "natural." Their rules function as a collective unconsciousness as we assume and obey them but barely notice them and can only haltingly describe them. The general word for the entire body of naturalized and accepted extensions of a group of people is culture.  Within the last few million years, Hall points out, the human genome has changed very little, but cultural evolution--the evolution of our extensions--has made us vastly different from remote ancestors who had only "a few crude tools and the rudiments of language" (p. 40). The extensions of our ...

       Thou shalt not kill is an obvious commandment, but, as usual, the devil is in the details. It isn't usually read to protect nonhuman life, except maybe family pets such as dogs and cats (with major exceptions). One friend includes pigs. I've never killed anybody and am not aware that any of my friends have, though combat veterans may omit the fact from conversation. Obviously, the commandment can't prohibit accidents, which are unavoidable, but does require us not to endanger fellow humans.       War, self-defense, law enforcement, and possibly abortion are exceptions. Hebrew law allows so many exceptions that the King James translation is clearly inaccurate. Thou shalt not murder is accurate but not very helpful. So homicide is wrong except when it isn't wrong? When exactly isn't it? When is it justified, even obligatory?  Besides, Murder  is a legal category, and we know that not everything lawful is good.      I...

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) proposes a primal form of religion, the supposed armature on which more elaborate rites are wound. He calls it totemism . A totem is a sacred symbol or, more specifically, an object representing that symbol. Totems derive power from group consensus. Absent a group's esteem, an object is "profane" or ordinary. Daily life is profane (etymologically, outside the temple ), but sacred times are infused with meaning through rituals centered around totems that stand for the group itself. In these rituals, individuals lose themselves in a collective identity: a nationality, denomination, clan, party, or fan base. Trump rallies--with red caps as totems--are recent examples. In the totemic gatherings of the Australian aboriginal clans on which Durkheim based his theory, participants experience a "collective effervescence" that transports them into an ideal realm. Participants are lifted out of their indiv...

  Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) was the first professor of sociology, refining on the positivism of August Comte. He approached the mores and institutions of society as realities to be studied objectively (statistically if possible) in structural relation to each other. Earlier writers had condemned religion as bad science, false cosmology concocted by priests. Instead, Durkheim asserted that religions, like all living institutions, serve living purposes. Their truth resides in their power to produce social cohesion and cure the disease of anomie --the alienation and fragmentation that results from loss of shared meaning. Religions exist, not because priests invented them, but because they are stable and self-replicating social realities. For skeptics in the 1700s, religion was simply bad science, destined to fall before the real thing. Auguste Comte (1788-1857), an early advocate of sociology, agreed with this but worried about it. For him, Christianity served vital functions, promo...

  J. R. R. Tolkien's dragon from The Hobbit,  infected with "dragon sickness" or greed A billionaire President became a hero of evangelical Christians despite his wildly unChristian personal morality, including two divorces, unrepentant adultery, counterpunching, holding of grudges, and habitual name-calling--all condemned in the Gospels. This variant of Christianity emphasizes opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage (and, more recently, transsexualism), issues on which Jesus is silent. We may speculate what Christ's teachings might have been on these issues, but making a hero out of a billionaire ignores the most frequent and explicit of Christian teachings. One of his strongest teachings about wealth, the story of the Rich Young Man, appears in three gospels. Taken literally, Jesus says that the wealthy can't saved unless they donate everything to the poor:  As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” h...

In The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Movement in the Western World in a Few Centuries, Rodney Stark charts sociological processes to explain the movement's success. After the crucifixion, there were about 140 believers in Jerusalem (Acts 1: 12-15). Three centuries later, some 35 million Christians were spread over the Roman Empire (pp. 6-7). When the Emperor Constantine recognized Christianity in 313, he merely acknowledged  a dominant movement in his empire.       Earlier historians either found this explosive growth inexplicable or explained it as evidence of God's favor. As a persecuted popular movement, unaided by military power, the messianic Jewish sect that became Roman Christianity seemed unique, its rise to power inexplicable, but Stark explains it as a convergence of social processes, a perfect storm but a natural one.      Stark came to this conclusion after his study of th...