Sorry for a typo, please read 'thaqt' as 'that'.
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Kamal Das <kamalctgu@gmail.com> wrote:
Dr. Roy
Nothing, not even sex, sells better than religion. Even Scientology of L. Ron Hubbard is one. As it grew in the primitive age with the concept of God as absolutely unknowable, the essence of religion is atheism. The priest-king Menes is said to be the founder of the concept of religion. He simply changed his name a bit to Amen/Amun/Ammon and made it the name of the highest God there was. The Hindu version of Amen is Achintya Dev, worshiped presently in Indonesia. He is unclad and hides behind his throne. Nobody needs a priest to tell him that the nature of God can't be known and yet the community of priests and preachers grew powerful and even won against the kings and emperors sometimes. For example, the Amenhotep dynasty was ruined by the priesthood of the God Amen. In India, however, the Buddhist priests lost the power struggle with the descendants of Ashoka the Great with the consequent decay of Buddhism in the land. Noticeable is the fact that a religion without God, e.g., Buddhism needed it's priests. In the last century Soviet Union had it's 'nomenclatura' to administer the religion called communism prompting George Orwell to write 'Animal Firm'.
As the Gospel says, "Nobody has seen God, and nobody ever will"; nobody needs to read the modern authors to have a clear concept on the anatomy of religion. The 'holy' books of different religions are sufficient to discard them as rubbish. As the primitive man looked up, he found the 'planets' roving the sky while the stars were immobile. So he called the planets Gods, and the stars the seers in trance. Any 'smart' man could fool the populace with celestial legends. Thus grew the Vedas, the Puranas, the Bible etc. Copernicus, Galileo had dug a hole in the faith centuries ago, but "Old habit dies hard", and the priest continues to make a living selling the faith. There are pseudo scientists who had been taught that a priest and his descendant is as pure as a 'Tulsi plant', hence it is alright to allow the lesser beings to kiss their feet. What they had not been taught that even a 'Tulsi plant' is ordained by the providence to be occasionally 'purified' by canine urine.
On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Jiten Roy <jnrsr53@yahoo.com> wrote:
Even without reading the book, I can agree with the three stages of evolution of human religion. The earliest stage, according to Bella, was ritualistic, which he called the 'enactive stage.' The interesting question is how did this stage first enter into the human psyche?
My hypothesis is – at the early stage of human development, people were desperately looking for answers to so many unknowns around them. They were trying to connect some dots by linking some events with some other events that followed (for whatever reason). Once they were able to make some correlations, they readily accepted them (with faith) as cause and effect without proper validation. This is how religion diverts from science. For example - prayer for rain during the extreme draught condition; occasionally, rain may have come naturally following the prayer, which helped building the faith over the effectiveness of the prayer. In the event when rain did not come, people blamed themselves for their imperfect prayer. There lies the crux of the religious-faith. It is guided by the following rule - faith is always right, if it is not, it must be due to human error. Once a phenomenological faith is built (ritualistically), the next quest was to find the source of the ritualistic faith, which is the mythological stage. After that spirituality came in the human psyche.
Perhaps this process can also be compared with the following process of our life. When a baby is born, only thing he/she wants is food. After that baby looks for his/her parents (mythical stage), and soon after that baby want to know how he/she was born (spiritual phase). It makes sense. May be I will buy the book this weekend. Thank you Farida.
Jiten Roy
--- On Tue, 3/6/12, Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com> wrote:
From: Farida Majid <farida_majid@hotmail.com>
Subject: [mukto-mona] Where Did Religion Come From?
To:
Date: Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 12:11 PM
The most annoying problem with today's brand of atheists is that they are too hung up with the idea of god, and a school-yard level argument of whether god exists or not. Ref. : Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, late Christopher Hitchens, et al.
Mark Juergensmeyer had been dealing with feats and foibles of world religions for a long time, and hence it was fitting for him to gather the group of scholars around Robert Bellah and his perfectly sensible proposition of looking at religion in connection with human evolution. I am glad to know that it ended up as an intellectual group hug. Very reassuring!
Of course religions are man-made. So are the arts, music, poetry and drama. I love religion because, like the arts, it encourages me to adjust my sense of magic into my everyday reality.
Bellah's thesis of play and playfulness makes sense, and so does the idea of the 3 stages of development of religion depending on man's social capabilities -- enactive, symbolic (myths and legends) and conceptual.
~ Farida Majid
Mark Juergensmeyer
Author, 'Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence'
React
Where did religion come from? And how has it changed as human societies have evolved over the centuries?
You'd think only children would dare to ask such questions, but these musings are precisely the ones posed by America's premier sociologist, Robert Bellah in a recent book, "Religion in Human Evolution" (Harvard University Press). He begins at the beginning -- literally, with the Big Bang -- and tries to identify when religion emerged and how, and how it changed through the centuries. He ends with the Axial Age of the sixth century before Christ, focusing on ancient India, Israel, Greece and China. The book has aroused the interest of a range of scholars, from biologists to social scientists and historians.
Needless to say, there are admirers and skeptics. Some are both.
I brought together a group of them recently in San Francisco to discuss this project with Bellah. With a passion that belied his octogenarian status, he defended his positions. Here are some of their concerns, and Bellah's responses.
In what sense can religion be thought of evolving, we wanted to know? A specialist on the ancient classical world, Luke Johnson, raised the issue of whether cultures change in a way that is anything like biological evolution. He noted that Bellah used the term "evolution" in more than a metaphorical sense -- but is that really possible? Religious dispositions are not genetically transferred traits.
Bellah countered that his book was not about the evolution of religion, but the evolution of human societies' capacities, and these make cultural changes possible. The capacity for creative activity, for instance, is possible only when one's survival needs are fully met.
So as societies evolve, their capacities for religion change. Bellah identifies three stages: enactive, symbolic and conceptual. Basic rituals are part of the first, then myth and legend, and finally ethical and theological reasoning.
The conceptual stage is one related to the Axial Age, roughly around the sixth century B.C.E., when Plato and other thinkers founded Greek philosophy and the Buddha and other teachers raised Indic religion to a whole new conceptual level.
Wendy Doniger, a scholar of ancient Indic religion, questioned whether the idea of a new age in India quite fit the facts. She pointed out that changes in ways of thinking are gradual, and that elements of the reflective, philosophical ideas associated with the Upanishads in ancient India were present in early Vedic writings. Johnson added that theoretical thinking is the privilege of elites, and for the masses, narrative and mimetic forms of religiosity continue to reign supreme. The scholar of comparative religion, Jonathan Z. Smith, questioned the very notion of the Axial Age, and suggested that Bellah's book would have worked just as well without it.
Bellah held to the notion that the Axial Age was something real -- a time some 2,500 years ago when shifts in ways of thinking were happening in similar ways around the world. Bellah acknowledged that these ways of thinking were often elitist, and that the masses -- both then and now -- are not very fond of conceptual religion. Bellah said that seldom did one stage of religiosity completely replace another; rather, different strands of religious representation existed side by side. Change, he said, seldom comes in steady increases but in paradigmatic leaps, and these moments require observation and explanation.
Finally, questions were raised about how Bellah described religion -- as an awareness of alternative reality -- and how it emerged. Smith asserted that he was intrigued with Bellah's suggestion that religion is associated with play, but he wondered whether it was even more related to a certain kind of playfulness -- games -- guided by rules as well as by spontaneous creativity.
Bellah affirmed that play and games are closely related to each other, and for that matter both are associated with another form of human activity, work -- and that these three often overlap. The religious impulse is related to all of them, though probably more essentially to the activity of playfulness, the free roaming of thinking and doing that is unencumbered by the need to be useful for some other end.
The discussion ended with an intellectual group hug. Each of the critics expressed an enormous appreciation for the immensity of Bellah's project, and the value of the book for a wide range of subjects in the study of the role of culture in human evolution. They acknowledged that the book was large in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of diligent analysis and fertile reflection, and that it set a new landmark in the efforts to understand the nature of religion in social life.
Follow the entire discussion, including additional commentary on the book and Bellah's response, at The Immanent Frame, a digital forum of the Social Science Research Council.
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