RE: [mukto-mona] Where Did Religion Come From?

  From the response I gave in the HUffington Post:
 
<< As Charles Darwin tried explaining many times, evolution of species is not about an unbroken straight-line progress from point A to point B. The species in question here is Bellah's idea of religion and human social capacities. This involves the whole gamut of man's cultural activities other than 'work' or mere survival as a species. In this context I find Bellah's concept of play and playfulness as a component of regligious evolution very helpful. Talal Asad's study of Genealogy of Religion pursues how the term 'religion' has undergone change since post-Enlightenment, and during the West's colonization of the rest of the world. We have to get back to that creative, imaginative part of religion, the mythopoesis, in order to progress to the next higher stage of evolution of our social capacities.

With the emphasis on the growth of the individual as a self-sustaining entity (the 1% model, the current runaway excess of capitalism), along with the authoritarian religious institutions and nationhoods, we have probably lost some of the 'playfulness' or the culture-producing social capacities, not only in the West but also in the rest of the globalized 'market'." >>
 
           Deshi so-called atheists tend to view a rigid line in the march of progress when they constantly refer pejoratively to the Medieval times while talking about their own history. This habit is an unexamined acceptance of the Imperialist History of India by the 19th century British historiographers.  I have battled with this habit of thinking in vain.
 
          Farida Majid

                        

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To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
From: jnrsr53@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2012 18:32:09 -0800
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] Where Did Religion Come From?

 

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' GET UPDATES FROM Mark Juergensmeyer   Like 20 Where Did Religion Come From? Posted: 03/ 6/2012 8:12 am React     Evolution ,   Religion And Science , Religion In Human Evolution , Robert Bellah , Evolution Of Religion , Religion , Religion News 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.   Follow Mark Juergensmeyer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/juergensmeyer

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