Religion for thee, but not for me?

What do you call someone who advocates religion for the masses but not for himself? Most people would call such a person a hypocrite. At the very least, such a political position evinces a mindset normally thought of as condescending -- the sort we would typically associate with the "ruling class." Doubtless this factored into Marx's denunciation of religion as the "opiate of the masses." (And while I am no Marxist, there's some intriguing research linking religious ecstasy to the release of endorphins.) So if Marx was right about religion supplying people with a need, why would that make religious advocacy by nonbelievers any more "hypocritical" than, say, the advocacy of sports or entertainment by a non-fan? Would I be a hypocrite if I said that attendance at sporting events or NASCAR races was a good thing, but failed to attend these things myself? I hate television, but does that mean I can't suggest that it meets some people's needs? If we look at it this way, why wouldn't it be possible for even an atheist to advocate religion for those who needed it?

There's one of those much-quoted wise sayings along these lines which is often attributed to Seneca the Younger:

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
There's no confirmation that Seneca ever said that, though. Instead, someone seems to have paraphrased Gibbon, and improperly attributed what he said to Seneca. From The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, ch. II:
"The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."
What's fascinating about this was that the official Roman state religion easily lent itself to such advocacy and even practice by nonbelievers. Just throw some incense into the fire and say the magic words. It didn't matter whether it was a superstition, and the fact that the gods had typically human traits made them much easier to identify with. Like believing in people just like you, with all the common petty vices, flaws, and squabbles, only they were immortal, so they were always there! And if you wanted more, they could always be added or created. The official religion was thus very tolerant of the religions of conquered peoples, because it wasn't a big deal to add a few more gods into the pantheon. But they couldn't add Yahweh or Jesus, because their followers wouldn't let them. Moreover, they refused to tolerate images of the Roman gods, and huge riots would break out if they were put up in the wrong places. Many a Christian martyr died for refusing to throw a little incense on a Roman devotional fire; magistrates found it utterly incomprehensible that given the choice of throwing incense to a Roman god or being put to death, the Christians willingly chose death. (No adding Jesus to that Pantheon.)

But what about the many Roman nonbelievers? Whether they were skeptics, atheists or agnostics, it didn't matter so long as they were willing to acknowledge the traditional gods. Moreover, some of the wisest Romans were nonbelievers who nonetheless saw the utilitarian value of religion. You don't have to rely on Gibbon's words stuffed into Seneca's mouth.

Here's Ovid:

'Tis expedient that there be gods should exist; and as it is expedient, let us believe them to exist. Let frankincense and wine be placed on their ancient altars.
And Plutarch:
The atheist thinks there are no gods, the superstitious man wishes there were none; but he believes in them in spite of himself, because he is afraid to die, and like as Tantalus seeks to evade the rock suspended over him, so does the latter evade his fear, by the weight of which he is no less oppressed, and would be content with, nay gladly accept the Atheist's state of mind, as a state of liberty. But as it is, Atheism has nothing in common with Superstition: for the superstitious man, though by inclination Atheist, is yet far too weak-minded to think about the gods what he wishes to think.
(Plutarch, BTW, was not an atheist, but a temple priest who tended towards the Platonic belief in one god.)

Superstition is something that does not easily go away; it manifests itself among agnostics and atheists, environmentalists who think "The Earth" is striking back, first ladies who believe in astrology, etc.

I think that what made the Roman religion easier for both superstitious believers and practical non-believers was the gods' very human nature. Fierce, pure monotheism in the form of worshiping an all-powerful, all-knowing, yet totally invisible GOD is a hard sell, because you're asking people to believe in an entity with which they cannot readily identify. Indeed, they are not supposed to identify with such an all-encompassing deity; they are to fear HIM, and above all, they are to SUBMIT. It just isn't enough to throw a little incense on the fire of the god you personally like best.

When people have a pantheon of gods that act like humans, they are spiritually undisciplined, and if they are to be made to submit to monotheism, the latter is best imposed by force. Fortunately for Rome, when it encountered monotheism, the monotheists -- in the form of the Jews -- had no interest in converting the Romans. The trouble resulted from their devout refusal to allow Rome to coopt them.

Interestingly, Egypt (polytheistic for many centuries) had been briefly monotheistic (worshiping only Ra as the only for a time under the Atenist dynastic period), something the monotheist rulers tried to accomplish through force:

In Year 9 ( 1344/1342 BC ), Akhenaten strengthened the Atenist regime, declaring the Aten to be not merely the supreme god, but the only god, a universal deity, and forbidding worship of all others, including the veneration of idols, even privately in people's homes - an arena the Egyptian state had previously not touched in religious terms. Atenism was then based on strict unitarian monotheism, the belief in one single God. Aten was addressed in prayers, such as the Great Hymn to the Aten: "O Sole God beside whom there is none".

Akhenaten staged the ritual regicide of the old supreme god Amun, and ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt, and of all the old gods. The word for `gods' (plural) was proscribed, and inscriptions have been found in which even the hieroglyph of the word for "mother" has been excised and re-written in alphabetic signs, because it had the same sound in ancient Egyptian as the sound of name of the Theban goddess Mut. Aten's name is also written differently after Year 9, to emphasise the radicalism of the new regime. No longer is the Aten written using the symbol of a rayed solar disc, but instead it is spelled phonetically.

It didn't go over well, though, as the dispossessed priests of the old order eventually overthrew the new religion. Still, a seed had been planted and some analysts (notably Sigmund Freud) have speculated that Judaism was a direct offshoot of Atenism.

With Egypt being polytheistic, Rome's later conquest did not present any major religious problems, although monotheism was to return to Egypt big time, in the form of Christianity. It spread rapidly in Roman-occupied Egypt, and the Roman authorities had little luck in stopping it.

The most revolutionary event in the history of Roman Egypt was the introduction of Christianity in the 2nd century. It was at first vigorously persecuted by the Roman authorities, who feared religious discord more than anything else in a country where religion had always been paramount. But it soon gained adherents among the Jews of Alexandria. From them it rapidly passed to the Greeks, and then to the native Egyptians, who found its promise of personal salvation and its teachings of social equality appealing. The ancient religion of Egypt put up surprisingly little resistance to the spread of Christianity. Possibly its long history of collaboration with the Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt had robbed it of its authority.
Might the Roman rulers have suddenly realized how vulnerable the older polytheist religions were to this new form of monotheism?

Or should Christianity be called "quasi-monotheism"? Unlike Judaism, Christianity offered believers something unavailable to Jews: a god who was a man. To polytheistic peoples, immortal beings that were half-man and half-god had a long history, and even though the Christians concocted a doctrine called "the Trinity" to explain this away ("launder" might be too strong a word), the fact is that ordinary pagans of the time could much more readily be expected to identify with this new deity -- whether they thought of him as half-man, half-god "son of God," a man who was a god, or a God actually coming down to earth in the form of man. That the offer of eternal life has a certain appeal is undeniable too, as it was if they were saying, "you too can become an immortal." It beats the idea of a soul mysteriously disappearing in the nether worlds, or the view of many Stoics that there was no such thing as a soul. Add the Virgin Mary, and there's even a quasi-goddess to worship. The enormous religious appeal of virginity to the Romans is a well documented phenomenon, and it is no surprise that calls for Christian religious celibacy arose in the very infancy of Christianity when it was a Roman religion.

My view is that Christianity is basically a classically Roman form of religion, and a hybrid of polytheism and monotheism. I realize that there was a time when saying such a thing could get you killed, but not now! If atheists are free to denounce the existence of God, I am just as free to speculate that Christianity is founded upon -- and contains within it -- a still unresolved struggle between polytheism and monotheism. Perhaps the struggle is irresolvable, and perhaps it really doesn't matter. Little wonder the Islamists consider Christians to be unredeemed heretics engaged in quasi-pagan idolatry. For that very reason alone, I'll take Christianity over Islam any day! Unfortunately, the Islamists' ferocious monotheism seems to supply fuel for those who seek to radically "purify" Christianity and make it more resemble the intolerant form of hard monotheism that wants to destroy it.

But I seem to have digressed from my original point, which was to discuss nonbelievers who advocate believerism. (I still don't know what they are to be called; "religionist" isn't the right word, nor is "religiosity.") It strikes me that it is a lot easier to advocate something you don't believe in if that something makes no demands on you. For example, it is not an easy thing to convert to Judaism, and if I advocated Judaism as a non-Jew, few would take me to task for it. But if I were to advocate Christianity, atheists would be upset, and they as well as some Christians would demand that I "practice what I preach" (even though I preach nothing), and I'd run the risk of being called a hypocrite.

Is it easier to sometimes just throw the incense on whatever fire people have burning, without regard to belief? Why not?

If there is such a thing as infinity, there's probably a tolerant deity out there somewhere in the unending void who would understand.

And if there isn't then what's the harm? And if OTOH, there is only the bigot God of the Muslims out there who will surely put me in hell, then hell is where I belong, as I would rather not be with such a deity.

Are these things not all ultimately unknown and unknowable? Sure, there are innumerable texts claiming to know them, but being texts, they constitute little more than appeals to authority -- written by people who claim to have been acting on behalf of ultimately unknown and unknowable authorities. So religious disagreements are disagreements over the unknown.

Seen this way, advocacy of religion boils down to stating that because of the nature of infinity, it might be easier on some people to take a position one way or the other. Even if Marx was right and religion is like an opiate, I favor legalizing opiates, so why would I seek the abolition of religion? Whether religion is "good for society" (as many claim) has less appeal to me, as I am not a communitarian, and although I certainly do not want a bad society, I'm uncomfortable with trying to control the minds of others. I think it's arrogant. Especially the idea of making people behave by telling them that God made the rules which they must obey under penalty of eternal death. Such things are not knowable, and I could never in good conscience advocate imposing on people things I don't believe are knowable.

What about the view that religion is basically grounded in fear of death? It's certainly true that we all fear death to one extent or another; even though I am very familiar with death and have come close to that ultimate unknowable state myself (and thus I do not live in inordinate fear of it), I sincerely believe that there is something out there, even though I cannot prove it. Still, I am honest enough to acknowledge that there might in fact be nothing out there. It is that fear of the possibility of nothingness which makes me very impatient sometimes, because I have less and less time, and I hate seeing it wasted. When the dreaded "hourglass" icon randomly appears on the screen (whether from a stupid freeze caused by Firefox, an Adobe PDF-caused browser crash, one of the endless anti-virus updates, or other torments from cyber hell) it stops me from whatever I am doing, and I am reminded that what limited time I have left on this planet is being utterly wasted.

It reminds me that in my case, the fear of death is really the fear of running out of time, which sucks.

Hell, it even inclines me toward an occasional exercise in superstition.

posted by Eric on 08.02.10 at 12:01 PM





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Comments

One of the things that always puzzles me is how some of my acquaintances who claim to be hostile to religion (and especially hostile to Christianity) are also very superstitious and can be quick to believe in any new-agey claptrap that comes their way, no matter how ridiculous.

Kurt   ·  August 2, 2010 01:47 PM

I wonder what effect something like life extension(SENS) would have on religion. Indeed the pope has come out against technological life extension.

MetaThought   ·  August 2, 2010 02:43 PM

An excellent post!
According to Homer W. Smith in his Man And His Gods>/i> (Grosset & Dunlap, 1952) Socrates may have had a hand in formulating the basis of Christianity. From Chapter 4, page 149:

...Socrates was the first to formulate the immortal soul which possesses
consciousness, which is the seat of knowledge and error, and which is responsible for a man's thought and actions. ...The Socratic soul, if it may be so designated, was a new spiritual entity which, far from being fragmentary and inferior in power to the animal body, was by virtue of its prerogative of domination entitled to a definitely superior status. Yet here the break with precedent was not so complete as when, in the single word 'immortal,' this invisible inhabitant was equipped to endure indefinitely by being cut away not only from respiration and nutrition, but also from the otherwise universal phenomenon of corruption."

If you haven't read this old book, I recommend it. It also has a forward by Albert Einstein.

Frankf   ·  August 2, 2010 05:58 PM

I always like the Roman pragmatism, if you were worshipped as a god, you were one. It's as simple as that. It makes sense to me.

I will say one thing about Christianity, Catholic brand in particular, in regards to polytheism/monotheism.

It's definitely polytheistic, if you define a god as someone who performs miracles in response to prayer.
What else are Saints but divine beings we pray to.
How is praying to Saint Christopher for help while travelling any different from praying to Apollo asking for rain?

Veeshir   ·  August 3, 2010 12:19 PM

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