Posts Tagged ‘religion’
the ultra ultra ultra male god we’re still dealing with
Can’t kill me, nya nya
A few years back I was trying to be more sociable by attending meet-ups, using the meet-up app, but it didn’t seem to work for me, given me. One perhaps promising meet-up was organised by an elderly intellectual, on philosophical topics. He would choose the topic, then send us a screed of viewpoints and questions related to it, which I found more or less apropos. So I went to a couple of these meet-ups, which were interesting enough, except that, as often in these situations, a minority hogged the limelight, and I’ve never been much of a limelight-hogger – though actually I found that one of my great pleasures of becoming a teacher, somewhat late in my working life, was that it was more or less set up for the teacher as limelight-hogger, which I have to say I found most satisfying. I’d had very little experience before then of actually being listened to, and I found it quite a treat.
Anyway, getting back to the elderly intellectual, he was generally good at sharing that wonderful limelight thing, and encouraging diversity of opinion, so it struck me as interesting that at one point he became firm, and, apropos of nothing, said that he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of religion. It had become clear to me that he wasn’t a religious person, and I later learned that he had a PhD in physics, which wasn’t at all surprising given the tendency of his conversation. So why this remark? The new atheism movement, with its ‘four horsemen’, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, had run its course by this time, not without having an influence on myself. I had never been religious, but the movement reawakened me to the baleful influence of one religion, Christianity, upon Europe and its global empires – the ‘civilised world’ that Darwin had in mind when he wrote his Voyage of the Beagle.
But more recently, the Abrahamic religions, as they’re called, have bugged me mostly because of their patriarchy, because of its clear conviction that the One God, never seen, never manifest, but ever-present, must be male. Which of course emerged from an ultra-patriarchal society, and helps to maintain that patriarchy to this day. I’ve gone on about the Catholic Church, known simply as The Church, which more or less controlled the whole of Europe for 1300 years, with its six-tiered hierarchy of maleness:
- the Father-Son godly duo
- the Papas, or Popes
- The Cardinals
- the Archbishops
- the Bishops
- the Priests
And even beyond them, the various all-male Catholic orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits and no doubt others I happily know nothing about. Of course there were Nuns, and some feisty ones, for better or worse, but they were generally imbued with the pride of their own celibacy and would often be more furiously puritanical than their cock-bothered brethren, as history has shown.
It seems to me that this patriarchal nature of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, all of a piece, is a weak spot that the four horsemen of new atheism didn’t exploit sufficiently. Where were the horsewomen? Where are they now?
I’d argue that the maleness of the so-called Abrahamic god should be the real target. To me, it’s painfully obvious why this ever-invisible, omniscient, omnipotent god was as male as male can be. It’s because he was constructed some 2600 years ago from two male gods then popular in the region of ancient Canaan (Yahweh and El/Elohim) – I’ve written about this in a two-part blog piece referenced below – by a society as ultra-patriarchal as it’s possible to be, IMHO. A society which sold females into marriage, in exchange for a dowry – from the age of ten, and even younger, without their having any say-so whatsoever. And once that deal was sealed, and the youngster handed over to her often much older husband, she was titled a ‘woman’, which adds extra horror to the story in John 7:53 – 8:11 (apparently a later interpellation, but that’s irrelevant) of the ‘woman taken in adultery’. Jesus supposedly saved her from being stoned to death, but how many others suffered that fate? And how many innocent girls, more or less raped by their unchosen husbands, suffered or died in childbirth?
The number of insults to women presented par inadvertence in the Bible is impossible to enumerate. It starts, of course, with the creation of the first woman as the male’s help-mate out of a supernumerary rib, a woman who promptly becomes the reason for the poor innocent man’s fall from the Macho God’s grace. But I won’t go on with the many proofs of the god’s maleness – because what is more interesting, and disturbing about the belief in ‘our Father, who art in heaven’, is how oblivious many believers seem to be about this fact.
Example – in glancing back at my two blog pieces on the origin of the god called God, I reread a very long comment to Part 1, by ‘Anonymous’, the only comment I received. It was a generally reasonable comment about not taking the Bible literally, that it was full of stories that one might reflect on and learn from and so forth. Fine. As ‘Anonymous’ says, you can take what you want from it and leave the rest. Fine. And ‘Anonymous’ inserts one brief line, which perhaps I overlooked at the time:
If you see G-d as very male that’s what you see.
I respectfully disagree. I see this god as very male because the Bible uses the male pronoun to refer to him almost 7000 times, and never once refers to him using the female pronoun. And of course because I know that the stories about him were written by people who lived within an ultra-patriarchal framework. And these things matter, and they have consequences to this day, as we know from anti-feminist remarks still being made by Bible Belt Old Testament literalists and Young-Earth Creationists and the like.
‘Anonymous’ doesn’t refer to his or her own gender, but I think I can guess.
I’ve added to my references a hilarious-horrific essay on Godly masculinity, just for fun.
References
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity
the clothed and ‘sexually modest’ ape – cui bono?
good ole Christian propaganda
It is illegal, just about everywhere in the world, to walk down a street completely unclothed, above a certain, very young, age. It’s also considered shocking, alarming and generally disruptive to the well-being of society. This truth has fascinated me ever since I was old enough to think muchly about it. Even the religious must accept that their god created humans déshabillé, so why all the fuss? Well, there’s been much philosophical palaver about the Garden of Eden story, the shocking discovery of ‘Otherness’ and how it distracted our ancestors from benefitting from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and so forth, but from a more anthropological or palaeontological perspective, the question is, when did the purpose of clothing widen from providing protection and warmth to concepts of public decency? Not to mention style, fashion, class and all the rest.
So Wikipedia cites a 2010 study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, on the origin of habitual clothes-wearing:
That study indicates that the habitual wearing of clothing began at some point in time between 83,000 years ago and 170,000 years ago based upon a genetic analysis indicating when clothing lice diverged from their head louse ancestors.
That’s a useful time-frame, but it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an insight, based on genetics or anything else, about the why of habitual clothes-wearing – that’s to say the mindset of those ancestors. Clearly, need had a lot do with it initially. Even today there are indigenous peoples in tropical climates who go about their business completely naked for much of the time, but climates have varied considerably, both locally and globally, and one theory has it that a very cold period in Eurasia some 40,000 years ago likely wiped out our Neanderthal cousins. A good set of fleecy jackets and ugg boots might’ve seen them through.
It’s more or less taken for granted, though, that we wouldn’t have been so self-conscious about our nakedness when we were as hairy as our chimp and bonobo cousins. On that topic, here’s Wikipedia again:
The first member of the genus Homo to be hairless was Homo erectus, originating about 1.6 million years ago. The dissipation of body heat remains the most widely accepted evolutionary explanation for the loss of body hair in early members of the genus Homo, the surviving member of which is modern humans. Less hair, and an increase in sweat glands, made it easier for their bodies to cool when they moved from living in shady forest to open savanna. This change in environment also resulted in a change in diet, from largely vegetarian to hunting. Pursuing game on the savanna also increased the need for regulation of body heat
We might dispute the time-frame, but there’s surely no doubt that we’d lost a substantial proportion of body hair, over a substantial period of time, before we started getting coy about our jangly bits and crevasses. During that long period, we developed into anatomically, neurologically (and perhaps neurotically) modern humans, being increasingly obsessed not only with proto-clothing but various other forms of bodily adornment, scarification and the like.
Of course, as the human population grew and spread, it diversified culturally. Bodily adornment and dress became a cultural indentifier, as did the treatment of women. The veiling of women can be dated at least to the Assyrians some 3,500 years ago, though it was practised exclusively by the elites. Slave women would be severely punished for such practices. The point being made had to do with women’s ‘availability’, particularly in the matter of sex. Apparently, slave women should be accepted as sexually available as a matter of course, while a respectable woman belonged exclusively to her husband, along with his other wives. And just by the by, the ancient Athenians’ veiling and closeting of women, as well as their economic dependence on slavery, makes as much a mockery of their being touted as ‘the first democracy’ as does the slave-based colony later to be officially called the USA, as ‘the first modern democracy’.
But returning to clothing in general, it is likely that, at least in cooler climates, the change from hunter-gathering, nomadic lifestyles to a more settled agricultural existence in the Neolithic period led to clothing becoming the norm, for adults at least. Perhaps the persistence of hair around the genital region marked it out as special and inviolable. It’s notable that the early paintings and drawings of Australian Aborigines depicted them as naked but for leaf-decorated belts or strings, with attached hides conveniently covering their privates. This may have been whitefella modesty, but it also makes sense that they would have been useful for attaching dilly bags, small weaponry and other items. It also makes sense that the genital area would have been most in need of protection, and so marked out as special, and then sacred.
Religion, of course, has played a role in all this, especially in terms of female bodies, but this of course begs the question of why all the dominant traditional religions are so patriarchal, and so obsessed with controlling sexuality….
All of which makes me want to express my exasperation by paraphrasing Marx – the question isn’t so much to understand this weird sex-policing world we’ve created for ourselves, but to change it…
References
a touchy but important subject: 1 – sex, fun, sin, etc
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
I recently read a comment somewhere online claiming that meta-analyses of human consumption of pornography have found that it leads to increased aggression (presumably in males?).
The commentator gave no information about this supposed study, so I can’t attest to its veracity, but given the issues around bonobos, sex, violence, patriarchy, matriarchy, the ‘oldest profession’, human sexual repression (and obsessions), to name a few related topics, I’m very much tempted to open this can of worms, though I’m worried that I’ll never see an end to such stimulating research.
I think I’ll start with bonobos. In a 1993 paper, ‘The evolution of sexuality in chimpanzees and bonobos’, Richard Wrangham wrote this:
Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of [nonconceptive] sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favours), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favoured through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”
I think Wrangham was right about the ‘relaxed feeding competition’, the abundance of resources south of the Congo that made for closeness and reduced the hormone-spiked tendency for the largest and/or pushiest males to compete for domination. One can only speculate, but it seems females began to realise the power of bonding, to protect their sisters against the kind of ‘domestic’ chimpanzee abuse described in the first chapter of Carole Hooven’s Testosterone, and written up (not by Hooven) in a Time magazine article ‘Wife Beaters of Kibale’.
This female bonding, as Wrangham and other researchers such as De Waals have claimed, is highly sexualised. I recall De Waals saying that the behaviour is at times ‘pornographic’, and so regular and time-consuming as to become ‘boring’, presumably for the viewer.
So what about human hypersexuality, and is it linked to pornography? We might get to the thorny question of what pornography actually is later. There’s no doubt that hypersexuality is frowned upon, especially by the patriarchal religious institutions that have dominated ‘western culture’ for millennia – and of course there’s no effective male counterpart to the term ‘nymphomaniac’, though it seems to me that this term has rather lost currency. In any case we’re living through an era fraught with concerns about sex, power and consent, and shifting attitudes about female and male roles, both within families and in the broader community. And sex itself can be gentle, rough, fast, slow, elaborate, basic, intense or humdrum. And so on. It’s surely also something that many people experience less than they’d like to, for a wide variety of reasons.
As I’ve written before, the first intellectual figure to influence me, when I was barely into my teens, was Sigmund Freud. It’s probably fair to say that I discovered Freud at about the same time that I discovered masturbation. Two connected Freudian terms stuck in my head, ‘polymorphous perversity’ and ‘sublimation’. The idea, or my interpretation of it, was that we were first ‘sexualised’ by the discovery that we could manipulate our genitals while thinking of an attractive neighbour or classmate, experiencing thereby a pleasure nowise comparable to anything experienced before, and that we’ve managed somehow to harness this energy and pleasure by channelling it into productive output. This second part of the theory struck me as a bit suss, but on reflection so did the first part. I never experienced polymorphous perversity, just plain old ‘perversity’, if that was the name to be given to my genitally-based delirium. And the fact that I, for one, wasn’t able to ‘sublimate’ these sensations into keeping up with my schoolwork or pondering the nature of the universe, made me feel something of a failure, and even, perhaps, a non-polymorphous pervert.
But I’m being too hard on myself – after all, I was exploring Freud at this time, as well as reading encyclopaedia articles on British history as well as on Einstein, Hitler and Albert Schweitzer, and masturbation was a bedroom secret. Unlike the bonobo situation, and that, of course, is the point. I couldn’t exactly go into breakfast and share with the family how invigorated and beneficent I felt, after a good wank.
Again, as I write, I feel I’m stepping into territory where angels fear to tread. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book, Why is sex fun? I don’t think it taught me anything new, and I understood why it didn’t need to be long. On the other hand, a work with the title – Why is sex so problematic for humans? – could easily run to several large volumes.
An easy target for blame is surely religion. I was shocked recently when the government of our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, unanimously passed a law declaring sex outside marriage a crime requiring imprisonment (presumably only for humans). The unfathomable stupidity of such legislation is beyond belief, and I had thought that Indonesia was a moderate Moslem country – though one might fairly argue that moderate Islam is as much a contradiction in terms as moderate Catholicism. The proportion of women in Indonesia’s parliament is at its highest at around 22%, but it would need a majority (which will never happen in a Moslem country) for any real change to occur.
Anyway, the topic I began with, and which I seem to be avoiding, was pornography. But actually I’m not avoiding it, I was going to use it, and prostitution, as an entree into sexual behaviour, in the WEIRD world, more generally, and in trying to find a healthy way of balancing our needs and aims in a future more feminist society – for it will become more feminist, of that I’m certain.
So, look forward to more of this waffle.
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/6/indonesia-passes-legislation-outlawing-sex-outside-marriage
On Dostoyevsky’s moralistic god
So I’ve just managed to get through Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov, for the first time, it seems, though I swear I’ve read it twice before. Life’s funny that way. But I’m not going to write here about the novel’s merits or otherwise, I want to focus on a meme, if that’s the right word, which I first noticed being spoken by a minor character, an intelligent boy named Kolya – “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted”. At other moments in the novel it’s associated with Ivan Karamazov, amongst others. It became a famous expression, firmly associated with Dostoyevsky’s philosophy – so much so that it came up in a very very different book I’ve been reading at the same time, – Determined, a book which presents a detailed argument against the philosophical concept of free will, by a Stanford University professor of neurophysiology, Robert Sapolsky:
Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipresent Someone doling out the consequences? As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
R Sapolsky, Determined, pp 251-2
Sapolsky then goes on to cite anthropological evidence that moralising gods are a very recent phenomenon in human history. In fact I would argue that the first moralising god was also the first successful monotheistic one, created in the land of Canaan about 2600 years ago, the ‘Abrahamic’ god, essentially an amalgam of Yahweh and Elohim, the two most favoured gods of the region at that time. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere. Here’s more of what Sapolsky has to say:
Hunter-gathers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99% of human history, do not invent moralising gods. Sure, they might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other.
Ibid, p 252
And this brings me to some thoughts I’ve had on the origins of religion. Clearly our development of religious thinking was a product of evolution. Other primates show signs of incipient ‘religious’ thinking. Dogs and cats don’t. With neurological development we began to notice stuff that required explanation. For example, ‘Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed’… Shakespeare’s personification of the sun might be a conceit, but it points to a history, or prehistory, of rather more real personifications. The wind plays gently or blows furiously, the sea provides us with food but sometimes rises up and washes our village away, one baby thrives, the next is stillborn, mild seasons are followed by endless driving snow which covers the land and its food, and so forth. Humans came to recognise that seemingly capricious forces were at work, and they attributed these forces to capricious but powerful entities. How to interact with them, to get them on side? In the same way we might deal with powerful, but unpredictable humans. Pander to them, give them stuff, offer them bribes, and call them sacrifices. Dedicate buildings to them, set aside some of our harvest for them, create dances and chants to honour or mollify them.
This idea of powerful living, quasi-human forces that people had to deal with to ensure their survival was, as I say, an advance of sorts. For we’d acquired enough brainpower to require explanations for seasonal and environmental unpredictabilities. Morality may have played a role of sorts too – these forces were perhaps punishing us for behaving badly, but not likely in an absolute sense. With many forces, or gods, having control of different aspects of the physical and mental realm – fire, water, fertility, war, love, the weather – and perhaps even arguing and fighting over their particular domains, morality would likely have been less of an issue than obeisance to whatever god most mattered to you at the time.
So morality in the more absolute sense – Good and Evil – seems to have been a product of monotheism. But not just monotheism. The first monotheism that we know about was attempted in Egypt by the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, a top-down decision to banish all gods apart from Aten, a god strongly identified with the Sun. As Amenhotep then defined himself as the priest of Aten, Akhenaten, it seems that this was an attempt to combine worldly and heavenly power within his own person (an approach copied by many later autocrats, and it seems likely that Amenhotep wasn’t the first to try it). It didn’t last, of course, but the Jewish attempt to create a monotheistic system about 700 years later was more successful, first because it wasn’t the work of one self-aggrandising individual, and second because it was all written down, together with an origin myth, a chosen people myth, and a set of good-and-evil commandments, amongst other propaganda. And note the very first commandment:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3).
which is built upon later in Exodus:
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14).
The first quote suggests monolateralism (one boss god and a handful of subordinates – other gods must be behind me) – while the second quote suggests monotheism (though for some reason the name Jealous didn’t catch on).
And meanwhile humans continued to evolve, socially, until something like modern science began to develop, and, very very recently in evolutionary terms, religious forces and explanations came to be questioned and, in some places, abandoned. And so it continues…
So, back to Dostoyevsky, and I do mean back. But not everywhere. Sapolsky has it that only 5% of United Staters identify as atheists. The 2021 census here in Australia found that 39% of native-born Australians ‘claim no religion’. That percentage has risen rapidly over the past few censuses. My own birthplace, Scotland, is now the least religious region of the UK. The first census in Australia, in the 1890s, which asked the same question on religion as is asked today, had over 90% of the population identifying as Christian.
Oh, yes, Dostoyevsky, I forgot. His reputation as a great philosophical novelist will fade, I think, as the Abrahamic moralistic god fades, in some places more quickly than others, obviously. It’s a long game. Dostoyevsky’s greatest strength, I think, is in creating characters of complexity – often tortured, suffering, self-harming complexity. He himself suffered from epilepsy, a condition that was stigmatised for centuries, as Sapolsky also relates in Determined. Which brings me to Smerdyakov, the character I feel most sympathy for….
But that’s another story.
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1880
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians, 2006
Australia, religion and the appeal of eternity
The latest Australian census figures are out, and as always I zoom in on religion and our quite rapid abandonment of….
It’s not that I’m against religion exactly, I recognise it as an attempt to understand our world, before science came along. Often to understand it as story. The story of how the world formed, and who formed it. Religions, I notice, are always about personae, doing Very Powerful things. Creating the heavens and the earth, plants and animals, and of course humans. For some kind of moral purpose, which we must constantly try to discern, from the signs and stories of the creators. And some humans are better at pinning down this purpose than others, and they become elevated as intermediaries between the creators, to whom we owe everything, and our benighted selves, tossed on the waves of godly caprice, which only seems like caprice, because the gods have a higher purpose which even the most blessed and spiritual of mortals can only partially comprehend.
Anyway, the census. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), ‘A question on religion has been included in all Australian censuses since 1911. Answering this question has always been optional but is answered by nearly all respondents’. In that first census, over 100 years ago, pretty close to 100% of Australians described themselves as religious – essentially meaning Christian. And things hadn’t changed that much by the 1971 census, when still a vast majority – 87 to 88 percent – described themselves as Christian, and the number of people who dared admit to any other religious belief was virtually zero. But by the seventies, the hodge-podge of regulations that made up the White Australia Policy had been dismantled, so that by this latest census (2021), religious beliefs other than Christianity were being admitted to by just over 10 percent of respondents.
But Christianity has fared particularly badly over the past fifty years, as the graph above shows. I first started paying serious attention to this trend away from Christianity after the 2006 census, and from memory, I gave a talk to the SA Humanist Society after the release of the 2011 census, noting the trend, particularly the fact that the abandonment of Christian belief was accelerating. However, I predicted, at least to myself, that this trend would soon start to ‘plateau’. My reasoning was partly based on the breakdown of Christianity into denominations. Not a complete breakdown, from my very basic research. The ABS broke it down into Catholicism, Anglicanism and Other Christian, and it was very clear that Anglicanism was fading most quickly, and Catholicism most slowly. It seemed to me that Anglicanism, which, unsurprisingly, had been the most practiced Christian religion in the early censuses, had suffered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to its reforms and increasing liberalism (though of course it has its conservative faction). Considering that religion is supposed to be about the eternal values of the creator, unchanging since our creation, rather than about values that simply change with the times – what some call social evolution – it may have caused many Anglicans to lose faith in religion altogether, or even to switch to something more ‘eternal’, such as the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. My prediction was that Anglicanism would continue to lose support until it bottomed out, in the fairly near future, and that Catholicism would also start to level out, what with all those cultural Catholics who built their social lives around the Church. And there was also the popularity of those Big Church evangelicals and Pentecostals, the ‘Charismatics’ that I kept hearing about.
So I was taken by surprise by the 2016 census, which saw the biggest drop in the Anglican religion of any previous census, as well as a more substantial drop in Catholicism than anticipated. The ‘other Christian’ category had also dropped, and the no religion category had risen to just over 30%. These figures upended my expectations completely, so I was more open to what the 2021 census would bring. Even so, a jump from 30% non-religious to 39% in five years is pretty amazing – but rapid change has been the norm in modern times, at least in the WEIRD world. Today we talk in terms of generations – the baby boomers, the millennials, generations X,Y and Z, and it’s all a bit hard to parse. I don’t think the generation of the 1740s would have had much difficulty in dealing with gen 1760, except of course to complain about their youthful foolishness, as Aristotle was wont to do.
So, as you can see from the graph, ‘no religion’ is pretty well certain to replace Christianity as the largest religious category in the next census, while owing to our increasingly multicultural mix, other religions will continue to rise, though not substantially. Interestingly the largest jump in religious presence since the 2016 census is that of the Yazidis, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group from northern Iraq and surrounding regions, fleeing from persecution by the so-called Islamic State. Though it only ‘took off’ in the 12th century, its origins are apparently pre-Islamic and pre-Zoroastrian, later tinged with Sufi and Islamic influences. So, I learn something new every day.
Of course, the cultural make-up of Australia is changing, but slowly. We could do with expanding our immigration program, and behaving in a less hostile and cruel way towards refugees. I’m not religious of course, but bringing into the country a wider variety of religio-cultural groups might tend to water down the influence of the very male Judeo-Christian god that has been worshipped in this country for so long. Even if these new religions have their own patriarchal features, as most do, the divisions between them might tend to dilute the patriarchy of Catholicism, the Christian religion that has always most concerned me. Catholicism began to challenge Anglicanism as the most practiced, or at least believed in, denomination in Australia in the post-war period, though there was always a large Catholic presence, particularly Irish-Catholic, before that. It continues to be the most persistent denomination, but it will clearly never be the politically dominant influence it was in the 1950s. Even so, it’s noticeable that the religiosity of our political leaders, our parliamentarians, in terms of numbers, is greater than the general population – just as the average age of parliamentarians is greater than the general population.
As mentioned, the above graph clearly shows that the biggest religious category in the next census will be ‘no religion’. And that category will continue to grow over the next decades, and even the immigrants with their different religious varieties may go the way of the majority.
But us oldies may not, or will not be here to witness what happens. What will these developments mean for the nation? How will it have changed our politico-social landscape after we have passed? That’s the sad thing, life is very addictive, and we don’t want it to stop. We always want to know what happens. No wonder eternal life is so profoundly appealing.
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
It has long irritated me that people ask the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ or ‘why don’t you believe in God?’, assuming that there’s only one deity, a cultural assumption that reveals a fair degree of ignorance. Obviously there are many gods, or spirits, or powers or forces, because many many cultures have developed over many thousands of years in isolation to each other.
For example, I’ve been reading Cassandra Pybus’ book Truganini, which relates the horrors suffered by the Aboriginal inhabitants of what was then Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s and 30s. One particular spirit – Raegewarrah – was considered mostly responsible for the disaster that had befallen them with the advent of Europeans, but there were many other gods and spirits associated with places, activities and so on. Speaking more generally, I recall one spiritually inclined friend saying that these different gods or spirits are all different interpretations of God, or the godhead or some such thing, but it doesn’t take much anthropological research to discover that so many of these creatures have different characters, powers, relationships and fields of agency. There are malevolent and benevolent gods, there are capricious, unpredictable gods, there are regional gods, seasonal gods, gods of love and gods of war, gods of the sea, gods of the forest, squabbling and/or incestuous families of gods, hierarchies of gods, and gods of the other peoples over the mountains or on faraway islands.
It’s stated on some websites that there are between 8000 and 12000 gods on record, but records require writing, and religious beliefs surely predates writing, as for example those of Aboriginal Australians. And we have as little idea of when religious belief in humans began as we do of the beginning of human language. It’s likely though, at least to me, that the origins of human language and religion are connected.
But returning to God, rather than gods, this is a reference to the Judeo-Christian god, as I live in a country colonised by Christians. He (and he’s very male) is also referred to as the Abrahamic god, who unites the three associated religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in monotheism, or sort of. Christianity differs from the others in that there’s two gods, father and son, who sort of compete with each other for the attention of belevers, being, apparently, quite different characters.
Anyway, this Judaic god wasn’t, strictly speaking the first monotheistic god, though he was at the foundation of the first successful monotheistic religion that we know of. We can’t of course be certain of how many monotheisms have been tried in history or ‘prehistory’ but we do know of the attempt by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, some 3,300 years ago – some 750 years before the rabbis of Judah got together to institute their monotheism. Akhenaten tried to compel his subjects to worship the Aten, the Sun God, but only through him, the pharaoh. It was an attempt to impose monotheism in a very hierarchical way, to consolidate the pharoah’s power, and it would’ve entailed the essential abolition of over a hundred other Egyptian gods, so it didn’t survive Akhenaten’s death – in fact, there was a fierce reaction to it afterwards.
Now of course the rabbis of Judah knew nothing about this when they began to develop their monotheism. It’s likely that the Judaic religion existed centuries before it turned monotheistic. It was one of several Canaanite polytheistic religions of the region, and the various Semitic cultures probably shared their different deities, leading to confusion at times about their identities and roles. Much of this will always be speculative as we have few written records from the time, but the name El, from which the Arabic name Allah derives, comes up in slightly different forms in Ugaritic, in Aramaic and in so-called proto-Semitic languages to describe a god who may are may not be the same god in each case. Sometimes El seems to represent a special or supreme god among gods. Other times it seems like a prefix to some particular god, such as El-Hadad. So basically, the name El, and its derivatives, comes up in so many language-forms and in so many contexts that it’s virtually impossible to characterise the god in any coherent way. If you don’t believe me, look up the comprehensive Wikipedia entry on this god, or this descriptor.
So during the Bronze Age (about 5300 to 3200 years ago) the land of Canaan, of which Judah was a a small part, was occupied or influenced by the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Hurrian Mitanni and the Assyrians, among others. So there were all sorts of cultural and religious influences and pressures that I’m not scholared enough to sort out, but the gods that most stuck with or appealed to the Israelite tribes of Judah and surrounding regions were Yahweh, a warrior-god, the aforementioned El, the mother goddess Asherah, and Baal, who by the time of Iron Age 1 (3200-3000 years ago) had come to replace El in parts of Canaan as the master god. Baal was particularly a fertility god, associated especially with rainfall, which was crucial to the region. The scholarly term is monolatristic worship – with many gods, but one god being more prevalent or important.
However, over time, and probably due to the regular incursions into and occupation of Israelite regions by other cultures, Yahweh became the more favoured god, a being to rouse the embattled Israelites against their various oppressors. The most serious oppression came from the Babylonians during Iron Age II (about 2600 to 2550 years ago) when the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem and deported the most prominent Judeans, taking them captive to Babylon. Jerusalem, the city, was apparently destroyed, though much of the rest of Judah remained untouched. It was likely this trauma (much relieved a few decades later by the defeat of the Babylonians by Cyrus II of Persia, and the return from exile) that turned the Judean people inwards, and caused them to see Yahweh, their warrior-god, as their sole god, under whom they needed to unite as his chosen people.
Which brings me to the complex writings of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. I feel daunted at the thought, so I’ll focus mostly on Genesis, the origin. I have very little interest in the endless abstrusities of Judaism or any other religion, but the tight hold that ‘the one true God’ still has on millions of people has fascinated and disturbed me for decades, especially considering what we’ve come to know about our universe in the past few centuries. It seems knowledge percolates slowly, even when confined to the so-called ‘WEIRD’ world.
I don’t believe that science and religion are in any way compatible – they offer completely different programs, if you will, for understanding the world and our place in it. The science program is endless, or opened-ended, if you will – with new facts or findings leading to new questions, which, when answered lead to further questions with no end in sight, whereas the religious program (and I’m specifically focussing on Abrahamic religions) has an end, in God, He who cannot be questioned. The old Stephen Jay Gould attempt to evoke NOMA (non-overlapping majesteria), the idea that science and religion can live happily together, (about which I’ve written here), always struck me as frankly ridiculous.
Of course I understand that religion comes wrapped in culture, which comes wrapped in religion, and all this forms a great part of the identity of many people, and I have no wish to belittle or take from people their culture. It’s a vexed issue, and I don’t have all the answers. I do think there are heavy cultures, which can be damaging, and I notice this damage especially when it comes to gender. Bonobos again. And since the god called God is so very very masculine, I cannot help but feel great discomfort about the Abrahamic religions.
So my next post will look at the Hebrew Origin myth and the nature of the god as shaped by the writers of the earliest texts.
References
https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg19125641-200-how-many-gods-are-there/
Truganini: journey through the apocalypse, by Cassandra Pybus, 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torah
Stephen Jay Gould, NOMA and a couple of popes
a bonobo world: the ascent and fall of man
devil woman, with evil on her mind
Bonobos obviously evolved from some earlier type, along with chimps, but we’re not as interested in their evolution as we are in ours, understandably enough. What wouldn’t we give to fill in the gaps in our rise – the where and when of the first use of fire, the first spoken language, the beginnings of religious practice and so on? And of course none of us will live long enough to find out if bonobos, left alone (which they won’t be), become more gynocratic or less in the distant future, let alone whether we humans will eventually manage to live for as long as some tortoises I’ve heard about.
We human apes, of course, have socially evolved, especially over the past few thousand years, as Jacob Bronowski pointed out regularly in the series so admired by Deutsch. Yet interestingly, there was a kind of evolution that Bronowski himself, and the producers of The Ascent of Man, seemed not to have arrived at by 1971. I haven’t watched the entire series, only the two episodes and other bits and pieces I’ve found on YouTube, because I’m too poor to pay for the entire series, but having watched the first episode more than once, I felt bugged by all this ‘man’ stuff. So I did a count. Bronowski utters the word ‘man’ 70 times, together with the pronouns ‘he’ (29 times), ‘his’ (23) and ‘him’ (12). The words ‘woman’ ‘she’ and ‘her’ are uttered zero times in toto by my count. In terms of imagery, only two human figures are focussed on apart from Bronowski, a male child learning to stand on two feet, and a male athlete running and pole vaulting. But of course, by ‘man’ he means ‘human’, right? And, hey, this was the beginning of the seventies, right? Which was almost the sixties, really quite close to the fifties…
I’m not even a woman but I felt like I was having my female irrelevance bashed into my face in listening to all this – a bit like a sleeping woman who only realises she’s being clouted when she wakes up. And all this man stuff didn’t suddenly end with the seventies – I’m reminded of a book, God, actually, which I read at the tail end of the New Atheism flare-up a few years ago. It was a dreadful piece of drivel seeking to prove the existence of the Judaeo-Christian god and to debunk evolution, which, against the advice of my betters, I managed to read to the end. Yet nothing in the male author’s specious arguments irritated me more than his deliberate use of ‘man’ as a generic term (though I was more irritated at the publisher, ABC books of all people). At one point, after reading the ‘man’ word about fifteen times in a couple of pages, I threw the book across the room in disgust. It seemed far more of an attack on women than on atheists.
But perhaps the title ‘The Ascent of Man’ was meant as a clever science-and-human development counterpoint to the religious ‘Fall of Man’ trope? Or at least, let’s pretend. The fall of man really was male, of course, and it was caused by woman. Or, if you like, by god, who should’ve left that spare rib alone. Not that this little fable was necessary to create a viciously misogynistic society, as witness the ancient Greeks (with apologies to the Spartans). Still it did a fine job of making life hot for women, long before the witch-burning frenzy of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (to be precise, the last woman known to have been burnt to death as a witch was Barbara Zdunk in Poland in 1811, and the first known execution of a witch, recorded by Demosthenes, was of Theoris of Lemnos, and her family, some time before 323 BCE, though it’s likely that witch-hunting, torture and execution predates this). Since all the early Christian writers and power-wielders were men with natural sexual desires, and since they’d gotten into their collective heads a fear and hatred of sexual desire as a straying from the endless and more or less brainless contemplation of the divine, women, the ‘daughters of Eve’ (though women were generally supposed, at least by the elites who pretended to understand such things, to be the carriers of the human seed without contributing to it) became the collective scapegoat. Basically, women were encouraged to be the objects of men’s desires, and exploited as such, and then blamed for it. Here’s the early Christian writer Tertullian, as memorably quoted by Beauvoir in The Second Sex:
And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?
As many feminist writers have pointed out, the exploitation of, and the ill-treatment, murder and general public opprobrium of sex workers of all varieties has never really abated, despite the so-called sexual liberation that began decades ago. What these religious and conservative types would think of bonobo shenanigans is an interesting question, but not particularly relevant for the future of humanity, whether it’s headed upwards or down. For the future lies with those who are open and attentive to the behaviour of our relatives. Bonobos’ use of sex isn’t obsessive, or particularly excessive. What is excessive and obsessive is our fear of sex, and our need to control it, to hide it, to wrap it in bonds of ownership, to weaponise it. We’re so absurdly uptight about it, so incapable of normalising it as a need, a feeling, an appetite, a social bond, a pleasure.
The fall, indeed. We’ve fallen for so many myths about sex. When will be able to rise above all that, and be kinder to each other? Not until women are on top, I’m pretty sure.
References
The Ascent of Man, Ep. 01 “Lower Than the Angels” (YouTube video)
Roy Williams, God, actually, 2010, ABC Books & HarperCollins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoris_of_Lemnos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Zdunk
bonobos, religion and feminism
bonobos, promoting the common good
Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus that religion has lost, or is losing, its political clout, and is largely a force of the past with little impact on the future. This is largely true, but more so in WEIRD countries. Catholicism still has a firm grip on many South American and African countries, and I don’t see any Islamic nations Enlightenment in the offing – but you never know.
During the ‘New Atheism’ fervency of a decade and more ago, I became quite engaged in the issues. I’ve never believed in any gods, but I’d avoided really thinking about Christianity’s ascendancy in the UK and Australia (I have dual nationality). The decline of the religion even before New Atheism had made it all quite easy to ignore, but the new polemics excited me enough to read the new texts – The God Delusion, God is Not Great, Breaking the Spell and assorted others. Perhaps more importantly, I actually read the Bible, and, through my blog, wrote my own exegesis of the gospels and other New Testament writings, compared Jesus to Socrates, and other fun things. It passed the time. And I’m sure the movement hastened the drift away from religion in the WEIRD world.
For these essays, though, I’m thinking of how religions have impacted on the females of our species. Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism, in particular, have had a congealing affect on male and female social roles, especially, it seems, among the poorer classes in the cultures those religions dominate.
There’s a lot that I could say about religions, but in a nutshell they grew, initially, out of a desire to understand and control the world as humans saw it. That’s why, in my view, they’re in competition with science, which grew out of exactly the same desire, but which has turned out to be phenomenally more successful in fulfilling that desire. So religions are in wholesale retreat, especially in the WEIRD world.
Let me elaborate. The world to early human apes was full of mysteries, as it is to bonobos, chimps and other smart creatures, who might take note of such sights as waterfalls, volcanic eruptions, lightning fires, and even, perhaps, slow changes like the growth of a tree from a seedling. Also regular occurrences such as the change from day to night, seasons, the movements of the sun, moon and stars. But human apes would likely go further than a sense of wonder and awe. They would come to wonder what, and why. And lacking any handy explanations they would turn to inventing them – and those whose inventions seemed most convincing, and who seemed most familiar with the forces at play, either through delusion, calculation or conviction, might attain a power of sorts over the group, something seen as innate and special, and perhaps passed down to offspring. The forces and vagaries of wind and water, heat and cold, of food abundance and scarcity, might seem to be manipulable by the powers and spirit of these chosen few, the adumbrations of religious figures, shamans, a priestly caste. And given that, apart from a few notable exceptions – some ancient Greeks and the odd Egyptian and Chinese – science as we know it is a very recent phenomenon, religions held sway for ages, not only explaining and ‘controlling’ the powers of nature, but inventing plausible enough stories for how it all began and who to thank or blame for it all.
If this just-so story about the origins and purpose of religion has some truth to it, then it follows that religion has a conservative element. This is how the world began, these are the forces that created it, and this, that and this is what they want from us, in payment for the life they’ve given us. It’s unchanging, and we need to maintain our roles, eternally. For example, the Judea-Christian origin story has woman as almost an afterthought, man’s helpmeet, shaped from a supernumerary rib. The Islamic creation story is altogether more vague, but both myths took shape within highly patriarchal societies, and served to maintain those societies largely unchanged for centuries, until we began to find better explanations, at an accelerating rate.
Still, we’re left with the legacy of those religions and, for example, their views on leadership. It strikes me that some of the Catholic hierarchy would rather be burned at the stake than allow women to become priests, and I doubt that there are too many female Imams. There are debates of course, about whether restrictions on female leadership roles are cultural or religious, or indeed about whether culture and religion can be separated, but they often work together to maintain a perennial status quo.
Until, of course, they don’t. Modern science has knocked us off our pedestal as the darlings of the gods, and has reframed what used to be our whole world as a tiny planet revolving around a bog-standard star on the outskirts of a fairly nondescript spiral galaxy in one of possibly countless universes. It’s been a bit of a downward spiral for our sense of specialness, and it’s all been quite sudden. We can pat ourselves on the back, though, for having brought ourselves to our senses, and even for launching ourselves into the infinity of progress – a world of particle colliders, tokamaks, theory-of-mind-AI, quantum computers and space tourism and much else beyond the horizon. And yet, the old patriarchy is still largely with us. Men in suits, or in uniforms, leading the military, dominating the business world and manipulating the political arena. There’s no good reason for it – it’s simply tradition, going back to early culture and religion. Some of these cultures seem incorrigible in spite of their new-found WEIRDness. Will Japan, for example, ever transform its male business and political culture? When will we see another Chinese woman in the Politburo? As to Russia’s Putin and his strong man allies – when will this kindergarten club grow up?
With the success and growth of modern science has come great international, and inter-gender, collaboration. I can think of no greater model for our future development. With the current pandemic, too, we’ve seen follow-the-science politicians, many of them women, emerging with the greatest credit. Co-operation among women has always been powerful, but too little recognised. I would like to see more of this co-operation, especially in the service of keeping men in their place. It works for bonobos. I truly feel that a bonobo culture, but with human brainpower, would make the human world more exhilarating, in its compassion, in its sexiness, in its sense of connection with the biosphere and all its delicate mechanisms, than any other cultural change we can make. I actually think it will happen – though sadly not in my lifetime.
on religion and explanation
it’s true
Jacinta: I’ve been thinking about religion as the earliest form of explanation for a while, and about when we – our species, or our ancestors – began to feel the need for explanations, about everyday regularities and irregularities, such as why the blinding white disc travels across the sky, disappears, plunging the world into darkness, then reappears on the opposite side and retraverses the sky again. And again and again. Or why these periods of light are sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler. Or why water pours from the sky from time to time. Or why, in the darkness, there are patterns of tiny white lights in the sky, together with a much larger pale white disc that seems to be slowly eaten away to nothing then replenished over a period of many ‘days’ and ‘nights’. What were these things, and why did the ‘air’ around us whizz by, sometimes with such force as to blow the trees down and blow our children off their feet and make them cry.
Canto: Hmm. Dogs and cats certainly don’t seem to wonder about such things. What about bonobos? They certainly display curiosity. I’ve seen monkeys crowd around an exotic animal, poking and prodding and jumping away when they get a reaction, just as I’ve seen the forest people of the Congo crowding around a white man, something completely new in their lives.
Jacinta: Yes isn’t the internet a grand thing for the armchair-bound. That sort of curiosity, as you say, is for new things, and it is on display in cats and dogs. And the questions for them are – can I eat it? Is it dangerous? But the queer regularities that have been with all these creatures from the beginning – night and day, warmth and cold, rain and shine, earth and sky – it seems unlikely that any dog or cat has felt curious about such things. Bonobos I’m not so sure about, but I’m doubtful. At some stage in our ancestry, and it would be obviously linked to neural development, we started asking ourselves – why is this happening?
Canto: Language. To ask these questions, even of ourselves, wouldn’t we need language?
Jacinta: Hmmm. Maybe. But imagine some highly irregular natural event, like a solar eclipse, being experienced by our pre-lingual ancestors, whether Homo erectus or an Australopithecine. They’d be shocked, scared, and they’d be hanging together, maybe huddling together, communicating their fear, and maybe their wonder.
Canto: Thinking mostly, is it dangerous? Should we hide? And even with language, with a singular event like that, they wouldn’t have an explanation.
Jacinta: Well, they might have a go at an explanation – okay, maybe you’re right, maybe some kind of language would be necessary, which is kind of the same thing as neural development. I mean, language clearly didn’t just come about, it evolved, over who knows how long. And we still don’t know if Neanderthals had it, or some rudimentary version of it, like us, 100,000 years ago or whatever. Think of fire. Once someone learned how to create and control it, and utilise it for warmth and to ward off predators, and, presumably later, to transform our food, they needed to communicate these skills. And from there, or somewhere, they might go on to communicate other things, like navigating by the stars, or how those stars crossed the sky, like human travellers crossing the land in search of food. Stories, of a kind.
Canto: So, I’ve been investigating a bit more, and there’s been some observed behaviours in chimps – and clearly they don’t have language, unless you define language very widely – that some have described as proto-ritual, such as slow-dancing in the face of fires. Fires caused by thunderstorms would be a highly irregular feature of life for chimps, living half in savannah grasslands, half in forests. And ‘dancing’, or ritual movements, might be a way of trying to placate or somehow communicate with this apparently living, dangerous force. And they’ve also been observed performing such ‘dances’ when the rain pours down.
Jacinta: Hmmm, and those movements might be meant to convey something to the fire or rain, or some other phenomenon, but also to other chimps. Something about communicating to others that there’s maybe a way to deal with these phenomena. This might hardly be in the realm of proto-proto religion, but surely the first religions were animistic – according significance and even some kind of intention to the wind and rain, thunder and lightning, lakes and streams, hills and valleys, specific trees and so on.
Canto: Yes, much fuss has been made of a tree hollow in which chimps were found placing stones, for no non-ritualistic purpose human observers could think of. If nothing else, it indicates that the more we observe other species, the more complex and multi-faceted they tend to become. Remember when we used to talk about bird-brains?
Jacinta: I also saw, on a video, that during a firestorm one of the chimps, apparently a king-pin, appeared to be raging at the fire, seeming to suggest that he – it would surely be a male, given chimp society – could, or thought he could, tame the beast, like old George slaying the dragon. Intimations of future shamanism?
Canto: Yes, or maybe he was just pissed off after a fight with the missus. Jane Goodall, on noting chimpanzees sitting for a long time staring ‘dreamily’ at a waterfall, used the term spirituality, which she roughly described as ‘the experience of appreciating magnificent, unknowable powers at work in the world beyond ourselves’. I believe Franz de Waal has used the term, in a different context, for bonobos too, but I’m not so comfortable with the term, it’s way too vague, and it drags religion behind it too emphatically. A feeling of awe, or wonder, of being overwhelmed, etc, can be described as just that.
Jacinta: And yet. A noisy, crushing, powerful waterfall, a raging, dangerous, painful fire – attributing something like intention to these things seems like a step forward. And also the desire for mastery of these forces, by somehow understanding and manipulating their intentions, that might seem an advance. But it’s hard to tell, with our smug hindsight.
Canto: And talking about hindsight, many of us consider, from the pinnacles of science, that religion is just a hangover from the days of pre-scientific explanations. Why are we here? Because the god called God created us to have dominion over the birds and bees and beasts of the field, and after a female was built from a male rib (which must’ve contained some pretty impressive pluripotent cells), and after some snakey female behaviour, we were sent forth out of Eden to multiply, and the god left us to our own devices, but when he came back from wheeling and dealing in foreign parts, he found we were wrecking everything – female trouble again, doubtless. And so he decided to drown us all, so as to Make his Arcadia Great Again, but, presumably feeling a bit tired of the creation process, he chose a human family and unspecified number of species to float about in a boat for a while, watching their friends and neighbours drowning, so as to begin it all again, but definitely for the last time, because, having discovered golf, he’d really lost interest.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s one variant, perhaps not the orthodox one, but as Mary Midgley used to say, these sorts of stories provide a far richer account of our origins than anything scientism has to offer. I mean, life from non-life in a warm puddle? Boring.
Canto: But seriously, these creation stories, and ancilllary stories of the fruitful, deadly forests and the deserts and their oases, and the wind and the rain and storms and fevers and the patterned, watching stars and the smiling, burning sun, and the cool steadfast moon, these were as rich and comprehensive as they could possibly be, and those who remembered and told these stories best, and had the most intimate relations with all these insidious, ineluctable forces, would be precious persons indeed.
Jacinta: Mmmm. It’s a beginning.
References
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/chimpanzee-spirituality/475731/
23 – bonobo morality superior to Christianity
the Cyrus Cylinder, dated to 539 BCE
In his strange but interesting book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari reveals an obsessive interest in religion. While recognising that the traditional religions such as Christianity, which dominated Europe and its colonies and offshoots for a millennium and a half, no longer provide a template for our political and social organisation, he’s happy to label the isms that he claims are traditional religion’s successors, namely humanism, liberalism, progressivism and scientism, as religions too. And the final section of his book bears the title ‘the data religion’, and is all about our new-found worship of algorithms.
Personally I much prefer a tighter definition of religion, being a belief in gods and god-like entities, or spiritual, or spirit-ish, beings such as sprites, fairies or mischief-making bunyips and such – thingummies that have an effect on our world but are too superior to ever be caught by hand or on camera. Or they belong to another world or dimension or something. Harari dismisses the non-believers’ dismissal of these beings as supernatural, but he offers no better alternative. He seems to have caught the Nietschean affliction of trying to stand outside of everything so he can be disdainful of it.
Traditional religions, however, suffer from the hearsay problem. I first heard about the Judeo-Christian god from a Sunday School teacher who no doubt heard about him from either his parents or rellies, or some other churchy elder, and so on down the generations, with mostly increasing conviction as we go back in time. Another way to describe him, or gods and religions in general, is as memes, thought-bubbles, differing in detail and import as they pass between people, but always presented with a sort of prestigious vagueness. God, for example, is divine, but what does this word mean? How do we collect evidence for divinity? Much easier to collect evidence for the processes involved in the Earth’s origin. Humans are lazy that way.
I don’t want to enter into a philosophical or theological discussion here – god forbid – but I’m concerned about the baleful effect that certain religions, those that still influence large numbers of human apes today, have on morality. Religion, as we know, tends to congeal morality in the time-frame of that religion’s founding, or its high-water mark. And even then it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Take the story of ‘the woman taken in adultery’, in the soi-disant gospel of John, about which there’s much argy-bargy as to authenticity (it may have been a later interpolation), as if any of these writings are particularly authentic. The issue here, for me at least, is about whether the ‘sin’ is really a sin, or more generally what is a sin, though in the religious context of the time, the point of the story is that, since everyone sins, this woman’s sin deserves forgiveness, like everyone else’s sins, as long as she sins ‘no more’. Of course, it’s a pretty piss-poor argument, even if you equate sinning with wrong-doing according to the legalities of the day. Context is everything, and no context is given in the story. Adultery isn’t even clearly defined. It’s well-known, and other biblical texts bear witness to the fact, that women were treated as chattels in this era and region, and very often married off as children to men twice or thrice their age, with no fellow-feeling about it. Bonobos wouldn’t have stood for it. So my advice to this youngster would’ve been ‘go for it lassie, and pay no attention to those arseholes’. Depending on the context, that is.
And yet this sort of context-free drivel is still taken seriously by those who aren’t religious and should know better. I’ve heard a professional philosopher, much younger than myself and by no means religious, argue, or simply claim, that our legal system is based on Christian teaching. That’s total bullshit. Some years ago I did a deep dive on Christian morality as expressed in the five ‘gospels’, including Thomas, and found no clear moral message – again because context is everything, so that general remarks like ‘blessed are the peace-makers’, or indeed the cheese-makers, are essentially meaningless. Bonobos are pretty peaceful, but they’ll fight when they have to, to keep the greater peace. It’s a pretty good general rule, but the particular action and its extent depends on context.
Another example of context-free ethics that I’ve heard being extolled is the Ten Commandments, or at least those that still make sense in the modern world – don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet (note the negativity), don’t commit adultery (makes no sense to bonobos, and why and when did human apes start marrying?), and honour your parents (hmmm, shouldn’t parents, and any others, be given the respect they deserve? Not based on titles or positions, but on observed behaviour and effects? Automatic honouring, or respect, strikes me as a bad, even dangerous idea. Political leaders often benefit from this automatic, fawning respect, especially in non-democratic countries, where those leaders are allowed to hang around for a long time, like an ever more fetid odour).
None of these commandments should be considered as absolutes, which is why the nuance of laws based on the complexity of civil society is far superior, and that nuance is displayed in rather more earthly laws of the time, such as those of Solon in Athens. And another near contemporary, Cyrus of Persia, renowned for having emancipated the Jews of Babylon, had rather more humane laws (or really just policies, and possibly short-term) written on a cylinder uncovered more than 2000 years later, and celebrated by some (mostly Persian nationals) as the first versions of human rights.
Laws change, as they should, as we learn more about human flourishing, and that such flourishing depends on a broader, more vital flourishing of that narrow band of life that covers the surface, and a tiny sub-surface, of our planet. From whence we emerged. Only recently, rather shockingly, has the so-called developed world caught up with bonobos in their understanding and acceptance of homosexual behaviour – and that acceptance is very far from universal. Perhaps such intolerance has sprung from the old idea that ‘the world must be peopled’, but these days we’re well aware that it has been peopled enough. Nowadays we don’t want so much to have children to carry on for us, but to carry on ourselves, hale and hearty for 200 years or so. But that’s another story.
References
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Solons-laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder