Religious Hybridization

According to Almeida, the author of our reading, the Christians in Ethiopia practice many Jewish traditions even though they believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. They still practice circumcision despite New Testament proclamations (by Paul in particular) that Christ came to save everyone regardless of whether or not they're circumcised. Interestingly, in this case not only the Jews and Christians are circumcised, but so are the Moors and "heathens" (62). Apparently, the Ethiopian Christians were oppressive toward non-Christians and indirectly pressured them into this behavior. Also, the Ethiopian emperors are polygamous, marrying many women of many different religions. Almeida compares this to King Solomon, who had a thousand wives and concubines and fell into sin by building pagan shrines for them to worship at (69). If the Ethiopian Christians really are descended from Jewish migrants (with or without the alleged son of Solomon and Sheba), this would make sense. Another aspect of Ethiopian culture that reminded me of the Israelite Jews of the Old Testament was their warfare. Apparently, "the life of all [in Ethiopia] who are not farmers is war" (76). In the Old Testament, the Israelites go to war many times against Gentile tribes, fighting against those who are not the Chosen People. Now that Ethiopia sees itself as the Promised Land, it is no surprise that they would be aggressive in warfare like Israel was. Aside what could be seen as Jewish customs, the Ethiopian Christians also have practices that the Catholic missionaries see as erroneous and sinful: they baptize their babies too late (so many of them can't get to heaven because they die before their baptism) and they are heavy wine drinkers (63, 65).

The Ethiopians' relative isolation and correspondingly unique religion shows that culture has a considerable impact on the direction of a religion--so much so that different cultures are able to have completely different customs and behaviors and profess the same belief. The Catholic missionaries from Portugal see many problems with the Ethiopian cultural practices of the Christians as well as the other religious groups. Yet both the Portugese missionaries and the Ethiopians call themselves Christians and read from the same Bible. Culture, therefore, has a very large influence on the form of interpretation used with religious texts.

Ethiopia and Zion

If, like we postulated in class on Wednesday, the Kebra Negast was written in order to build community pride and unity, the writers did a very good job. Especially in Part II of the reading, many passages proclaimed Ethiopia's privileged status in God's eyes. First, the merchant Tamrin counters an Israelite's claim that the promised land is much better than Ethiopia, saying that the only thing Ethiopia lacks that the Israelites have is wisdom (44-45). This passage surprised me quite a bit, actually, because the Bible does describe Canaan as the land of milk and honey (although I don't remember the exact reference right now), and it seems arrogant of the Ethiopians to say that their country is even better than that. However, such a belief works very well in giving the Ethiopians something to be proud of. In the course of this story, though, they get something much more impressive even than that--Zion (the ark of the covenant). Not only do they bring Zion (and therefore God's dwelling place and presence) into Ethiopia, but they also are escorted by an angel. Their whole caravan is lifted off the ground as they travel, and they make such good time that wise Solomon doesn't believe it at first (78-79, 87). How much more blessed could they be than that? This whole incident follows an extended description of the great and numerous blessings that God bestows on those kings who please him by following his word (56-58). Later in the reading, Solomon confesses to God that he has not been following the word and this is the cause of his misfortune, but the Ethiopians apparently have been diligent and therefore are reaping the benefits (93).

In a dream on the night of his son's conception, Solomon saw a bright sun rise up, leave Israel forever, and settle in Ethiopia (35). Although he didn't realize it at the time, this sun is Zion, and Israel loses its privilege forever when Zion leaves the country. Ethiopia then can make a valid claim as the most blessed nation. Ethiopia had already been granted all the land East to India (and even further than that), so with this considerable territory coupled with God's very presence with them through Zion, it's no surprise that they developed a belief of their nation's superiority (53). I'd personally be interested in learning more about Ethiopian Christianity, so isolated as to allow--presumably--for exaggerated claims of its own uniqueness. The idea that Ethiopia is so special and privileged doesn't seem to gel very easily with the rest of the Bible and its continued discussion of Israel's chosen status as far as I can tell. But I don't know a lot about the issue, so I'm in no position to judge it.

The "Essence" of Religion

Catrina and Alex both recently posted about the definition of religion, and I'd actually just been thinking about the same issue because of a reading I had to do for my Christianity in the Modern World class. In On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, written in 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher tackles the very same question, and his basic conclusion is that religion's true form is personal experience--feeling and intuition. What I find so interesting about Schleiermacher’s definition is that instead of seeing religion as a box or chain or whatever other metaphors we’ve used in class, he sees it as only the very essence, or core, of those aspects which we seem to categorize within the religion definition. In his words, “religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite,” meaning that when one has a religious experience, one feels immediately a connection to the infinite, a.k.a. God, and this feeling is so strong that one knows without a doubt that there really is that connection to the infinite (285). He divides human experience into three categories: thinking, acting, and religion. Thinking includes science, rationalism, and metaphysics, and this is not religious because it is derived from imperfect [finite] human views of the world. Acting, or doing, includes morality and is not religious because it isolates humans instead of seeing them as part of the infinite universe. According to Schleiermacher, thinking and acting are “empty” except when approached from the perspective of previous or current religious experience (286). Catrina mentioned in her post that “morality is not purely the realm of the religious,” and Schleiermacher would definitely agree. To him, a religion cannot be defined strictly by morality; it needs to have the underlying religious experience (like the “spirituality” that Catrina talked about) to back it up.

Schleiermacher talks a lot about how morality and metaphysics are so often seen as religion but are really just an outgrowth of one's awareness of the world gained through the aforementioned religious intuition. Religion itself is simply that feeling, and everything else connected to it--theology, identity, community, morality, etc.--instead of being based on the intuition of knowing God are based on such things as consciousness or contemplation of finite things. Therefore they are not really religion, and critiques of them should not be counted as critiques of actual religion. This would be one answer to Alex's aversion to religious sects that sanction violence toward outsiders (although I do think Catrina's point in class on Wednesday was very important as well--she said that even without religion, people will still naturally create in- and out-groups which will lead to conflict). Schleiermacher would most likely agree with Alex that such violence is wrong, but he would not see it as a fault with the religion but with the human interpreter of the religious experience.

When Schleiermacher defined religion, he differentiated between Religion the entity (almost like Plato would say… the “form” of religion) and various religions, which he saw as outward manifestations of real Religion. Interestingly, he accepted religious pluralism, saying that no religion is able to be a perfect version of Religion. This idea seems to go along with what we’ve been talking about—that it’s so hard to define religion because all religions are so different that they don’t necessarily all have the same common elements. While Shleiermacher sees it as different perspectives of approaching the same “taste for the infinite,” we’ve been talking about it as different manifestations of humans’ evolutionary desire for supernatural explanations and/or community. As different as our class’s complicated definition of religion and Schleiermacher’s very basic definition seem, we come out with almost the same conclusion. It’s just that Schleiermacher didn’t try as hard to figure out what all the different manifestations of religion could be like we’re doing.

Metropolis and Marxism

I was quite surprised to be watching a 1920s silent film in Religious Studies class this week, but after the discussion in class on Monday, it made a lot of sense why we watched it. The movie's many uses of religious themes and imagery to convey a very non-religious point illustrates just how useful and versatile religious allegory can be. In my opinion, the movie is critiquing the Marxist view that society must change through a revolution from below, because it clearly shows that a revolution from below can be disastrous, and it also advocates a mediator from above as the real solution. Noelle made an excellent point in class when she discussed how the intended audience of the film was the upper classes (since the lower, working, classes wouldn't have the time or money to spend at the cinema). With that audience in mind, it makes a lot of sense for director Fritz Lang to propose action from the upper rather than lower classes.

I don't remember who said it in class, but I agree with the idea that using religious imagery like this allows viewers to implicitly understand much more than is explicitly shown in the film, especially with the limits it has in being a silent film with so little dialogue. If Lang had wanted to get the same point across without using these religious themes, he would've had to work a lot harder in his character and plot development. Some of the examples of religious (Christian) imagery in the movie were the character Maria, the story of Babylon, and the idea of a mediator between high and low (like Jesus brought together God and humankind). Using these and other images, viewers' conceptual blending allows them to bring in well-known events and character traits from the Bible to supplement what Lang shows onscreen. The main point of the movie doesn't seem to be to promote these religious themes, especially since they're somewhat inconsistent with the Bible (the metaphor isn't uniform). Instead, especially considering the historical and geographical context of the film and filmmaker, it was intended to address socio-economic and political issues rather than religious ones. The religious overtones of the film simply made the task much easier by accelerating the plot and character developments.

Sam Harris' Exaggerations

In looking at Sam Harris' long collection of quotes from the Koran in his book, The End of Faith, I couldn't help noticing that--whatever he might say about them--at most, four of the passages (2:190-93, 2:216, 2:217-18, and 3:156) could be seen as supporting actually fighting nonbelievers. And even these passages are somewhat questionable in that regard: the first might only apply to retaliation, the second and third could be figurative (since I can't see them in context), and the fourth could also be in self-defense. The rest of the passages do promote a vicious attitude toward the nonbelievers, but Allah seems to be the one taking all the action against them, not the Muslims themselves (Harris 118-123). If it weren't for those few passages about fighting, I personally would interpret this part of the Koran to mean that nonbelievers are damned by Allah to eternal suffering after they die and that they deserve it--not that Muslims must go attack them and bring their death sooner (after all, they should be given time to accumulate as many sins as possible to increase their punishment...). Just because Muslims may hate nonbelievers, they don't necessarily have to kill them: hating and murdering are very different things. As far as fitting in those other passages about fighting, I'm not sure what to do. Since I don't have them in context, it's hard to discern what meaning they were originally meant to convey, but again, it may be figurative. Like Augustine said about violent Biblical passages, the fighting may have been geared toward the sin of the nonbelievers, not the people themselves (Augustine 76-77). However, Harris says that Muslims see the Koran as "literal and inerrant," so it all depends on one's interpretive methods (Harris 110).

Reading Harris' brutal attack on Islam, I feel that he highly exaggerated both the prevalence of Islam-related terrorism as well as the amount of support for it in the Koran. I think Noelle is very right to say that terrorism is far from "commonplace" as Harris describes it (Harris 109). And I'd like to elaborate: not only are the 2.8 million Muslims in the United States acting perfectly peaceful, but so are the majority of Muslims even in the Middle East and all across the globe. While some small factions of the religion have embraced terrorism as the most highly religious act, not everyone has. I admit that the survey results Harris cites, showing such widespread acceptance of suicide bombings as justifiable, are surprising, but they're also inconclusive (Harris 125-26). In asking participants if suicide bombings are ever justifiable, the survey is including situations in which the bombings could be counterattacks to previous violence by nonbelievers. To most people, violence in response to violence is at least sometimes justifiable, and if this is what the Muslims surveyed were thinking, the survey results become much less surprising.

Noelle also brought up another good point--that the militant Islam that does occur can just as easily be explained by psychology or sociology as religion. While the civilians being bombed wouldn't have attacked Islam themselves, they could easily be a scapegoat for the Muslim's retaliation. Once people start thinking in groups, they start to see people outside their "in-group" as less than human, and it becomes easier and easier for them to rationalize immoral behavior toward those outsiders. With the addition of the pressures of obedience to authority (as Milgram described and Noelle also mentioned), the situation can quickly get out of hand as people blindly obey their corrupted leaders. However, this has not happened to a very large faction of Islam. The sects in which it has occurred probably had cultural circumstances lending themselves to such violent measures; since Islam itself hasn't adopted them, I think there's good reason to believe that the core religious beliefs of Islam are not the cause of this terrorism. (Noelle said this in her post as well, but I thought it was very important and worth repeating.)

To me, Harris' arguments seemed very naive for ignoring these major points. Not only is the Koran much less supportive of outright violence than he seems to indicate, but Muslim violence int he world today is also much less widespread. As we've learned in this class, religious writings can be interpreted to mean many different things, and the militant Muslims who have committed acts of terrorism are just one example of imposing views not explicitly supported by the text onto other passages.

Blending and Religious Beliefs

I found "Conceptual Blending and Analogy," by Gilles Fauconnier, to be surprisingly intruiging. One of the most interesting aspects of conceptual blending is the fact that it is so natural that people don't notice it and often forget about the process altogether. In his skier example, Fauconnier says that the hypothetical skier only needs to think of the analogy of a French waiter until he masters his the ability to hold his arms correctly (261-62). After this point, the position is so natural that it doesn't need any assistance from a conceptual blend. Likewise, people using computer mice have mastered the ability so completely that they don't think at all about the fact that the movement of the physical mouse is not the same as the movement of the arrow on the screen (268-69). Fauconnier states that "once the integration is achieved, this imperfection is hardly accessible to consciousness any longer" (269). I believe that this is useful information in the study of religion, because religion naturally relies heavily on analogy (since we don't have any concrete objects with which to represent God, spirits, ultimate truths, etc.). According to this theory, if we are using analogy to explain religious beliefs, we will naturally tend to forget that the beliefs are analogies.

People can become so set on the analogies which they believe to be true that they accept them with the same certainty as they would accept facts gathered through empirical observation. But the fact is that religion and empiricism are very different. Religion, as we have seen in our readings about the Neanderthals, is rooted in the mind and mental processes. It has some external effects such as hierarchy/organization and artwork, but by no means can it be measured in the same way as anything in the realm of science. This is obvious in the definition of religion itself (or lack thereof): we have a very hard time defining religion because it varies so much based on individuals' and cultures' different mindsets. Some common themes in religion, though, such as higher powers or spirits, justice, and what happens after death, etc. cannot easily be put into words that literally describe them. The definition of a "spirit," for instance, is extremely vague due to the fact that people can't see or touch spirits. Likewise, what really is "justice"? Trying to define these concepts inevitably results in some form of analogy, because in the case of justice, all we know is that it's like what we see as just except that it's infallible unlike our attempts at defining it. I recently read excerpts from Bruce Benson's book, Graven Ideologies, in which he described the difference between laws and justice: laws are humans' attempt to apply justice to their lives. When the laws themselves are interpreted as true justice, what Fauconnier predicts has occured: the two original parts of the analogy have disappeared into the recesses of the mind, leaving only their blended result.

Interpretation Allows for Change

In On Christian Teaching, Augustine demonstrates how flexible religion can be, even with a seemingly inflexible body of written word and law. In Augustine's view, Scripture can be interpreted either literally or figuratively, and figurative interpretation comes into play when the literal meaning of the passage doesn't fit with the theme of God's love (80). What he means by this is that some passages, mostly in the Old Testament, seem to encourage violence or other "bad" things, and only by interpreting them figuratively is he able to make sense of them according to what he sees as the basic message of the Bible. For example, he uses Jeremiah 1:10, "Behold today I have established you over nations and kingdoms, to uproot and destroy, to lay waste and scatter," to say that the literal uprooting and destroying, etc., only applies to kingdoms of sin, not real kingdoms. In this way, God isn't seen as violent only toward sin and not toward other people or kingdoms; therefore, his goodness and love is upheld (76-77). The fact that Augustine can, in effect, pick and choose which passages from the Bible to believe while still affirming the truth of the whole Bible, shows quite clearly that the use of metaphor or allegory--like we discussed before--makes it easy to change some aspects of a religious belief while retaining the basic form and name of the religion itself.

Augustine goes on to say that commands in the Bible must be interpreted also according to historical and cultural context, explaining that the more important aspect in an action is the motive, not the act itself. Therefore, if one follows the motive of the people in the Bible, the outcome in the current culture may be completely different than what the Bible describes (81-82). Again, Augustine is using his method of interpretation to change the literal meaning of Scriptural passages to fit what he wants it to mean. If he didn't use this method of contextual reference, he would have to find some other way to explain why he and other members of his culture did not follow every single law of the Hebrews. This ability to change laws' application is very useful for religions, because it doesn't devalue the whole religion just because certain laws aren't followed anymore. Similarly, Augustine discusses symbolic language in Scripture and describes how words sometimes have very different meanings in different passages and contexts. This further supports his tendency to allow Scripture's meanings to change. However, when he uses other passages to determine those meanings (like he recommends), I believe he is actually doing what he says he's doing--restoring the intended meaning to the passages(86-87).

While his intentions are to bring out the true and intended meaning of Scripture, Augustine is actually imposing his own opinions on the text. I personally support most of his reasoning behind the methods he uses, but I do realize that what he concludes is probably often not what was intended by the passages because he takes such a subjective instead of objective view of them.

Hope in the Midst of Destruction

As Professor Smith already pointed out in class, the article, "A Different Kind of Courage," by Charles Taylor (a book review of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathon Lear), describes the Crow people as going through a situation very similar to that of the Israelites during the sack of Jerusalem. In fact, I believe that the two situations are nearly identical with respect to religious hope, the only difference being that the Israelites have progressed to an even more desperate state than the Crow.

Just as Lear's book describes the Crow as completely losing their culture because the conquering Americans took away the basis of all their values (the coup). Everything the people used to celebrate had to do with increasing or defending their hunting territory, and in a reservation, territory was no longer an issue at all. Then, everything else became completely meaningless because their whole culture had revolved around it. In the same way, the Israelites' way of life totally disappeared after the Babylonians took over their city. Their society centered around their religion--their beliefs, their leaders, and their behavior (i.e. social and dining etiquitte). With the Babylonians' sack of Jerusalem, huge numbers of Isrealites were killed, and those who remained had no temple-related structure left to which to cling. They were so desperate just to survive that they resorted to all kinds of behaviors specifically prohibited in their books of law--even murder (of close family)!

Yet, remarkably, neither the Crow nor the Israelites (at the very least the writer of Lamentations), gave up hope completely. They had what Lear called "Radical Hope," because they hoped for something they couldn't understand, believed in something to come that was still fully unknown. For the Crow, it was Plenty Coups' dream that they would be able to transform their culture into something that would survive among the white men. For the Israelites, it was Jeremiah's conviction that God is faithful and would not abandon them forever (Lam. 3:23, 31). The difference between these two hopes is that Plenty Coups' hope relied upon the Crow themselves to bring it to completion. In order for them to survive as a people, they needed to make the effort to understand the white culture and adapt themselves. The Israelites, on the other hand, cried out repeatedly for God's mercy--for Him to do the work in saving them from their enemies.

I believe that the two responses differ in this respect because while the Crow still had their health and the ability to learn about the conquering culture, the Israelites had been completely demolished. Everything they stood for was gone, and even their food was almost gone. I'm not an expert on war tactics, so I don't know if it would've even been slightly possible that such a decimated group of people could have overcome such an opposition, but I do know that it's very, very unlikely. Therefore, the only hope that they could possibly have left was to rely on God's grace alone. And this decision was made even more natural by the fact that they believed that God's wrath had been the cause of their destruction in the first place, so if God started it, God could end it.

The Function of Allegory

Just this year I learned the difference between inductive and deductive Bible studies: while deductive studies enter a passage with a preconceived idea of its meaning, inductive studies allow the passage itself to determine its meaning (with help from historical context). The allegory which Origen lavishly uses in his commentary on Lamentations strikes me as the perfect example of a deductive study. He didn't approach the book with an "open mind," but rather he chose passages from it which supported his ideas of Christian theology and applied allegory in order to make the connections clearer. Allegories should be used with caution: too often, they reflect only the commentator's ideas, obscuring the author's intended meaning. The only time allegory is an appropriate method of Bible interpretation is when the author wrote in allegory, and in such cases the connections are obvious to most people. In a video about Bible interpretation that I watched last fall, Dr. Kenneth Bailey uses the story of the prodigal son to illustrate this point. Almost anyone who reads or hears the story (a son asks for his inheritance early so he can go off on his own, only to squander all he's worth and come back years later begging his father to let him be a servant in his own house) and knows anything about God is able to see that the father represents the merciful God who forgives his children (the son) in spite of their sins (Luke 15:11-32).

On the other hand, Origen's interpretations of Lamentations imply that Jerusalem symbolizes the soul, and the destruction and captivity of Jerusalem symbolize demons (73). While this is a somewhat plausible suggestion, it is far from fact and is at most an implicit addition to the primary meaning of the text. Jeremiah, the author of Lamentations, wrote the book soon after Jerusalem--the real city--was destroyed, so one should assume that when he writes that Jerusalem was destroyed, his main intention is to say that the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Origen himself even uses historical context in his interpretations, but he believes that the scripture has two levels and that the concrete fact of the first level is superceded by the deeper meaning he discovers with his "laws of elevated interpretation," or allegory (78). I argue that as soon as one enters the realm of allegory, all things become uncertain. Any conclusions drawn by this method depend more on the interpreter than on the text. Dr. Bailey demonstrated this in the aforementioned video by using an elaborate allegory on the Gospels to "prove" that Jesus was a Nazi: you can make almost anything work by saying, "A symbolizes B, and C symbolizes D, so clearly..." I think that some of Origen's conclusions have a very shaky foundation. They fit well with Christian theology, but they have little to do with Lamentations itself. For example, he likens the "multitude of people" in Jerusalem to "theoretical insights" and the "multitude of gentiles" to "good works," explaining that when the people left the city, Jerusalem became without the Word and lost its distinction as the greatest city (75). Christianity teaches that the Word is very important, so with this logic, such a statement makes sense; however, it has very little to do with the actual passage because it is so allegorical.

When allegories are not intended by the author of a text, the best they can do is to illustrate an idea that has already been proven elsewhere, keeping in mind that the allegory itself is a human device used for individual purposes that does not necessarily reflect the real meaning of the text. Looked at in this way, Origen's commentaries are helpful for Christians who have considerable knowledge of scripture because they unite concepts from different parts of the Bible into coherent theology. However, they must not be taken to have arisen completely out of Lamentations, but rather out of Origen's mind (with the influence of both Lamentations and other books of the Bible).

Paleolithic Eden

I decided to start a new post, because the idea I just had--as radical as it is--needs more space than just a paragraph at the end of my last post. I admit that what I'm about to write is probably of little or no relevance and relies heavily on interpreting Genesis figuratively, but it could potentially connect the Genesis story to Paleolithic people.

To begin with, I think that Guthrie's basic claims in The Nature of Paleolithic Art could very well be true based on the evidence and the arguments he provides. And those claims are that Paleolithic humans, living in the Ice Ages, were very attuned to the details of the natural world and not religious. Once the climate warmed and food became more available, they settled into more stable and larger communities, and their artwork became more and more symbolic, or religoius.

However, Guthrie also pointed out some very interesting observations about the Paleolithic people that distinguish them from later humans: 1) They did not murder or make war; 2) They worked together and respected each other; 3) They did not get sick with infectuous diseases; 4) I already said this, but they show no signs of having a religion. What I find so interesting about these observations is that #1-3 are all Eden-like, meaning that if one were to design a utopia, they would be included.

1) I think this idea is the coolest one: obviously, before sin, humans did not commit murder. The first murder came in the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1-16), after the Fall. Since murder entered history with the beginning of communities and mystical thoughts, those mystical thoughts could be thought of as the knowledge from the Tree of Knowledge that the forbidden fruit came from. Perhaps God didn't want people to try to seek knowledge on their own through mysticism (i.e. their own minds/imaginations) but preferred that they stick to what he had decided to reveal to them in the physical world around them. And when they started believing in spiritual forces, he had to banish them from "Eden" (a.k.a. the sinless state of being/society) and this is when all the murder and things started happening.

2) Guthrie says that the Paleolithic hunters would've had to have extremely good cooperation in order to survive, and this implies good relationships with one another based on respect for each other's specific contributions to the band. In Genesis, God gives the man a woman as his "partner" and "helper" (2:18-20), which implies a similar cooperation.

3) This point doesn't fit so well with Genesis since diseases aren't mentioned at all in the chapters we read, but the idea is slightly reminiscent of God's punishment for Eve. He tells her that he will increase her pain in childbirth, almost like he could increase her pain by giving her a disease. I won't carry this analogy any further, though. ;)

4) Although, like I said, the Paleolithic people didn't seem to have a religion, it depends on the definition of religion. They didn't really have symbolism or a set of written morals or anything like that, but they did have community. And, in the Genesis story, God walks with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (3:8). He's part of the natural world for them, so they don't need to get spiritual in order to find God. That would explain why (if the Paleolithic people are what Adam and Eve symbolize in Genesis) they are such empiricists.

So... to summarize how I think Genesis could (maybe) explain Paleolithic history:
A. God creates humans (humans evolve) and he is empirically present in their lives.
1. They live in harmony with God and each other.
2. They don't sin or have physical health problems.
B. Humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge (they start dreaming up spiritual causes for things)
1. God punishes them by removing them from his physically discernable presence.
2. They sin even more and have to continue using this spirituality to find God again.

Empiricism Then and Now

In Part I of The Nature of Paleolithic Art, which we read for Monday, R. Dale Guthrie tried to explain that Paleolithic Art is not religious, and although some of his arguments made a lot of sense, there was still the burning question (for me): Why would those ancient humans draw so much if it wasn't religious? I have very little experience with art myself, so I couldn't think of any proclaimed benefits of art besides it making people "feel good" by engaging their creativity, etc. But I couldn't imagine how the drawing of such repetetive images of large animals and the like would satisfy their desire for creativity. Why didn't they draw something different for a change?

In Part II, Guthrie found, in my opinion, a very good reason: this art was not just a hobby, it was part of an intense lifestyle that demanded skill and quick thinking just to survive day to day. Because of their "frequent life-or-death decision making," these early humans had to perfect their skills of observation and reasoning if they were going to succeed at catching prey. This is why people of all artistic skill levels practiced drawing in remarkable detail the animals on which they depended for food and survival. (419) This "look-draw-look-draw" (433) method forced them to be very attentive to all the details of the physical world around them--from the coloration of the animals to their characteristic movements to how they look at a distance (the 3D images from Lascaux Cave). Not until life became easier with the improved climate of the Holocene did symbolic images start to appear in cave art. According to Guthrie, as people started to live in bigger communities sustained by this better climate, individualism and abstract ideas began to emerge, replacing the previous preoccupation with the natural world. (419-20)

Upon reading Noelle's latest post, I noticed an interesting connection between her quote from Karen Armstrong and Guthrie's point about Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Armstrong is quoted as saying, "One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. ... One of [this pov's] consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the 'spiritual'..." This sounds exactly like what the Paleolithic peoples were doing before the Holocene--examining and recording the physical world without any concern for the metaphysical. The difference is that the Paleolithic people were pre-religion and pre-spirituality while modern people are (according to Armstrong) post-religion and post-spirituality. Instead of "edit[ing] out" (Armstrong) the spiritual, the Paleolithic humans never had it in the first place because they hadn't yet moved on past the physical.

Guthrie raises another very interesting idea, saying that after life had improved in the Holocene, people came to expect survival instead of always expecting hardship. Yet, life is never perfect, so they still encountered some hard times. Guthrie proposes that because hardship had become the exception to the norm, people tried to find reasons for it and started looking for things to blame (418). Robin Marantz Henig's concept of agent detection (from last week) would agree with this interpretation, saying that humans look for reasons-- empirically verified or not--for everything (41). In Paleolithic times, only physical reasons were useful because all decisions had such immediate and severe consequences that any mystical ideas of cause and effect would quickly become evolutionarily extinct. In contrast, in the more "leisurely" times of the Holocene or, consequences were less essential to survival, allowing more room for mystical interpretations.

Yet, somehow, humans began to venture back toward empiricism, leading to the "scientific culture" (Armstrong) of modern centuries. One might think that with the entry of larger communities and eventually civilizations, life would only improve, but Guthrie asserts that humans were made for intimate, small groups (419), which might explain the origin of many of the problems that spawned a later return to empiricism over spirituality. Guthrie's speculation about physical and mental heal problems stemming from excessively large social groups may be over-the-top, but the fact remains that early humans DID live in small groups, and we DID evolve from them. Maybe the best thing to do is to return to the small hunter-gatherer groups of the ancient past, rejecting religion and technology in favor of campfires and javelins.

Religion from the Mind

In The Nature of Paleolithic Art, R. Dale Guthrie contends that the Paleolithic art that has been excavated by archaeologists shouldn't be interpreted merely on religious or symbolic grounds because it is such a tiny fragment of ancient peoples' art. He makes the point that although some art is religious, it's only part of the larger whole (10). According to Guthrie, we shouldn't think of Paleolithic peoples as so "mystically preoccupied" (10). He prefers to look at them as humans just like us--united through evolution (11). Our humanness is most exemplefied in our "shared rational ability" which allows us to see outside of ourselves and imagine other perspectives. Because we can thus see things objectively, we can have reason, which distinguishes us from other animals. (12-13)

Although Guthrie doesn't discuss religion very much in his book, the above statements provide some interesting implications about religion. As we've discussed in class, humans are the only species that seems to have a religion. If our ability to reason is also unique to humans, do reason and religion go together? Many people would say they don't, claiming that religion blinds people to their own common sense. For example, Richard Dawkins states that Catholic priests and monks are denying themselves their instincts to reproduce because they ignorantly obey an imagined God (The Selfish Gene). While it's true that some religious behaviors go against biological/evolutionary logic, this is not true of all. We've already established in class that religion can be beneficial to groups and individuals--it brings people together, promotes altruism, and gives people hope. Robin Marantz Henig addressed some of these benefits in the article, "Why Do We Believe?" from last week.

Our reading about Neanderthals earlier this week supports the idea that complex thoughts and highly developed minds brought about religion, although in that case it is cognitive fluidity rather than reason that is the main difference between human and animal brains. However, cognitive fluidity, or the ability to make connections between different areas of the brain and produce metaphors, is closely related with the ability to reason, or to see outside of oneself. This is because the connections involved in cognitive fluidity are what allow people to make analogies to things outside of themselves. Early humans could gain understanding of fellow humans and of the natural world through their rational abilities, and it is logical to think that they came to other conclusions as well--namely, the existance of spiritual beings. I believe we also discussed this idea briefly in class. The only other way I can think of religion originating is the way described in Genesis of God deliberately appearing to humans and telling them who he was. But if humans did come to the conclusion that there is a god through their rational thought, then either they're right and there is a god, or their reasoning led them astray to a mistaken conclusion. I realize that our systems of reasoning have been significantly changed/improved since then, but the fact remains that it may have been the very same process by which some people try to disprove religion that religion actually started.

This seems slightly ironic to me... if we're looking for the rationale behind the origin of religion yet are concentrating on the rational/scientific, i.e. physical, explanations, we're ignoring the whole spiritual aspect of religion. And that is not a small part, either; what is religion without the spiritual?