“Come hither, my boy, and tell me what thou seest there.”
“A fool tangled in a religious snare.”
–WILLIAM BLAKE.
It is 8:30 A.M. on a workday and I’m sitting at my usual table at the Starbucks on Broadway and 108th Street in Manhattan, not far from “Labyrinth” books and the local university campus. I am the kind of guy you wouldn’t notice – which is fine by me, since it is easier to observe others when they don’t see YOU. I am wearing the uniform of the urban graduate student or young faculty member: light blue shirt, faded khaki pants, sensible shoes, messenger bag. I look like I can use a haircut and I seem to be sporting the regulation unshaven chin. My glasses are the tiny and rectangular type that might be taken to signal my vaguely European-Leftist sympathies, as does my peace button and the faded “Amnesty International” patch on my bag. I am sipping some designer coffee and reading the “Times,” minding my own business, when I notice a guy who comes into the coffee shop and hands out flyers to the sleepy-eyed and eager beavers alike, as they stand on line for their morning brews.
It is not unusual in this city to have people hand you pamphlets (religious, political, commercial, as the case may be) at intersections or other public places, so I take it in stride when the guy – who seems equally non-descript and is bound to be a postgraduate in philosophy – strolls up to me and hands me one of these “advertisements.” Before discussing this advertisement, it may be worthwhile to quote the entire text:
“Do you have feelings of lonelyness, or a sense of guilt and fear deep inside your heart?”
I am sufficiently intrigued by the headline to keep reading.
“Do you ever wonder about the purpose of life?”
Yes, on occasion.
“Many people are trying to find answers to these feelings. [I wonder whether we need to find “answers” to “feelings.”] THE ANSWER TO YOUR PROBLEMS IS MISS ANDREWS – READER AND ADVISOR. The religious holy woman [and] healer, God’s messenger who guarantees to heal the sick and ailing, to remove all suffering and bad luck from your body. She will call your enemies by name and tell you who to keep away from. [I’m pretty good at figuring that much out for myself.] She is a religious woman who will show you with your own eyes how she will remove sorrow, sickness and pain, and all bad luck. What your eyes see, your heart must believe. The touch of her hand will heal you. She has God-given power to heal by prayer. Are you sick? Are you suffering? Do you have bad luck?”
“See this gifted lady today and be rid of them. She guarantees to reuinte the separated and solemnly swears to heal the sick, and help all who come to her. She will remove the evil spirits.”
There follows an address and telephone number and (yes, you guessed it!) a website too.
In the middle of New York city, in the twenty-first century, this obvious fraud is able to prey on the gullible and stupid, which is probably most of us. She is clearly “capitalizing” – in every sense of the word – on the naive human hope that “spirits” and “magic” may be real, and may operate in human affairs. She is making money off of people’s desire to re-establish connections with loved-ones who have passed away, usually so as to assuage their own guilt.
I wonder how many of my fellow sophisticated Manhattanites, in their power suits, wielding tiny cell phones, with wires dangling out of their ears, carrying very flat laptops in very flat attache cases, regularly consult Ms. Andrews. After all, Nancy Reagan liked to call on her astrologer and look at how far she got her “Ronny.”
This “gotham soothsayer” (I couldn’t resist that line, but any headline writer for the Post is welcome to use it) can afford to pay for an office on Broadway and, very likely, the Mercedes parked in front of it. But then, is there much difference between her customers and the people crowding into the local Synagogue, Mosque or Church to seek comfort and understanding, yet only to find the silence and indifference of a God who is, if not dead, at least on a very long vacation? If there is a difference, then what is it? How would I define it? What is religion? Why do people need it?
My feelings on this subject have shifted somewhat in recent years. I have gone from an utter and complete hostility to religious belief and suppressed contempt for anyone who expressed even mildly religious feelings, to a certain respectfulness in my attitude towards religious believers and belief. In what follows, I wish to ask what religion is about, but also why we need it, if we do, and whether we can do without it.
Why are we, as a species, burdened with this common instinct to suspend disbelief and disregard the powers of reason in a seemingly futile effort to fill the universe with magical forces and/or God or gods? Will we ever outgrow this “childishness” (Freud)? Is it childishness? Does it distract us from the worldly concerns with social justice (Marx) that should occupy us? Is it merely a way of disguising envy and hatred (Nietzsche) under a cloak of “concern” and “love”? These doubts expressed by the thinkers called the “Masters of Suspicion” by Paul Ricoeur, have now become pervasive in Western culture. Everyone is a bit cynical about religion now. Should we be?
For most educated Westerners, even if they are too polite to say it, the “gotham soothsayer” and the Pope are on roughly the same level, and so is the local rabbi or muslim cleric or the used car salesperson. In the words of my landlord, “They’re all full of shit.”
I am aware that there are contemporary scientific accounts of reality that are compatible with religious belief. I know that important scientists have held religious tenets. Highly intelligent and articulate people hold religious views and are accounted among the faithful. I am sometimes (and I use the word deliberately and ironically) “mystified” by this: Do such people believe all the mythical stuff? The “little star in Bethlem” kind of stuff? They can’t. Not at this point in history. Do they have to? What does one have to believe to be religious?
I am beginning to think that actual belief in the myths is not required.
If religion is merely reflective of the knowledge that any sensitive person has, eventually, that life is fleeting and transitory, that each of us is involved in something infinitely greater than him- or herself and much more important than any of us can ever hope to be individually; and most of all, that each person’s life is somehow connected to every other person’s story – if these sorts of insights are what religion is really “about,” then its basis is merely “psychological,” so that even if all of this mystical insight is true, this says nothing about the universe per se.
The problem with this conclusion is, of course, that science is also merely “psychological” too; it reveals a world or an empirical reality that is only “phenomenal,” that is, science can only tell us about reality as apprehended by creatures with our cognitive faculties in a way amenable to handling by us. There are, according to some theories, as many as eleven dimensions, but this notion is literally incomprehensible to us because it is inconceivable by us, it cannot be “pictured” by beings with our kinds of minds, which accounts for many of our difficulties with grasping quantum mechanics. We think in images and metaphors, in stories, and the universe may be far too protean and complex an entity, too difficult a story, to be graspable by our limited faculties in its own terms. At best, we get a fragmented and distorted image in our stories, in our theories and our science, in our cosmologies – even in our arts.
I know that I will die. People I love will die. Pain will be part of my life always. I know that much of this makes no rational or moral sense. I know that I cannot change the most important things in my life, the deck of cards that I have been given, but I can change much and must strive every day, in what is perhaps a losing effort, to do just that.
I sense the horror of so many human lives, the presence of evil and its effects in the world. I also feel elated sometimes. Among other occasions, for instance, when I walk into this Starbucks in the morning and get a smile from the young woman behind the counter with the beautiful eyes and perfect breasts, suddenly life is worth living. Mozart’s music balances the news from Iraq, but in the end everything adds to the bewilderment: Why be elated or sad? Does any of it really matter in the absence of subjects to whom it may matter? If not, does that matter?
Nothing I have read on this subject has stayed with me like George Santayana’s phrase that religion is the “love of life in the consciousness of impotence.” If religion is a balm for our wounds and disappointments in life and if the danger of intolerance that can result from religious belief can be offset by the message of love and acceptance conveyed by most religious ethics, then perhaps ALL of the great religions may be said to be “true,” at least according to a pragmatist conception of truth, because they serve human purposes – despite their frankly mythic or poetic nature, exactly as scientific theories do.
Is it possible, then, to “love life in the consciousness of impotence”?
