To Dr Abrar Hasan

Rethinking Religiosity and Fundamentalism

I assure that I am unarmed and harmless, and the considerable geographical distance between us is only one of the reasons you are safe from me. I am a tolerant man (at least in a sense; see my penultimate paragraph). However, I have read your piece attempting to redefine religiosity, and do not agree with it. In essence you are claiming that we are all religious beings. My counter-thesis is that we are not, and that your contention can be valid only if we eliminate the useful and accepted distinction between “religious” and “non-religious”.

Some personal history may help here. Bear with me, and you will see the relevance of this approach. About twenty-five years ago I attended a public lecture delivered by Lloyd Geering. You Canadians will not be familiar with Professor Geering, but he is very well-known here in New Zealand as a theologian and “intellectual” (always a suspicious term). Back in the 1960s he became a national household name when he was excommunicated from the Presbyterian church for publicly rejecting the bodily resurrection of Christ and postulating a more radical, psychological concept of God, without supernatural elements. To Geering, God was a human creation. Many labeled him an atheist, but the way he saw it, God was no less important for being imagined; God was a valuable myth.

The audience for his lecture was made up almost entirely of religious people of one kind or another. Christians who considered themselves progressive were there to support him, and the more conservative, literalist Christians wanted to ask him some hard questions. During question time after the talk, one of the latter group stood up and asked, with a kink in his eyebrow, “Do you believe in divine miracles?” Professor Geering had no hesitation. Clearly, he was ready for such questions. “Yes, I do,” he said with confidence. “Everywhere I look, I see miracles. Childbirth is a miracle that occurs every day. So is the recurring wonder of spring growth. I see life itself as a miracle.” He continued in this moving, poetic vein, scanning the natural world for events that most of us cherish. He is quite an articulate speaker and writer, and his answer was delivered with such assurance that he seemed to charm almost everyone. Even the questioner, who began quite truculently, seemed to be won over. I looked around the room, and could see almost everyone nodding sagely, as if to say, “Yes, he’s hit on a profound truth.”

But I was most dissatisfied with this answer. I made no objection, mainly because I was young, modest, diffident, undecided about my beliefs, and somewhat awed by the well-respected professor (these days I am middle-aged, diffident and modest; I have also learnt that theologians, no matter what their reputations, know nothing). To me, Geering’s answer was an evasive and useless piece of sophistry. He had taken the word “miracle” and used its different applications to manipulate the intention of the question. “Miracle”, like many words, has a primary and a secondary meaning. The questioner had used it in its primary sense, but Geering had knowingly answered according to its secondary sense.

This kind of manipulation of words is common with people who want to put across a particular philosophy or point of view. I believe that you are manipulating certain words in order to persuade the readers to accept a new way of thinking. I disagree with other aspects as well, but time restricts me from commenting on every statement I would challenge. You begin by claiming that you “are devoutly religious”, which is an engaging opening, designed to set the audience up to accept the unorthodox definition that follows. The trick is that, of course, you are presumably not devoutly religious in a primary sense at all, just as Geering did not believe in primary miracles. You are devoutly religious only according to the quirky definition of religion you proceed to explain.

The problem is that I do not accept the series of parallels you go on to outline. Therefore, I do not accept your unconventional definition of religion. It is true that we cannot always say with certainty what is a religion and what is not (I am referring to religion in a primary sense, not as in “Basketball is his religion”, which is clearly secondary). For example, a friend of mine, whose beliefs I respect enormously, considers Marxism an actual religion. I say that it is like a religion in many ways, but I do not consider it to be a religion in a primary sense, but he does. “Religion” is not a perfectly clear term. Nevertheless, it is a useful word despite its occasional vagueness, and in most cases we can distinguish between religious and non-religious ways of thinking. Much of your thesis is devoted to willfully eroding the differences. Words like “religion” are like colour words. “Blue” is in most cases a useful term, even though a certain hue may, for example, be close to green.

Let us consider some of the evidence you offer. You say, first of all, that all beliefs ultimately are based on faith. I have heard this claim before, but I do not accept it. You do not state (but seem to imply) that even “rational” thought can ultimately be reduced to axioms which we assume do not need explanation. In mathematics, for example, we accept without question that if a=b and b=c, then a=c. This is axiomatic. However, accepting this as true has nothing whatsoever to do with faith. This is simply not what we call faith.

I find your expression “the blind faith that non-religious sources are the only sources of knowledge” most peculiar. It is not that secular people reject any kind of thinking that is meaningful and makes sense. If religious discourse makes any useful and testable claims, let it go ahead and make them, and we secular people will assess them on their merits. If we tend not to pay any attention to religious claims, it is only because in our experience we have not found them useful or correct. Your objection to secular thought here is similar to the accusation that alternative health practitioners make against conventional medicine: that the latter rejects any alternative treatments. Not at all; alternative practitioners are free at any time to demonstrate that they have something to contribute to medical knowledge and treatment…but conventional empiricism always beats hearsay and anecdote.

Secularism, you say, has “its God and its Prophets and its priests”. No, it does not…at least, not in the primary sense. This is a crucial difference. You see, religion has these figures, in a quite literal, primary and generally understood sense. You concede that secular writers “do not claim to be perfect” and you are right. That is why they are not prophets.

I use the term “secularism” for its convenience in this reply, but no such belief really exists. This is a further manipulation of language. You attack all “isms” and include “secularism” as if it is a belief. This ignores the nature of modern thinking. Insofar as “secularism” exists, it is not so much a belief as a rejection of an unnecessary belief from the past. We non-religious people do not replace religious belief, but discard it as useless – unless it can come up with something meaningful, of course. But I am not holding my breath.

You seem to misunderstand the nature of probability. We can reason inductively by considering actual events and analysing the way they occur. Based on this experience, we can make reasonable predictions about what will happen when a similar combination of circumstances occurs again in the future. Consider weather forecasting. Meteorology is partly the science of looking at events in the atmosphere and predicting likely upcoming weather by examining the frequency of causes and effects. It is a science which has made considerable strides in just the past generation. When I was young I seldom paid much attention to weather reports, but these days they usually have it fairly right – even when predicting weather long-term. Like any science, it never makes any claim of infallibility, but it is the best tool we have. Now, in what way does faith play a role here? You say that “the probabilistic basis will need to be accepted on faith”. How? Not in any way I can see, because the absence of any claim to infallibility is the very opposite of faith.

I understand you when you write that your use of “fundamental” is implied by your earlier use of “ultimate”. However, I rejected the way you used “ultimate” and consequently I reject your related use of “fundamental”.

“The God of capitalism”. Oh dear! Are we to associate any belief with one of your invented gods? When we believe, even tentatively, that a certain set of actions leads in general to a desired and beneficial outcome, is that to be called a religion? Really? In a primary sense? I wrote earlier that aspects of socialism resemble religion; that is, real religion, as commonly understood, and in a primary sense. It has aspects of the mystical about it; it possesses a dogma which makes promises that it cannot deliver; its leaders often are surrounded by faithful believers resembling priests; it makes predictions, especially about a future utopia; it invents new “truths”. I suggest you read “Animal Farm” if you have not already done so...or take your next holiday in sunny Pyongyang. Now, it is possible to say that someone’s religion is capitalism if they advocate an extreme and uncompromising form of it, but only in the sense that it is possible to say that someone’s religion is basketball; that is, in a secondary sense.

The difference is that socialism’s resemblance to religion is pervasive and inescapable. It is a part of its very essence. This is not so with what we call capitalism. As I write this, I am on the fiftieth floor of an apartment building in downtown Singapore. I am looking down on what I believe is now the busiest port in the world. I can see hundreds of ships and thousands of containers – despite the fact that we are technically in a recession. This is, if you want to label it something – capitalism in action. Yet “capitalism” is a little like “secularism”. There doesn’t really need to be any such term. The Singaporeans probably don’t even call themselves capitalists. They just do what comes naturally, and have a government which carries out policies that allow all this commerce to happen. If we call this a religion, then we have manipulated the word “religion” out of useful existence.

I get the impression that you are no more religious than I am, and I see that in your article you are, a little cheekily, just “flying a kite”. I imagine that you may be tempted to say that I have taken your piece of whimsy too seriously. However, I regard your use of terms like “religion”, “faith”, “fundamental” and “-ism” misleading, and that matters to me. In criticising your piece, I am not wearing the hat of a “philosopher” but rather of a humble speaker of English. I do not like the meanings of useful words being diluted or manhandled for persuasive ends.

You recommend that we tolerate all faiths. On the contrary – we should tolerate NO faiths; faith as a substitute for reason will not do. It depends, of course, on what is meant by “tolerance”. Naturally, we should tolerate any belief in the sense that we must grant everyone the right to believe whatever they wish. That is why you will always be safe around me. Nevertheless, it is hopelessly naïve to tolerate all beliefs in the sense that we consider them all worthy. For example, I consider that most of what you have written here is nonsense. However, who am I to take your life because of mere words? I am no fundamentalist – either in the primary or even the secondary sense.

If you want to find out more about that over-praised New Zealand “intellectual”, Lloyd Geering, with whom you have a natural affinity, you can find him here: http://dsof.blogtown.co.nz/2009/03/26/the-lloyd-geering-reader/

Peter Joyce