Religion ≠ Belief

Dan Harper briefly addresses what I think is among the more pivotal points about religion in the context of debate about its value, here… namely, that religion doesn’t necessarily mean “belief” (about God, the supernatural, etc… or about objective reality at all, per se).

In fact, I think that one of the tasks religion is most poorly suited to is forming a system of beliefs about objective reality.

Dan points out historical cases where religions exist with very little in the way of unified beliefs, but implies that Western religion might be irreversibly married to such. I’m not so sure. There are liberal and moderate Christians for whom this is not necessarily the case, for whom a particular humanitarian impulse is more important than a creed. Likely this is the case with other Western religions.

It occurs to me that I could ask anyone interested in the question – religious or irreligious – liberal or conservative – to consider a set of premeses about where religion performs poorly and where it performs well (judged not by efficiency at a task, but by desirability of the outcome), and perhaps have their considerations less skewed by religious or irreligious prejudices than might otherwise be the case.

So, that is what I will do now. It being beyond the scope of a blog post to formulate an absolute metric for religious performance, I will instead present my suggested premeses in relative terms. First, I will relate each area of performance relative to the others by ranking them in order from least effective to most effective. Next, I will relate each area of performance relative to the performance of non-religious methods for similar or equivalent purpose using the signs -, +, & =. Those tasks for which religion is less well-suited (at least at the present) than non-religous methods will receive a ‘-’. Those for which it is better suited will receve a ‘+’. Where there is no appreciable difference, I will indicate this with an “=”.

Remember, I am asking you to conisder this with an eye toward gaining your assent for my evaluation. It is, of course, your perogative to disagree. I hope you will do so no more so than you are compelled to by your own experience with the matter. But, to whatever extent you agree or disagree, I would love to see what relative strengths and weaknesses you ultimately identify. Please feel free to leave a comment here. Ideally, this would make a nice blog ‘meme’, with at least some of the respondents linking and pinging back to this post.

A final note. I use the term ‘religion’ broadly and generally. That means I am taking into account not only how well Southern Baptists do a thing, but how well Unitarian Universalists, Buddhists & Mormons do it. I hope you will do the same.

Without further ado – and in order from “worst” to “best” – my subjective opinion is that religion serves the following tasks relatively thus, from poorest to best:

Understanding objective reality (-)
Honestly representing its own perspectives (-)
Governing the State (-)
Preserving the social status quo (-)*
Avoiding excess, particularly of self-certainty (-)
Resolving conflict between persons of culturally disparate perspectives (-)
Understanding philosophical truth (-)
Providing comfort or aid to those afflicted with mental illnesses (-)
Establishing a system of ethics (-)
Understanding human nature (-)
Providing comfort or aid to those afflicted with mild personality disorders (=)
Resolving conflict between persons of culturally similar perspecives (=)
Providing emotional comfort/aid to those otherwise healthy, but experiencing grief (=)
Enriching the general culture through art & literaure (=)
Creating an impetus for social change (+) *
Providing physical comfort/aid to those in need of it (+)**
Serving as a cornerstone for stable communities and families (+)***

* Again, I am discussing not the efficiency with which the task is carried out, but the desirability of the results. I find that religion, when it is involved in preserving a social status quo, creates an undesirable result compared to other tasks it carries out and compared to how other methods might carry this task out, because the religious, unfortunately, have a tendency to be attached to undesirable aspects of the status quo. On the other hand, when religion provides an impetus for social change, the reuslts tend to be more favorable. Here I have in mind the end of the British slave trade, abolition in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., and others. I do recognize that the Temperance/Prohibition movement was also a product of religion and that the results in this category are mixed.
**This includes providing access to standard medical treatment for physical ailments, but does not include directly healing or treating those ailments
*** James Dobson’s advice on family matters notwithstanding… Update: Or Phyllis Schlafly’s

Ok… One more item. Of this list, I think that religion is irredeemably bad at understanding objective reality, governing the state. The rest of the items that I listed early in the list and with the ‘-’ sign, are ones where I believe religion has enough room for improvement that it may one day be at least as successful in those tasks as other methods. Of course, even where I think religion already does the best job of a thing, I have no doubt that there is room for improvement. The biggest obstacle, to my mind, that might prevent religions from improving on these scores is fundamentalism. Fundamentalist thinking (found within and outside the fundamentalist church, but not ubiquitous in either place) denies the need for improvement in any area of its own religion (while being quick to find the log in the eye of the neighbor’s religion). It is precisely this characteristic, above and beyond all others, of fundamentalist religion, which causes it to be more susceptible to dangerous tendencies than moderate religon.

Again, I plead with those reading this post not to let it go unanswered. I would dearly love to see a larger conversation about the merits and drawbacks of religion that don’t start with the flawed notion that religion is as small as a person’s mythological “beliefs”.