Religion is a countable noun that can be made plural: my religion, the religions of the world. It is also a mass noun denoting a general concept: religion in schools, the role of religion in the modern world. All religions, or certainly all the proselytising revealed religions such as the main branches of Christianity and Islam, seek to move from being just a religion towards filling the central concept and becoming religion, whether that be in a particular geographical area or universally. The free market in religion, just like the free market in goods and services, is driven by the ambition of the providers to achieve a monopoly. Again, as in a free market, the achievement of monopoly or a near monopoly usually leads to the damaging of the product as a complacent manufacturer cashes in on its success, and this in turn may lead to the re-opening of competition. Many schisms in the Christian religion are surely the attempt to bring back the energy and even the sense of fun that must have accompanied the early efforts of Christians to promote their faith as rebels against emperor worship in the Roman Empire.
Since religions are in competition, we should look at what they are offering to supply. What is the product? If all religions were to be erased today, what would we expect their successor systems to provide?
The four main functions of any religion are, in no particular order,
I feel that we need a kind of check list or comparative table to judge religions against each other on each of these parameters.
This is where religions win their most converts, including winning back lost souls, since this is where people are most vulnerable and open to accepting any kind of reassurance, even a flagrantly lying one. A fairy story of paradise to come may help to diminish pain now, as well as inspiring fanatics to fly planes into skyscrapers. A tale of divine justice and retribution may comfort someone who knows they have been harmed by a wicked enemy and balance their impotent anger. Take that, Hitler! Most of all, images of a loved child sitting beside God in paradise may carry a grieving parent through mental pain.
Awarding the points, Christianity and Islam score magnificently. They have by far the best medicine for the suffering, however fallacious. Reform Judaism is more rational, avoiding the easy sentimental answers, and therefore loses this contest. The oriental religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, do not offer immediate cheap reward either. Karma is less reassuring than paradise.
Weddings and baptisms, coronations and church festivals, this is the most visible aspect of many religions, especially those which have won the struggle to achieve monopoly or near monopoly status in a community. Christianity, having held its dominant position in the economically successful west for many centuries, has worked up a magnificent array of ceremonies as well as places to hold them. Above all, it has the music. Bach and Mozart may have won more people over to God-worship than Luther, since they offer something which is hard to imagine any ordinary person creating without divine inspiration. Secular humanism, atheism’s closest match to religion, is trying hard to make up ground here, but it does not have the buildings or the music yet.
We do not know how far an animal is conscious of anything outside itself and its immediate environment. Does a dog wonder where it came from? Is a gazelle afraid not just of the pain of dying but also of the mystery of what lies after death? Common sense suggests not, since we can be sure that animals do not have language with which to create a shared consciousness, a culture.
Human beings, however, most certainly do have this shared consciousness, and it has made us embarrassingly aware of our insignificance and impermanence. There are and have been many millions of us, and we are only one among millions of species of living beings on board a small planet orbiting a small star in a galaxy of millions of stars which we now know to be only one of millions of galaxies. Faced with this smallness, there is an understandable hunger for something which would make sense of the contrast between the importance we attach to ourselves in our self-awareness and the triviality of our lives which we have to acknowledge as we look around. We may feel we need an explanation in order to motivate ourselves to continue living and enquiring, and so come up with the ludicrous idea that the earth was “designed for us.”
Generally there is no difficulty in distinguishing good from evil behaviour. Good is “do as you would be done by” and evil is anything else. That accounts for about ninety percent of all morality. In most of the remnant, the moral dilemma amounts to “should I tell tales on my pals?” or “where do my loyalties lie?” That leaves a minute residue in which the good outcome may be obscure and where an ordinary person would do well to think carefully or seek advice before acting.
Morality is where most religions go wrong and wreak their greatest damage. Religious leaders emerge who are able to claim authority through force of personality, and they invoke a metaphor of family discipline. “If a child is naughty, its parent will inflict punishment. We are suffering a drought/earthquake/flood. Clearly our heavenly father is cross with us.” From this the shamanic leader will announce that the community has been naughty in not being respectful enough of the God, and the priest and will demand more praise and more sacrifice. Thus we get the first commandment being not “Be nice to other people” but “Be nice to God”. Gods have to be extravagantly praised, and the only evidence that they like it is that they refrain from inflicting earthquakes and floods or defeats in war.
No established religion comes out well under this heading. They all develop touchstones of morality which have little practical value, and their competitiveness has caused and will no doubt continue to cause great cruelty towards “sinners” and unbelievers. Their suppression of free enquiry and demand for unquestioning faith, especially from children, often amounts to child abuse. However, there is in the Jewish Talmudic tradition at least a tendency to allow morality to become a matter for discussion. On the other hand Jews are especially encumbered with ludicrous arbitrary rules on diet and behaviour. Christianity is to be commended for one of the strands of Christ’s teaching, the instruction to “turn the other cheek”, i.e. to reject revenge as the basis for a system of morality. There is also the non-violence characterising the best forms of Buddhism as well as Ghandi’s movement. But not many Christians make “turning the other cheek” central to their personal morality.
So I come back to where I started: in spite of having sung in a church choir for fifteen years, thank God I’m an atheist.