I’m going to go through this a lot quicker than the subject maybe deserves; it won’t be as comprehensive or straightforward as the title suggests. Anyways, this post is part of an ongoing series…
It’s that… the whole point is this isn’t something to be settled on, but something that continuously unfolds or emerges through life living. So for now I just want to cite a few passages from people who helped develop my thinking about religion belief.
Everything I think and believe in some way gets back to William James. Which isn’t to say my ideas always come from James… here’s something he wrote to a friend about his work on Varieties of Religious Experience [Letters of William James, II, 27. To Miss Frances R. Morse.]:
… the problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my “class”) “experience” against “philosophy” as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life — I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world’s meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean the creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt is my religious act.
The two main lessons I take from James are that everything must come from or at least refer back to experience (rather than abstract principles or absolute law) and that the act of dealing with experience in that way – learning through it, improving our knowledge and ideas — can itself be the highest purpose of life… a “religious act.”
Like James, this is my religion. This is what I’m talking about when I talk about “the love of learning” and “thinking alive.” These aren’t just sort of profound things that occured to me in the shower, marketing slogans, or concepts that I use to cut a more intellectual-looking figure. These are references to my beliefs that I struggled for years, the old-fashioned way — not just on an intellectual level but on an emotional, socially-conscious level as well — to work out.
(Almost all of my writing in some way represents or elaborates these ideas. Check out the Essays page and look for the posts marked with 3 or 4 stars; those penetrate the deepest into my beliefs… most recently, Personal Moral Codes, Creative Philosophy, and Exceptions to Every Rule and Rules for Every Exception.)
Along with James I have to mention Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Dewey supplies the most appropriate passages (that I can think of at the moment) to use here.
In A Common Faith, Dewey made a distinction between religion, religions, and the religious. We have tendency to talk about “religion” but that is something impossible to pin down — not to mention the confusion caused by lumping everything from virgin sacrifices to the love of learning under a single heading.
Dewey argued that the most general sense of the religious (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary) as “recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship,” is compatible with science and in many ways actually at odds with belief in the supernatural.
It isn’t “religion” that causes problems but belief in the supernatural at the expense of real experience:
A body of beliefs and practices that are apart from the common and natural relations of mankind must, in the degree in which it is influential, weaken and sap the force of the possibilities inherent in such relations. Here lies one aspect of the emancipation of the religious from religion.
