Human understanding requires certain essential categories: these include time, space, number, cause, action, substance and character1. These categories could be likened to a frame that encloses thought:
Johnny (a character) sees some apples (a substance) in a tree (a space). He is hungry (a cause) and decides to pick (an action) some (a number of) apples today (a time).
We can see straight away that these categories are insufficient. Something is clearly missing here:
Should Johnny pick all the apples today? If he does that, some of them will be wasted, and none will be left for tomorrow.
The additional element we have added here is "intelligence". Intelligence adds strategy to thought, and makes it more useful.
Where did this intelligence come from? The origin must be either individual experience (Johnny worked it out for himself), or social experience (Johnny learned it from somebody else).
Where intelligence arises from individual experience, its origin is self-explanatory:
I'm doing it this way today, because that's how it worked for me yesterday (learned behavior)
Where intelligence is grounded in social experience, it may be that:
We do it this way, because we know that's the best way to do it (collective experience)
We do it this way, we're not sure why, but it corresponds to our collective belief (tradition)
We do it this way, because we are forced to (coercion)
Where intelligence is social in origin, it doesn't matter if Johnny (or anybody else) understands why things are done in a certain way. However, rationality - by which I mean the conformance between an action or belief and the reasoning that led to it - is not equally distributed across these three categories of social experience.
Taking the four categories of individual and social experience together:
LEARNED BEHAVIOR and COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE are rational. Indeed, they may be considered to define rationality itself (although some philosophers give this kind of rationality the prefix “instrumental”, to allow for other kinds).
TRADITION contains both rational and irrational elements. Often, conformance that existed in the past - between an action or belief and the reasoning that led to it - has disappeared in the present: the reasoning may now be invalid, or it may simply have been forgotten.
COERCION, from the point of view of the victim, is irrational2. However, coercion does not define irrationality - there are many other paths to that destination!
So - how does religious thought fit into this picture?
Religious rites and myths are universal within human societies, so they clearly substantiate some human need, whether that need be individual or social. In addition, all religions must have a hold on reality, and be capable of expressing it - otherwise they would not exist; they would die out along with their followers.
I contend that religious thought is irrational, but lies outside category of coercion: it therefore lies exclusively within the category of tradition.3 The question, then, is this: why do irrational beliefs always become embedded in traditional social experience?
The answer, I think, is that religious belief substantiates a human longing for meaning that lies outside the domain of rational discourse. This longing for meaning is widely shared by the members of all communities, whether they are generally perceived as religious communities or not, but its outward form (its substantiation) is communicated between them by means of rituals and myths. These rituals and myths together must be embedded in a tradition to ensure that they are capable of being passed on from one generation of members to the next.
In summary, to propagate successfully as tradition, a religious belief must have the following properties:
It must satisfy a human need (the quest for meaning) that lies outside the domain of purely rational discourse
It must conform to the prevailing social reality
It must be expressed in rituals and myths (its substantiation) that convey meaning to its believers
At this point I will only add that in all religions the quest for meaning tends to be fixed, its substantiation evolves very slowly, if at all, but the social reality that overlays both can change very quickly. As will be seen, the viability of any religion is partly determined by the rate at which these properties change.
In future posts, I will examine two religions - Christianity and the Religion of Progress - and attempt to map their trajectory onto each of these properties.
Thank you, Aristotle.
Of course, to a perpetrator of political violence, coercion may be entirely rational.
Note that this precludes the possibility of so-called “secular religions”, which are political in character, and therefore intrinsically linked to methods of coercion. So, for example, communism should be classified as a political ideology, not as a secular religion.