Religion

History

Early Evolution of Religious Forms

IP:

"The most foundational spiritual paradigm is animism, often run together with shamanism where the divinity and the participant are radically immanent. Just as the ostensive is the radical presence of sign and signifier, the shaman participates ecstatically in the divine, with no mediation between the god and himself—man is his own high priest. The shaman carries out a specific, often expiatory function in archaic societies, which are usually animistic. Under animism, nature itself is charged with the divine presence; divine will pervades all of nature, including man. This paradigm is expressed communally in totemism, where the totemic animal is the ancestor or tutelary deity of a group, but is still identified with that group, in some sense is that group.

From this paradigm we get the cultic. The ancestor, whether the totem, human ancestor, god, or all of these at once, is no longer radically present to the celebrant, but issues him commands that are religiously binding. These commands take the form of rites, which are performed in a pre-reflective and formalistic way—so formalist, in fact, that the liturgy may even no longer be understood by the celebrant, but still demand total fidelity to the literal word. These cultic religions are typified by the ancestor cult, the most well known of which in the West is the state cult of Rome, but which exists elsewhere such as in Shinto. And it is here, in the cultic paradigm, that we find cosmic maintenance.

Cosmic maintenance takes its purest form in the sacrificial offerings performed throughout the Indo-European world,5 particularly in the state cults. In performing the specialized sacrifice, the priests re-enact the creation myth and thereby participate in the divine. If the rites are not performed just so, as a perfect microcosm of creation itself, creation will no longer be sustained—the sun will not rise, crops will fail, and chaos will again reign as it did in primordial time. Mankind has a part to play in the maintenance of the world itself, and his negligence is a matter of infinite significance."

(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/myth-of-the-21st-century)

Discussion

John Hick on the Institutional Balance Sheet of Religion

By Ulrich Mohrhoff, citing John Hick in his book The New Frontier:

"On the one hand the religions have been instruments of social cohesion, maintaining the unity of a tribe or a nation by providing communal rituals and shared identity-defining stories handed down from generation to generation. These stories, sagas and myths refer to specific strands of history but constitute for each community an allencompassing “grand narrative” which binds society and generations together, providing frameworks of meaning for the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The religions have also challenged their members with moral ideals, and have supported and comforted them in the sufferings and amid the anxieties and vicissitudes of life’s recurrent personal and social crises. Further, the religions have constituted the foundation of civilisations and been instrumental in the development of language, education and science. They have been responsible for the creation of hospitals and universities, and have inspired literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. So there is a great deal on the positive side of the balance sheet.

But on the other side they have not only been instruments of social cohesion but also of social control by a dominant class. . . . Again, while the religions have produced and nourished a succession of great philosophers and theologians, the monotheisms have also restricted the search for truth and new understanding by threatening and punishing thinkers who failed to conform to accepted ideas. . . . However, if we try to arrive at a “bottom line” in this complex profit-and-loss account, we find that the goods and evils flowing from religion are of such different kinds as generally to be incommensurable, so that it is not really possible to reach any straightforward verdict. We can only paint the mixed black-and-white picture which history displays. The world religions all teach love and compassion, each has its own formulation of the Golden Rule, each includes great examples of self-giving love for others, and yet each has been used to validate and justify large-scale violence and merciless atrocities. (pp. 8–11)

When it comes to the “scientific” study of religion, Hick is more outspoken:

Religion as institution is the subject-matter of the academic study of religion. The historians of religion, and the anthropologists and sociologists who study religion, necessarily focus on its outer and visible aspects. Emile Durkheim, for example, studying Australian aboriginal societies in the late nineteenth century, concluded that its totem functioned as a symbol both for its god and for the tribe itself as a reality greater than and having authority over the individual, and concluded that god was society in the guise of the sacred totem. His analysis of the religion of a particular primal tribal society is convincing but he, and many others after him, made the mistake of generalising it to explain religion as such: the overarching authority and power of society have been projected by the religious imagination as the idea of God. However, this theory does not explain either such non-theistic and basically individualistic faiths as Buddhism or the important element of prophetic challenge to society among both them and the monotheisms. Such oversimplifying generalisation is indeed characteristic of all the various reductionist sociological and psychological theories. They have a valid insight into some one particular aspect of religion and then uncritically assume that they have thereby discovered the essential nature of all religion." (pp. 11–12)

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/3-3-hick_review.pdf)