Religion can be the life-blood for many; the death-blood for many others. It all depends on individual and group context. When I think of the 'lifeblood' of religion, I think of Mother Teresa and the incredible humanistic work she did under the umbrella of 'God and religion' in the poorest regions of India. I think of anyone and everyone who has taken a similar path -- even in a much lesser role because who else can live up to Mother Teresa's 'one of a kind' standards of human love and compassion. In this sense, I think of all the wonderful things that religion has accomplished, and can accomplish, through particular individuals and groups of people, in the name of humanity, peace, compassion, caring, altruism, and love.
However, at the same time, one also has to look at both sides of the equation. Religion has also been responsible for some of the greatest atrocities and numbers of tortures and deaths in the history of mankind. Almost all groups of religions have been affected at some point in human history: the Christians (being thrown to the lions, the Armenian Holocaust); the Jews (victims of the Spanish Inquisition and the Nazi Holocaust to name only two of the worst).
Religion is literally a life and death matter when it comes to talking about all of human history and evolution, including the present and the future. How do we sort out this crazy mixture of human religion, altruism, love, ethics, narcissism, righteous extremism, violence, torture, and religously/racially motivated murder, even genocide?
When trying to sort out the relative 'health' or 'pathology' of a religion, many questions need to be asked such as: What religion? What are the ethics of the particular religion? Who's teaching it? Who's learning it? How is it being interpreted? How is it being practised? How balanced is it? Is the leader compassionate towards people? Is he or she congruent in his or her teachings? Or ideologically hypocritical? Is the leader's lifestlye congruent with his or her teachings? Or is it all a fascade? A sham? A smoke and mirrors, dog and pony show?
Religion can help to make us happy, healthy, and balanced in our approach to life -- relative to both our philosophy and our lifestyle. Or it can have the opposite effect. Everything depends on individual and group context -- and in particular, the ethics of the religion, how this ethics is being taught, how it is being interpreted, and how it is being practised.
Just because you are a very religious person does not mean that you are necessarily happy and healthy. And similarly, neither does being an atheist (a person who doesn't believe in God) necessarily guarantee good health either. Nor being a pantheist (believes in the equivalence of God and Nature). Nor being a deist (believes in God but for more secular and empirical reasons than 'scripture', 'revelation', 'miracles' and 'authoritarianism'). Nor being an agnostic (proclaims -- with sound logic in my opinion -- not to have enough verifiable knowledge to believe in either the existence or non-existence of God).
The key to understanding a person's relative health or pathology, which includes integrity vs. non-integrity -- all else being equal (economics, freedom, and other external factors not withstanding) -- is his or her ethical system and the degree to which he or she is actually practising it as opposed to making a mockery out of it.
A case also can be made for the content of a person's 'epistemology' (knowledge). Good epistemology is also imperative to a person's good health.
Thus, we can isolate three factors that are all imperative to a person's good health: 1. good epistemology; 2. good ethics; and 3. good executive and congruent action based on good epistemology and good ethics.
If these three factors are present in a person's life -- good epistemology, good ethics, and good action -- then it fundamentally is irrelevant whether the person is religious or non-religious, or what type of God or Gods they worship or don't worship -- whether they be a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Judist, or a Hinduist, or a Budhist, or a pantheist, or a deist, or an agnostic, or an atheist...
Let's summarize what we've learned so far.
1. Context (both group and individual) is imperative for understanding the relative health and/or pathology of any religion -- regardless of what it calls itself and how much credibility and/or non-credibility it may have. There can be no proper understanding of meaning without a proper understanding of context. (I learned that from General Semantics -- Alfred Korzybski and S.I. Hayakawa).
2. All else being equal, good mental health equals good epistemology, good ethics, and good (congruent) action, regardless of a person's religious or non-religous status.
Unfortunately, this does not allow for environmental-social-economic-political factors and what Erich Fromm called a 'pathology of normalcy'. The issue here becomes 'How much does a person perceive that he or she needs to bend and/or break his or her good epistemology, good ethics, and/or good action in order to 'fit into' the context of a pathological society and/or subset of society (for example, a righteously extremist religion, a narcissisticaly corrupt government and/or business corporation, and/or any narcissistically unethical sub-group of society such as a 'street gang')?
Thus, the same three factors that can be used to judge whether an individual person is healthy or not can and should be used to determine the relative health of any social/cultural institution: religious, political, legal, economic, business, etc.
Now I have put together a list of 6 factors that are totally relevant to 'ethical health'. Epistemological factors will have to be discussed at a later date.
These six factors make up the core essence of DGB Philosophy -- particularly, its ethical component. They are:
1, Congruence: What you say is what you mean, and what you mean is what you say.
2. Dialectical Negotiation and Integration: You work with people in areas of conflict to either accept each other's differences and/or to work to resolve the conflict in a way that is democratically fair to both.
3. Democracy: Based on principles of ethical and legal fairness, reciprocal relations, equal rights, congruence, homeostatic balance, a mixture of narcissism and altruism, self-assertiveness and social sensitivity, freedom of speech and belief, and humanistic-existential values.
4. Homeostatic Balance: This is the key to understanding all health and all ethics in Nature -- whether it be philosophical, biological, psychological, cultural, social, legal, economic, political...The fleeting homeostatic goal is to find a healthy, happy 'medium' or 'middle ground' between 'not enough' and 'too much'...
5. Humanistic: Compassionate, socially sensitive, caring, loving, generous, kind...
6. Existential: Pertaining to freedom, self-assertiveness, 'freedom of philosophy and lifestyle within a parameter of social senstivity, responsibility, and accountability...
These are the core ethical factors that make up DGB Philosophy -- with or without religion.
Now, as pertains to religion, and the application and priority of these ethical values -- some critical choices and decisions need to be made that separate the healthy religion from the unhealthy religion, and the healthy religious person from the unhealthy one.
Spefically, the choice needs to be made: Which is of higher priority -- 'scripture', 'revelation' and 'miracles'? Or the ethical values listed above?
I say the ethical values listed above. That is what makes me a humanistic-existentialist first and foremost. Religion has the choice of either making its values consistent and congruent with humanistic-existential values. Or not.
Thus, an important distinction needs to be made here. We need to judge the qualtiy of a religion by the qualtiy of the ethical values it subscribes too; not the other way around. In other words, an ethical value should be judged by its relevance to 'harmonious human relations' or 'homeostatic humanistic-existentialism'; not by its etiology in the religion it comes from, including any type of 'scripture' and/or alleged 'revelation' that it is purported to come from without any type of skepticism pertaining to the legitimacy of this so called 'revelation'. Revelation and humanistic-existentialism epistemologically do not get along. Humanistic-existentialism is highly suspect of any type of so-called 'revelation'.
Let us say that again. The strength of a religion is the ethical system it teaches -- and practices; not the reverse -- that the strength of an ethical system should be based on the religion, the scripture, and the alleged revelation that it comes from.
This then, is where religion and humanistic-existentialism can part company. They don't have to but they can and often do part company on the double issue of: 1. authoritarian epistemology vs. rational-empirical epistemology; and 2. authoritarian ethics vs. rational-empirical ethics. Thus, at this point, a critical distinction needs to be made 'authoriatarian' religion and 'humanistic-existential' religion.
The first can take us into serious human pathology -- issues of 'dominance/submission' and 'sado-masochism'; whereas the second can lead us to, and/or keep us in, good health. The first demands that we give up our mind in order to practise our faith; the second demands that we keep our mind, our independence, our freedom, our skepticism, our rational empiricism -- in short, our humanistic-existentialism -- and that this is our faith, nothing more, nothing less. The first can be the death-blood of both religion and man; the second is the life-blood of both religion and man.
In the remainder of this section, we will examine: 1. the 'epistemology' of religion; 2. the 'ethics' of religion; 3. the 'mythology' of religion; 4. the 'pragmatism' of religion; 5. the 'humanistic-existentialism' and particularly the 'altruism' in religion; and 6. the potential for pathology in religion.
An example is needed right now for some of the ideas I have written about.
In the next two essays, I will 'deconstruct' and 'reconstruct' the 'God, Abraham, and The Binding of Isaac' parable in the Bible in order to illustrate the difference between an authoritarian perspective in religion and my DGB humanistic-existential perspective.
Please join me there.
dgb, October 21st-22nd, 2007.
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