THE SOCIAL NECESSITY OF RELIGION

Take it or leave it, but those who repeat after Karl Marx that “religion is the opium of the people” do have a valid point. It certainly appears that religion turns off the reasoning mind and brings out the irrational element. There is no way anyone can prove the existence of God through reason, and, as I said elsewhere, had proof been available, there would have been no room for faith, which is of course the starting point of religion. Credo… Pascal, another God-obsessed man alongside Spinoza, makes not the slightest effort to prove anything about God. His “wager” essentially boils down to a gambler’s odds. If God does exist after all, those who bet on God will be winners. If He doesn’t exist, your bet on Credo won’t lose you anything anyway…

Pascal was a genius scientist, and a good man, of course, but wagering on God does seem rather disrespectful to God, in my estimation.

All this time we have been talking about God inside religion, a “Denominational” God, who is inseparable from faith and from doubt. God exists just because your Church makes it the first and foremost of its dogmas. God exists because you are a member of your Church and believing in the God of your Church is your obligation as a member.

Ironically, it is fairly easy to prove the existence of God outside religion. God’s problem is not man’s faith, but the confusion resulting from the multiplicity of religions and a lack of clear definitions. A theistically neutral definition of God will work as soon as we disattach the concept God from religion. St. Anselm’s famous and infamous Ontological Argument: “that than none greater can be conceived” can work if treated mathematically, rather than theologically. We know that infinity exists as a mathematical concept. Then if we conceptualize God as infinity, or as the Absolute Entity of “none greater” qualities, and move Him out of the contested territory of religion into the uncontested territory of the so-called exact sciences, -- lo and behold! – God’s existence is no longer insurmountably hard to prove. Just like the foundations of mathematics are impossible to prove, they become axiomatic, ergo sunt!

As with all axioms, all we need to prove to justify their legitimacy, is their usefulness. Mind you, not their unconditional usefulness to each and every one, but their special usefulness to science and to other spheres of human endeavor. Is anyone prepared to deny a special usefulness to God?

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However, Marx never said that God was the opium of the people. Remember, he said it about religion. The difference may be somewhat elusive, but it exists. Religion as a drug of mass intoxication and indoctrination may be used as a weapon against God. But let us not besmirch any religion for the ill effects it has on its extremist adherents. Let us not condemn historical Christianity, or Islam, or any other missionary and proselytizing religious movements for the inhumanity and horrors of religious wars, past and present. It is easy and often politically expedient to attack Islam today for the barbarity of its extremist elements, at the same time conveniently forgetting the bloody past of your own religion.

Indeed, religion is a mixed bag of good and bad things. Paraphrasing Longfellow, we can say that –

“…When it is good, it is very-very good,

But when it is bad, it is horrid!”

Yes, Dr. Marx, just like opium! It can wreak havoc as a powerful narcotic, destroying people’s psyche. But it can also do a lot of good. Take this for starters:

“Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.”

Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), English physician, called English Hippocrates.

But let us not be too modest about the beneficial role of religion on human society. Not only does it relieve human suffering and provide consolation to people in times of distress. Its cultural significance as the principal source of social morality, the absolute standard, as opposed to the relativist double standard, cannot be overestimated. Religion becomes the adhesive glue holding people together, defining their cultural development, their basic morality, their values, their national idea. One cannot build and maintain a nation on the foundation of reason and common sense alone. One must have a metaphysical foundation soaked in mysticism and bathed in the irrational. Nations cannot be governed by mere intellect. They need the supernatural element, producing awe and obedience to an absolute authority. They must believe. Who else but God can teach them the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and profane? Who else can give them hope for a better future, a higher meaning in life? Who can put them in the context not of a particularly lousy day, but of eternity?

The question of Warum? is not a special philosophical enquiry. It is the fundamental question of existence.

Why are people born and why do they die? What happens to the world without me and to me after life, having left the world? And to sum it all up, why should I care?

Without God and without religion as a conduit to God, there are too many questions that we cannot answer to anybody’s satisfaction. Especially to our own…

Many smart alecks may start arguing that man’s relationship to God or a lack thereof is an entirely personal matter. One can be moral and a believer in God philosophically, outside organized religion. Or one can be an atheist, yet a person of unimpeachable morality.

True, and I may even add that religion frequently serves as a hindrance to personal faith, a destroyer, rather than builder of morality. We know many famous and less famous examples of individuals raised in well-churched families, who could not cope with religious hypocrisy and have renounced God and morality as a result. Following Kierkegaard, we may say that most establishment churches have been corrupted by power and it is better to worship God in the blessed company of a pagan worshiping a stick than in the company of fellow “believers” for whom religion is merely a common form of social acceptance.

Yet the basic concepts of morality are absolute concepts and they can’t be developed ex nihilo in the admittedly relativist environment of pure reason. What the God-denying moralists do not wish to acknowledge, is that their alleged morality has not been spawned in them through spontaneous generation, that it has been inherited by all of us from our ancestors. We owe our morality to the culture of our society, and that culture has had religion as its essential component. We have inherited morality from our parents, and we have been spoon-fed morality by society. “Old values” can be renounced, both individually and collectively, but they never die, because without them there can be no absolute standards, and no social contract “in good faith” can ever be possible.

Religion is the only way for society and individuals to teach themselves about human values. Without religion there can be no culture and no society as such. Hence, the absolute social necessity of religion. Take it or leave it.

Happy Easter!