Back in the day, when we were geographically and informationally isolated, attending a private catholic or parochial school was de regueur. In my generation, it was a formalization of faith in a culture where religion was so prevalent that one could become a Catholic by assimilation. In the years prior and into the ’60s, life revolved around the rigid doctrine of the church.
There were line ups in the confessional box, mandatory mass on a Sunday, strict fasting when required. There were constant reminders of sin for anything even remotely antithetical to the church. Attending any non-catholic service was out of the question. It was a guaranteed ticket to hell!
Being in a system like this from elementary to high school ( and on through post-secondary in some cases) in retrospect had a profoundly stifling effect on our ability to grasp life beyond the confines of the church. It is akin to having another set of parents.
Only worse. This set “knows” what you are thinking, “sees” what you are doing, “hears” what you are saying and ready to judge your every slip and lapse. The church in my young life was a guilt machine. While this is coming from a catholic perspective, these experiences are nonetheless similar in many respects in the experiences of members of other denominations.
Our belief is an accident of birth and geography. I don’t know of anyone in all of my years in the Philippines who became a catholic because he became fully convinced that catholicism is the one true religion. I characterized it in a previous article as ” argumentum ad populum” ( if many believe so,
it is so! ) We were born into the faith, and one path is laid before us for the rest of our lives. It is true with a Muslim born in Egypt or a Hindu born in India.
In today’s smaller and hyperconnected world, more and more people are finding their beliefs untenable. What does a child know about truth and objectivity? How does a child process evidence?
It’s all about “intersubjectivity and imagined reality ” ( quoting author Yuval Harari).
It’s only real as long as we continue talking about it. (In contrast, rock remains a rock whether anybody talks about it or not; it is an objective reality.) Statues of saints and other religious pieces are attempts to objectivize an otherwise subjective enterprise. There is even a school of thought that some significant figures being venerated today never actually existed. Jesus and many of his 12 apostles are prominent examples of this theory.
What kind of marketing genius would convince entire populations of an invisible deity; outrageous myths bordering on lunacy, embraced by millions! Kneeling, praying, hyperventilating to an imaginary god! Is there anything that can surpass blowing one’s self on behalf of his belief? How do you explain superstition that attracts billions? Religion that cut across all ages, socio-economic levels, cultures, level of education, genders?
How is this all possible?
Human vulnerabilities can sometimes be confounding, but It’s nothing as complicated as one might think once one understands how the brain works. When one is introduced to a cultural priority considered to be of the highest value to a child, whose mind is practically blank, it will create the most profound and most enduring pathway ( hereinafter, I call the “rut”) in the grey matter. Because it is deemed of the highest importance, it is reinforced every step of the way by the entire entity of his/her community.
Church, school, media, government, even the smell in the air often conditions one to a religious celebration. The child is captive in this environmental totality throughout his young life.
By the time he can think for himself, the brain rut is more profound and the so-called “free will” becomes an exercise in confirmation bias. It doesn’t matter much even if one is physically out of this environment, his brain will seek like-minded company, reject opposition, and he will continue to find a rationale to sustain the “rut.” That’s why pilgrimages and the like continue to flourish. The shameless promotion of this fraud of host countries matters not. ( the “shroud of Turin” is one such example.
Despite being declared a forgery for the umpteenth time, ( since the 1300s during the reign of Pope Clement VII ) it doesn’t matter to the thousands who continue to pray and worship it).
It doesn’t matter that pedophile Cardinal Pell, the epitome of Vatican hypocrisy, is in jail. It doesn’t matter that parishes are going bankrupt because of similar scandals. There are countless financial anomalies, all forms of child abuse, conspiracy in Naziism, Fascism, forced asylums, and
other systematic human rights violations throughout its history.
If the Vatican has had its way, we would still have slavery now. (It is endorsed by the Bible. Catholic theologians, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas, taught slavery as not intrinsically wrong. The Jesuits owned as much as 400 of them in the early 1800s). However, Pope John Paul II apologized to black Africa for this in 1993.
All these “ideological pretzel” doesn’t matter, the “rut” has been cast, and it will take a superhuman effort to rid this albatross off of a faithful’s back.
But what can be so profound that it would create this supremacy across cultural lines?
How do you think a seven-year ( 7 years, according to the catholic church is the “age of reason,” yes, really! ), old would take a threat of ” being burned alive in hell forever” for a mortal sin? Fear is the most prominent driving force of all religions. The intimidation, the intensity of emotion, and the constant drone of “Fear of God” facilitates this passion. It is a sad spectacle to see adults struggle with his faith in the face of outrageous and absurd claims of his beliefs.
The so-called” Pascal’s Wager” is an attempt by some to justify his/her fidelity. ( Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician in the 1600s who also dabbled in Theology). He argued that a rational person has everything to gain by believing in God and would have lost nothing if it turned out that
God does not exist. Disbelief, on the other hand, is a ticket to hell if it turned out that God is real.
This is false on several levels. Simple belief does not guarantee “passage” to heaven; there is so much more in the doctrine that should be adhered to, according to the church.
This dichotomy is also based only on the Christian God. Pascal never considered the possibility of other Gods and what belief or disbelief it offers. Like a lot of us growing up in the ’50s, Pascal’s was a captive life. In his mind, it was only that one God, the Christian God. The thought of any other is ludicrous. (read: ” Have we been praying to the wrong god?” by this writer, https://opinion.inquirer.net/111694/praying-wrong-god ) What if the Christian god turned out to be the wrong god?
We are hard-wired to respond to faith in keeping with our evolutionary prerogative. Our brains evolved to imagine patterns where there is none; this may have helped us survive all through the eons of rampant tribalism.
Our preoccupation with superstition, phobias, and stubborn, irrational beliefs is a throwback from our caveman ancestry. Hence, we still tenaciously cling to such things as astrology, hell (the vatican says no such thing, recently), soul, god, bigfoot, rabbit’s foot, etc.
I would argue that many things that we dislike in the state of our country today are a consequence of our preoccupation with “salvation,” an ” intersubjective reality” at best. Corruption, the timidity of the masses, terrible governance, and the sheer amount of time spent in prayer and introspection are enough to make your head spin. There are many indicators that this is not doing us any good. It’s often repeated, ad nauseam, the successes of atheist countries (Scandinavia, China ) and the exact opposite of the most religious (Honduras, Ethiopia).
Let no one fool you into thinking that these so-called successes are nothing but material. The Middle East, the origin of all Abrahamic religions, remains the most volatile, divided, intolerant, war-ravaged, place on earth.
Saul’s biblical “Road to Damascus” in today’s context should now be “Road OUT of Damascus” ( Syria is the biblical “Aram” and part of the so-called “Holy Land.” The conflict between the Sunni and the Shia thus far has killed over 250,000 and created over 11 M refugees.) Religion has produced most of the terrorist organizations in the world: ISIS, Taliban, Boko Haram, Abu Sayaf, Al Queda to name some of the 210 listed today.
Then, of course, we have had the notoriety of Jim Jones, David Koresh, Shoko Asahara, Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite, Joseph D’Mambro and others in recent memory who killed and waged wars on behalf of religion.
The Philippines has the highest murder rate in Southeast Asia in 2013 and 2014 ( and most probably in the last two years as well) An unbiased look at the state of our country today will convey us the same conclusion. Our vaunted religious conviction may have made some of us feel virtuous and
repentant, but it fails to transform our country into a moral and ethical model for the region. What do all these acts of religiosity serving us?
Physicist Steven Weinberg once said: With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
Edwin de Leon, M.Ed ( edwingdeleon@gmail.com), is a retired science teacher, high school principal, and secular humanist. He is an occasional contributor to the Phil Daily Inquirer
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