How Did God Get Started? » Arion » Boston University

A great article on how religious faith appeared in Western culture as a direct result of the invention of rationality in Greek Philosophy.

With rationality, the Greeks gods are no longer necessary to make the wind blow, the earth shake, and the rivers flow, natural phenomenon began to have naturalistic explanations. And as a result religion splits away from reason, taking on a new purpose and a new set of characteristics.

It becomes:

• Monotheistic which simplifies and streamlines the pantheon by positing a single god who is seen in various forms, just as natural phenomenon can be reduced to elemental forms.
• Exclusive which strengthens monotheism by arguing that one god is the true god, and all others are false.
• Supernatural which in turn privileges the power of unseen forces over the seen. Faith becomes the foundation of religious thought precisely because it places authority beyond the natural and beyond scientific reasoning.
• Apocalyptic which finally allows religious believers take solace in the promise that their faith will be vindicated when the unseen world unveils itself and the secular world is ruins. A revenge fantasy and payback for those who are marginalized both by their religious belief as well as their relationship to the natural world.

As Colin Wells explains:

Whatever its precise origins, the idea of an exclusive God was crucial for Christianity’s spread among the Gentiles, because it answered so many needs at once. It appropriated the pagans’ own unitary god and trumped it, addressing paganism by offering a compelling rationale for rejecting the old gods; at the same time, it provided a resounding slap in the face to the naturalism that was always implicit in Greek philosophy, even if that naturalism was now being culturally swamped. Indeed, it was being swamped precisely because, then as now, it was so threatening to religious sentiment. Exclusivity fed into that reaction. Nature’s regularity had melded the nature gods into One that enfolded many, but (as Thales saw) it also unavoidably implied doubt about divine agency. Rising supernaturalism allied itself with the blocked impulse to restore divine agency, but couldn’t offer a new outlet for it. Exclusivity at once focused supernaturalism and cleared the way for divine agency, by demonizing the weakened gods and putting the one true God above them and their material realm.

In Darwinian terms, what I’m suggesting is that rational inquiry changed the religious environment, and that exclusive monotheism was the new class of religion that evolved as a result. Since religion’s environment is in fact psychological, to explain how religious “mutations” become successful “adaptations” it’s necessary to explain their psychological appeal. I’ve shown how exclusivity worked by appealing to and ultimately co-opting the rising tide of supernaturalism that reason left in its wake. Apocalypticism, exclusivity’s seeming corollary, has long posed a fundamental psychological problem, but we can explain it in a similar way. It’s easy to see how apocalypticism arose among a marginalized minority, and how it would appeal to Christianity’s earliest pagan converts—women, slaves, the poor. But what was it about the apocalyptic outlook that gave it such broad and lasting appeal as exclusive monotheism was taken up by entire cultures and societies? Why would a sense of marginalization resonate with the mainstream, which by definition isn’t marginal at all? Once more, we can look to reason and its psychological consequences for an answer. Apocalypticism’s message of ultimate vindication for the marginalized resonated with the mainstream because the inherent authority of naturalistic explanation threatened to marginalize all religious accounts of reality, in a way analogous to that in which Jewish authorities had marginalized outcast preachers like Jesus and Paul. The Greek word apocalypsis is usually translated as “revelation.” The original meaning of both words is “unveiling,” or a bringing forth of the hidden—for true believers, this became the time when the unseen will literally come out of hiding to annihilate the seen in a final act of glorious revenge for being so brusquely pushed to the side. From an epistemological standpoint, all believers are marginalized in this world. In pinning its hopes on the next world, what faith reveals is the ancestral mark of religion’s marginalization at the hands of reason.

This is a terrific idea, and the elegance of the explanation makes me want to take it a step too far. What if, for example, the specifics of American religious history can explain the increasingly paranoid mindset in American politics. What if it can explain the way that the dividing line is no longer drawn along party affiliation but also competing ideologies, one explicitly secular and mistrusting of authoritarian nationalism and religious fundamentalism and the other explicitly religious and skeptical of scientific authority and secular institutions.

In almost any debate it is not uncommon to see the two sides split between believers and non-believers. As a result, you repeatedly find this idea that "unseen" forces are in control and that only a few marginalized truth-tellers understand what's really going on. The masses are sheep, the individual speaker possessed of rare insight and special knowledge. We see that the government serves the elite or is ruled by hostile foreign forces, corporations secretly control our waking lives through marketing and misinformation, religious people are irrational for believing, atheists are egomaniacally deluded for their lack of faith, true believers are mocked for their credulity, scientists and skeptics are criticized for selling out the truth to the status quo.

If you think something is true, it's because they want you to think it's true. If you believe something is true it is because you're not one of those weak-minded fools that believes everything they're told.

And of course, the attraction of this style of thought is simple: it reduces the world to a single, simple explanation, separates the sheep from the true-believers, offers the excitement of fantastical events, and promises that the truth is out there waiting to be unveiled.

Faith, therefore, is not just belief in something that may or may not be true, but the potential to rationalize away our own sense of alienation in the name of open-mindedness, individual growth, or psychological healing.

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew doesn't seem to know what a myth is:

The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally. They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

If stories are not meant to be taken literally, then why take them so literally?

The real point is that a myth is not a falsehood taken for truth. It is an imaginative leap into the inner world of human experience.

Myths are the first human attempts at understanding human psychology: our haunted, wounded, despairing, doubting selves made better through storytelling. Myths are neither true nor false, reasonable or unreasonable, they are what make facts meaningful and understanding possible.

New Statesman - Claude Levi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

Practical deconstruction:

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought, underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths. Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne, and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage, there had been a current in western thought which saw in "primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship between men and their world than that which obtained in "civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss's position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist trying to persuade little girls to break tribal taboos.

Derrida not only demolished Lévi-Strauss's sentimental valorisation of the Amazonians, but took an axe to his "scientific" project. Linguistics was based on the discovery of the phoneme, the basic element of sound difference from which all meaning in a language flowed. Yet the anthropologist's mythemes were always the result of interpretation.

Werewolves of Edinburgh

Family lore:

Nisbet, A System of Heraldry, vol 1, p. 335, Nisbet discusses werewolves:

"I shall, therefore, end here with four-footed beasts, only mentioning one of a monstrous form, carried with us; its body is like a wolf, having four feet with long toes, and a tail ; it is headed like a man, called in our books a warwolf, carried by Dickison of Winkleston, azure, a warwolf passant, and three stars in chief argent : so blazoned by Mr. Thomas Crawfurd, and illuminated in several books ; which are also to be seen cut upon a stone above an old entry of a house in the Cowgate in Edinburgh, above the foot of Libberton's wynd, which belonged formerly to the name of Dickison, which name seems to be from the Dicksons by the stars which they carry."

Necessity and Nemesis

More from Roberto Calasso. In some versions of the myth, Zeus seduces Nemesis (a representative of Ananke and necessity, this time as a figure of retribution). From this seduction, comes Helen of Troy.

The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble in Zeus's reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen's lifetime. It was marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men could go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony pg 127).

In this telling, the birth of Helen is the catalyst for all of history: first the age of heroes, battles, turmoil and great deeds, and later the age of men, poetry, storytelling and art which follows. Helen is the synthesis of necessity and beauty (chance), and embodies all of the conflict and contradiction that this convergence suggests. The face that launched 1000 ships indeed, and the Iliad, The Odyssey, and all of western literature down to the present day.

With Zeus's challenge to the law, we have in this one figure the source of all human conflict:

• Fascism - the aesthetization of politics
• Marxism - cultural critique as science
• Christianism / Islamic imperialism - religion as politics (mythology as law)
  
• Communism - politics as religion
• Social Darwinism - aesthetization of science

Anytime idealism is forced upon reality, or the descriptive becomes prescriptive, we are witnessing the rebirth of Helen.

Conflict Schematic

Necessity

Ananke, Necessity, who stands above everything in ancient Greece, even Olympus and its gods, was never to have a face. Homer does not personify her, but he does describe her three daughters, the Fates with their spindles; or in the Erinyes, her emissaries; or Ate with her light feet. All female figures. There was only one place of worship dedicated to Ananke: on the slopes of the Acrocorinth, the mountain belonging to Aphrodite and her sacred prostitutes, stood a sanctuary to Ananke and Bia, goddess of violence. "But there is a tradition not to enter the temple," remarks Pausanias. And, indeed, what could one ask of she who does not listen? The difference between gods and men can be grasped above all in their relationship to Ananke. The gods endure her and use her; men merely endure her.

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1993, pgs. 96-97

Creative Mythology

Conservative Roger Scruton has a lovely essay on the work of René Girard. Although he takes some fairly pointless and frankly stupid swipes at Hitchens and Dawkins et al. in order to make the essay seem more timely and relevant, it's really a fantastic overview of a fascinating topic. The power of myth:

Girard's theory, like Nietzsche's, is expressed as a genealogy, or a "creation myth": a fanciful description of the origins of human society from which to derive an account of its present structure. (It is significant that Girard came to the anthropology of religion from literary criticism.) And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born. This experience comes to us in many forms—religious ritual, prayer, tragedy—but its true origin is in acts of communal violence. Primitive societies are invaded by "mimetic desire," as rivals struggle to match each other's social and material acquisitions, so heightening antagonism and precipitating the cycle of revenge. The solution is to identify a victim, one marked by fate as outside the community and therefore not entitled to vengeance against it, who can be the target of the accumulated bloodlust, and who can bring the chain of retribution to an end. Scapegoating is society's way of recreating "difference" and so restoring itself. By uniting against the scapegoat, people are released from their rivalries and reconciled. Through his death, the scapegoat purges society of its accumulated violence. The scapegoat's resulting sanctity is the long-term echo of the awe, relief and visceral re-attachment to the community that was experienced at his death.

It is indeed significant that Girard comes to anthropology by way of literary criticism, because the study of religion and mythology now properly belongs to the field of literature. As Joseph Campbell noted, since the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the modern era, secular literature has taken on the role of creating and continuing mythic traditions. These myths, freed by science from the burden of explaining the universe, now are able to explain humanity to itself and how the individual relates to society. These are psychological truths that do not require faith or proof but only steady reading, wisdom and understanding.

A Theory of Culture

The cultural landscape is awash in nostalgia, revisionism, and remakes of every kind. If you weren't around in the 70s you can see new versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and soon an all-new Halloween. If you were a kid in the 80s, you had the Transformers movie this summer as well as a new (bad) version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Coming up, Nicole Kidman is starring in yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, called simply Invasion, and Harrison Ford again has taken up his bull-whip and fedora for another Indiana Jones outing. There are highly successful new versions of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who with an all new Kirk and Spock led Star Trek on the way. Along with these (pretty obvious) examples, we have genres built around nostalgia: retro-futurism, steam-punk, neo-victorianism, new weird, all hearken to our love of an invented past, present, or future.

So, just as Vico had his New Science to account for the cyclical nature of civilization's rise and fall, I would like to propose my own (though by no means original) theory of culture in order to account for this phenomenon. As I see it, all popular creations go through four stages: 1. Emergence, 2. Refinement, 3. Parody, and 4. Revision.

The first question of course, is what is meant by a "popular creation". I'm playing pretty fast and loose, so it could mean almost anything: a character, a scenario, a theme, a mood. Anything that can be transmitted and replicated, like a meme, between artist and audience, between individuals, and even between cultures.

Stage 1. Emergence

In the first phase, the creation appears suddenly and seemingly from nowhere and is recognizable as something that's new and unique or at least innovative. More importantly it is something that emerges in response to a need, to something that's missing from the culture. It is raw and immediate. This is the creation as myth, as folklore, as superstition.

Stage 2. Refinement

In the next phase, the creation takes on an iconic role within the culture. It has been refined and put into the larger social context. This is the period where all of its qualities become well defined, rules are fixed in place, relationships are established, and its meaning is easily comprehended. This is the creation as art, as literature, as Romance.

Stage 3. Parody

As time passes, the power of the creation is drained. It is no longer relevant to the culture and there is an effort to de-mythologize it and see it for what it is: one object among many. What was once dark, is now light. What was once deep and meaningful is now superficial and trivial. An object can have no power over us if we can laugh at it. This is the period of camp, of kitsch, and of irony. It is the creation seen through the lense of modernism and postmodernism.

Stage 4. Revision

Finally we come to the era of nostalgia, where the dead creation is restored to a new version of its former self. There is an attempt to get back to origins and the authentic nature of the creation, to reinvest in its original power. This can also be a period where the original meaning of the creation is subverted or inverted in order to give it new relevance to the present day. This is the creation in its endlessly volatile, endlessly repeatable retro mode.

One of the interesting things about this last stage is the creeping anachronism where contemporary interpretations are given to past events and our motivations become the motivations of historical persons. There is often a sincere attempt to restore something to its original and authentic state, but what we get instead is a simulation that reflects our own cultural desires and fears.

We confuse the Victorian era with our Neo-Victorian fantasy, ancient paganism with our neo-pagan inventions, and we assume that our readings are the same of those of the author and his or her original audience. The truth is we are reinventing things in our own image.

Examples

Dracula and Frankenstein

1. Emergence: The original texts from Stoker and Shelley. Raw imagination, folklore and superstition come together in original visions. Dracula expresses Victorian anxieties while Shelley gives us science fiction as skepticism and philosophy, as well autobiographical fears about the horror of childbirth.
   
2. Refinement: The Universal Monster movies fix them permanently in the public imagination with all of their features, characteristics, back-stories, and rules. Lugosi's accent. Karloff's bolts and lumbering walk.
3. Parody: Over time, the Universal Monsters are no longer scary. They turn instead to comedy and merchandising: Abbot & Costello, the Munsters, "The Monster Mash," Count Chocula and Frankenberry cereals.
4. Revision: The characters are reinvented as romantic and tragic figures, as in Coppola and Brannagh's remakes, as well as Goth culture, post-humanism, and Anne Rice. Contemporary anxieties cause us to empathize with their outsider status rather than with their victims. Monsters become anti-heroes.

Batman

1. Emergence: Bob Kane's original and dark Bat-man. He is a two-fisted hardnosed pulp character that reflects the time period.
   
2. Refinement: Now called Batman, he joins the DC pantheon of super-heroes alongside Superman and Wonderwoman in the Justice League. His universe is well defined: millionaire Bruce Wayne, sidekick Robin, Alfred the Butler, the Batmobile, the Batcave, etc.
   
3. Parody: The Batman comic and TV show de-volve into camp and self-parody. Ka-pow!
   
4. Revision: The Dark Knight Returns. Batman is reinvented as a much darker and violent character beginning with Frank Miller. Though no one will acknowledge it, he is a villain. In the Graphic Novel he battles and defeats Superman, a pawn of American Imperialism. We all cheer.
   

The Wizard of Oz

1. Emergence: L. Frank Baum writes the original Oz novels and invests in them his own experiences and political beliefs.
2. Refinement: The Wizard of Oz movie becomes the iconic version of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion. Changes from the original become the canonical version for most people.
   
3. Parody: The Wiz, a failed attempt to update the story, as well as repeated showings on television ultimately drain the story of life.
4. Revision: Wicked retells the story from the wicked witch's point of view, revitalizing it through inversion, and perhaps restoring Baum's original political vision. The upcoming Tin Man mini-series on Sci-Fi channel looks to be a darker sci-fi version of the story.