Torco wrote: ↑30 Dec 2021 05:07
for example, religions aren't just prayer and ritual, right?
Well, that might depend on how you define 'religion'. I think there's an important distinction to be made between the roles that religion
does (inherently) play - the foundation of religion, as it were - and the roles that religion
can play. Because once you create a social institution, there are all sorts of things that you
can do with it.
I think we should bear in mind that today when people generalise about 'religion', they're mostly talking about Christianity and Islam - two imperial religions (in the sense of being religions that have been developed and selected to justify authoritarian rule by a universal ruler (the Emperor and the Caliph respectively)) - and modern religious strains heavily influenced by the global export of these imperial religions. If we lived two thousand years ago, and 'religion' mostly meant cultic paganism in Europe and Confucianism in China, with a little bit of Buddhism, then our generalisations about 'religion' might be very different... let alone if we lived 5000 years ago and most of us were animists or animatists.
they also are also a strong motivator, according to the religious, for example in politics: my own intuitions tell me that it actually has nothing do with it, that the religious just pick and choose whatever bit of their holy texts and/or religious scholars say whatever it is they want to believe and impose unto others anyway: the idea is that when a religious father tells his teenage daughter she's going to hell for masturbating or whatever, he's just a prude that's justifying his discomfort with his child's sexuality and happened to conveniently find himself in the situation that his pastor also wants to repress masturbation... but intellectual virtues -concretely, humility and charity- pull in the opposite direction: any explanation of such a widespread and important social phenomenon that boils down to "bah, they're just hypocrites" or "it's all motivated reasoning" is probably more indicative of my own sympathies and prejudices than anything else.
Well, this doesn't have to be a dichotomy - you can be sincere and yet also motivated. But mostly I'd say that what's really happening here in most cases is a figure of speech: people defend the conservative values of their way of life, and these days often name and explain those values by calling them 'religion', because religion is a prominent part of their way of life. And in a way, they're right. What we call a 'religion' is not just impulses and rituals, you're right - a 'religion' is usually just a name for a certain way of life, including certain collective ritual gestural language but certainly not limited to it. An of course religion can also inspire, and be influenced by, philosophical theories. We might perhaps as an approximation say that a religion was "ritual + philosophy + collective identity".
But at the same time, when we say that the father teaches his daughter a certain way of behaving BECAUSE OF religion, we're being a bit sophistic: he'd be teaching her a certain way of behaving (perhaps the same, perhaps different) even if his cultual practices did not include any organised ritual language (or, indeed, any exuberant ontological philosophical commitments). Strip out the 'religious' part of his culture and he'll still try to defend and promulgate his culture. So it's a mistake to say that 'religion' itself is what's motivating him, I think - although it's true that cultures tend to be more successful if they have prominent religious elements, of course.
(why? I'd suggest that a) shared religious language (by which I mean not just words but also rituals) is a powerful way to establishing a common identity and make people feel as though their needs are heard and answered; and b) because religious ritual is irrational, and providing people with reasons to act irrationality is hugely beneficial in terms of encouraging the sort of self-sacrificing behaviour that complex societies require for the greater good)
there's too many commonalities to what religious people tend to be like, and act like:
Are there?
if all there is to it is a socially constructed bunch of stories to explain impulses and gestures and things they already believed, how is it people come to be convinced of a religion in adulthood
Primarily, because people do not always know how to express themselves: they have to learn a language. And that includes learning a gestural language to be able to express, and ultimately communicate, the sorts of thing that religious behaviour communicates. People often, at a certain time in their lives, will explore these new ways of expression, and that includes discovering religion. The fervour of the new convert is much like the fervour we could imagine for a sighted person who grew up speaking a language invented by the blind, that had no word for anything to do with vision. They probably wouldn't be able to shut up about colours and light and predicting imminent impacts and the like...
, or why do they engage in crusades,
The Crusades were a complicated phenomenon, with many non-religious aspects. [why did the Crusaders randomly sack Constantinople? Not because of religious zeal...]. However, the religious aspect is simply: Crusading was a form of ritual. Specifically, in order to carry out (and let others carry out, and be sure of being able to carry out in the future) one ritual (pilgrimage), they invented new forms of ritual (armed invasions of the middle east). Crusading was not seen as simply a means to an end: the fact of having gone on crusade, even if it was a really rubbish crusade, was itself seen as a religious ritual. This in turn had both an internal aspect (crusading was advertised as a path to salvation) and also an external one (crusading demonstrated piety and courage to one's neighbours).
[other motivations included profit, fame, feudal duty, hatred of the other, righteous vengeance (much was made of the atrocities commited against christians), geopolitics and protection of the faith against an existential threat (much was also made of the need to assist Byzantine and Armenian Christians, and the fear that otherwise the Turks and Arabs would encroach against other Christian groups in the future)]
why do some devote significant part of their resources, or indeed their whole lives, to religious causes?
The three main purposes of this are ritual self-humbling (in which people demonstrate (or hope to gain) freedom from the addiction of possession by giving away their possessions), commitment (in which burn their bridges to alternative lifestyle choices, either to demonstrate their commitment to their chosen way of life or to pressure themselves to commit by removing their own options - or both), and philanthropy (because they believe either that others will directly benefit by getting more religion, or because they believe religious institutions can indirectly benefit others as vessels for charitable purposes).
But note that exactly the same behaviour happens among many people who are not 'religious' in any conventional sense. These behaviours occur any time people are passionate about any part of their way of life - whether it's veganism, opera, or their local football club.
religious beliefs are doing work here, they're not just passive results of answers to "why did i do or feel this or that".
Are they? You assume that when someone says "I did this because of X", that tells you a cause, and not simply a justification. But in any case, I certainly wouldn't deny that philosophical beliefs - some of which are 'religious' in nature - can influence the expression of a person's impulses. But very often the same or similar impulses will occur with or without those beliefs, and find similar forms of expression.
One man tells his daughter not to masturbate because it's ungodly; another, because it's disgusting or unfeminine or unhealthy. One man puts on his sunday best and goes to sit in a church every week; another paints his face and body blue and goes to stand in the rain in a football stadium every week. One person leaves all their money to the Redemptorists; another, to Bayreuth. I'm not saying that the 'religious' people here are completely identical to the 'unreligious' ones... but the differences seem to get smaller the more closely you look.