Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgement of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.
Well on that point about false consolation, I'm no fan of Hitchens, but he might have a point : false emotions are perfectly possible. Self-knowledge always comes with a failure rate. Plato went on at length about how false pleasure is possible, an argument I have neither the time nor inclination to explain, but here's a much more recent example :
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body?ocid=twfut
If you can believe yourself to be in love but actually aren't, then I see no reason why you can't believe yourself to be consoled but are actually aren't. I suppose it would be a deep form of denial, where you're genuinely unable to recognise what your own emotion actually is. However, this is not to say that religion doesn't provide genuine consolation, just to state that the argument is more complicated than that.
It's interesting how people make such strongly opposing arguments on such a well-studied topic. For some, religion is self-evidently necessary for moral actions. For others nothing could be further than the truth. I would say that by and large, religion is sufficient for the things described above, but not necessary. Sources of comfort and bonding are perfectly possible in an atheistic world view. My guess is that (from a purely sociological perspective) the tendency to explain things with supernatural elements is linked to the shared group identity that results.
https://aeon.co/ideas/religion-is-about-emotion-regulation-and-its-very-good-at-it
Interesting comments. In general I find that simpler people get just their right amount of guidance from one of the world’s great religions, no matter which one. I’ve found people who are areligious or skeptics often take questions of one’s personal life far more deeply and often are lifelong students.
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind these are just my own personal experiences. And for the record I am a UU.
Religion, speaking as a believer, is a big nothing. Everyone knows this, especially the believers who've moved beyond the superficial aspects of religion. It's an ancient framework, upon which we can hang all that's sacred to us.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who tries to write a sentence starting with "Religion is" - has missed the point already.