But what about science? It’s intriguing to me that for one of the most highly regarded philosophers of science, Karl Popper, the central problem in philosophy of science is demarcation. That is to say, for Popper, the most important thing philosophy of science needs to do is to distinguish science from non-science.

At first this seems an oddly defensive position to take. Compare “philosophy of science” in this regard to “philosophy of religion.” As William Wainwright’s excellent book notes, “philosophy of religion” means almost entirely different things to analytic philosophers of religion (who usually belong to the American Philosophical Association and continental philosophers of religion (who are much more at home in the AAR). For APA philosophers of religion, the only real problem is God: does he exist or doesn’t he, and if so, what are his characteristics? For AAR philosophers of religion, the problems are more varied. But neither side would dream of saying that the central task of their field is to demarcate religion from non-religion! For the AAR philosophers, that task, if it matters, is a task for religious studies in general, not just philosophy of religion; for the APA philosophers, it is a trivial side matter compared to the object of religion, God.

And yet I would say there is something vital to Popper’s question, a good reason why demarcation might be more important in philosophy of science than in philosophy of religion. Asking the question “what is religion?” is generally useless and gets us mired in pointless debates that do nothing to enlarge our understanding. I don’t think the same is true of the question “what is science?”

What makes science different and important, in my view, is two things. First, it has a normative weight; to say that something is scientific is to say something epistemologically good about it, to say that we have particular reason to believe it. (I referred to this concept of normative weight or normative force before, in discussing dialetheism: to note that even Graham Priest, while arguing that there can be true contradictions, nevertheless agrees that something about contradictions is epistemologically bad.) Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that science in some sense deserves that normative weight.

This is not, of course, to say that science is necessarily superior to everything else or that it’s the only kind of knowledge worth having. Such a claim is self-refuting, as I’ve noted before, since it’s not scientific. Normative claims, including the claim that science has a normative weight, are not scientific either, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So then what is science? And why does it have this normative weight (if indeed it does, as I claim)? That’s a question for another time – first it’s important just to establish that the question is worth asking.

The idea that I always associate with Hadot is encapsulated in the translated English title of one of his major works: philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, treats this philosophy as a way of life, a set of “spiritual practices,” and in so doing he helps remind us of the distance between ancient and modern philosophy. And I don’t just mean that he gives us yet another reason to critique contemporary philosophy departments, which (whether analytic or continental) typically seem far from any ancient ideal of the love of wisdom. I mean also that he reminds us why philosophy has so little place in contemporary Western culture.

I’ve noticed that a fairly large number of my posts have to do with “religion and science,” and the supposed relation between them. This wasn’t my original intent, since I don’t care much for the idea of “religion” in the first place, as most of those posts attest; and the most animated question in “religion and science” debates – the relation between evolution and Hebrew Bible accounts of creation – is of relatively little interest to me, since I’ve never bought any of those accounts to begin with. But I’ve been realizing something about most people today, even well educated people who might be expected to know some philosophy, and not only in the Western world. When moderns look for the things that Greek and Roman philosophy was supposed to provide – answers to big questions about the purpose of our lives, our proper view of the world and our place in it, ways of dealing with death – they don’t turn to philosophy. They turn to “religion” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, various “Hindu” traditions – and they turn to natural science, above all to psychology. It is in the realms of religion and science, that is to say, that philosophy is found today, especially any sense of philosophy as a way of life. Scientists often claim their work to be value-free, but especially for those who are not part of a “religious” community, much of the guidance we receive in life comes from scientific evidence and the people charged to apply it to our daily lives. The title we use for those people – “doctor” – originally referred to learned Christian religious. It is doctors who warn us that our behaviours are self-destructive, that we need to change our views and habits and ways of life, and that we fail to do so at our own peril – and this advice often involves codes of behaviour toward food that rival Leviticus in their complexity.

But philosophy – that is what we don’t have. Hadot reminds us that the ancients did. It’s not just that their academic work was not so carved up into disciplines, so that the inquiries now called “science” would have been known as “philosophy” (though of course it was that). The Stoic practice of prosoche, attention to one’s soul, bears a startling resemblance to Buddhist mindfulness – conducted in the name of philosophy. When the Greek explorer Megasthenes explained ancient Indian society to his fellow Greeks , the name he gave to the brahmins and to the samana wandering monks – the Buddhists, Jains and their ilk – was “philosophers.” He recognized what the Greeks called philosophy in what they were doing. It is in the Christian (and Islamic?) Middle Ages, Hadot notes, that philosophy loses this status, becoming “the handmaid of theology.” It is not a huge step from there to the analytic philosophy of today, which (I think it would be hard to deny) sees itself largely as “the handmaid of science,” answering only those questions left over from the empirical inquiries of natural science.

Now the terms “religion” and “science” seem unlikely to go away any time soon. We are probably stuck with them. Perhaps more importantly, the realms of knowledge and practice that the terms cover – from Kierkegaard to prayer, from Einstein to psychotherapy – are of inestimable value to human life. As much as I might wish for a world where these terms went away (at least the “religion” term), I would find it devastating if the phenomena were to disappear. So for better and for worse, “religion” and “science” are here to stay. So while I have always identified the present venue as a blog about philosophy, it necessarily also becomes a blog about religion and science.

What then happens to “philosophy”? Can it ever again become the way of life that Hadot tells us of? Not in the terms of the ancient world. If one were to start a monastic garden of philosophers the way that Epicurus did – even if one were explicitly to call it Epicurean – most people would invariably call it a religion (or worse, a cult). At the same time, I think philosophy takes on a crucial role in the world of “religion” and “science,” as a middle ground between the two. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, full of bile toward “religion,” nevertheless affirm the value of (at least analytic) philosophy; and philosophy, even today’s academic philosophy, has tools to examine even conservative forms of “religion” critically on their own terms, terms that science does not have. Even to the fundamentalist who denies philosophy as heretical, one may still ask the fundamental questions: why is scripture inerrant? Why must faith take precedence over knowledge? The answers to these questions can be interrogated by philosophy, but not by experimental science. One might even say that the problem with Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA is that, in separating the realms of science and religion, it ignores the third realm that unites them, namely philosophy.

This all is at the theoretical level. But it matters at the level of practice as well. One can always try to live one’s life entirely within the guidance specified by a particular tradition of inquiry, including the tradition of natural science. But once one tries to be both at once – to be both “religious” and “scientific,” or even to inhabit more than one “religion” – then one needs philosophy to settle their differences. One can no longer take philosophy by itself as a way of life. But philosophy may yet turn out to be an inescapable part of the best way of life today.

Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere took methodological anti-Protestantism a step further, effectively labelling not merely scholars of Buddhism but Buddhists themselves as regrettably Protestant. Obeyesekere coined the unfortunately widespread term “Protestant Buddhism” to describe what I have called Yavanay?na, the new modernist and rationalist form of Western-influenced Buddhism whose roots go back to nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and the reformers Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala.

What’s wrong with calling this modernized Buddhism Protestant? First of all, neither Olcott nor Dharmapala were Protestants themselves. Dharmapala was born and raised a Sri Lankan Buddhist. While born and raised a Protestant family, Olcott had converted away from Protestantism to “spiritualism” well before calling himself a Buddhist. Moreover, as Stephen Prothero has rightly argued, Protestantism was only one influence on Olcott’s thought; secular modernism was at least as important. For example, Olcott was a firm believer in the theory of evolution, rejected roundly by the Protestants of his time, and was enthusiastic about Buddhism partially because he took it – unlike Protestantism – to be compatible with evolutionary theory.

But beyond that historical point, one must also ask: what’s wrong with Protestantism? The term “Protestant Buddhism” carries the whiff of an accusation that there’s something wrong with this Buddhism, that these Buddhists are not really Buddhists but Protestants in Buddhist disguise. In a class I took from him, Robert Gimello once criticized Yavanay?na Buddhists who would make claims like “??kyamuni and I have got it right, and 2500 years of Buddhist tradition has got it wrong.” The class laughed, and Gimello added “I think that’s extremely arrogant.” Looking back on that experience, I sorely wish I had raised my and and asked the following question: “So may I clarify, Prof. Gimello? You are, in fact, telling us that the Protestant Reformation should never have happened?”

For after all, what was Martin Luther doing except to say “Jesus, Paul and I have got it right, and 1500 years of Catholic tradition has got it wrong”? To make a claim like Gimello’s is effectively to claim that Protestantism is a tradition founded on illegitimate arrogance. And one can reasonably make that claim – as a matter of anti-Protestant apologetics. Indeed Gimello – always a devout Catholic – has since moved to the University of Notre Dame to help develop “robustly Catholic” theological views of Buddhism. I believe in the value of apologetics, of theological or sectarian claims aimed at persuading members of one tradition to move to another. I only have a problem with apologetics when it poses as neutral, disinterested scholarship, as Gimello had once claimed his class to be. It may well be that a “robustly Catholic” sectarian apologetic helps us understand Buddhism better – but only if we acknowledge that that is what it is.

I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan’s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.

I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.

Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.

Fast forward: a little while ago, things were a little rough in my home. My fiancée and I tried to adopt a big beautiful black dog, which turned out not to be the right pet for our situation. The dog found a very good home and we’ll be able to get another dog soon enough, but losing the dog was pretty rough on us, especially my fiancée. It didn’t help that it was late winter, when everything was dark and cold, without the novelty of snow’s first arrival or the joys of Christmas. The stress of wedding planning didn’t help either. I was intending to ease some of my fiancée’s distress by planning a surprise party for her approaching milestone birthday. Of course, while the planning was happening, I couldn’t tell her about the party to comfort her; and hiding the event from her was its own source of stress.

It was a hard thing to take. Even though I knew I was doing something that would make her happy in the end, the combination of the secrecy and the present suffering was hard for me to handle emotionally. And so I found myself offering a prayer to Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom Śāntideva offers his devotion. I prayed, tearfully, for him to give me the strength I needed to help me through my loved one’s suffering. At one point while doing this I wound up calling him Maitreya, because (I admit sheepishly) I sometimes have difficulty remembering the difference between the two.

All this is no small deal for me, because I don’t actually believe in Mañjuśrī or Maitreya, at least not in any standard sense of the term. I don’t think there is actually somebody out there who accumulated enough good karma to become a celestial being who redirects good karma down to the rest of us for our benefit. I don’t even think we get reborn after death.

But in moments like these it becomes clear to me that prayer to some sort of personal higher being is something I need. And I am surely not alone in this. As atheists have become more open and strident in their criticism of theism, one of their favourite memes is the Flying Spaghetti Monster – a made-up joke deity which, they argue, should have as much of a status as any historical religious tradition, since there’s no more reason to believe in any of those.

And yet. A couple years ago the AAR held a panel on the Flying Spaghetti Monster phenomenon, one of the few such panels to catch the media’s eye. Lucas Johnston, a student on the panel, told an anecdote that rightfully caught a lot of attention. As reported in the AP story on the panel: “his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery. As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: ‘Come on, Spaghetti Monster!’”

Was she joking or being ironic? To some extent perhaps – but clearly she really wanted her car to start, felt a need to say something. And it seems to me that when facing difficult times, most people feel a need to pray to something, even if they don’t think there’s any real entity they can pray to.

Why is this? Freud thought that “religion” was all about the personification of nature: we have learned to treat nature, which we have no influence over, like the fellow human beings we do have some influence on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were accurate as a historical account of belief in higher beings (which, let’s not forget, is far from exhausting the concept of “religion” as it is usually used.) But there’s something further and deeper going on here as well – something I think Augustine really grasped. We human beings will never be as good as we want to be, let alone having all the things we want. We need help, we are dependent – but the people we depend on, our community, are often not there for us. We need a being to turn to. For Augustine this was really convenient, since he believed that life was all about turning to such a being. And yet, experience seems to testify that even if there are no higher beings, it is still necessary to invent them. David Hume’s Natural History of Religion claimed that science would lead us to belief in a distant deist God, a First Cause, but also noted that most “religion” had nothing to do with this – rather, it was a belief in actively intervening beings like saints or celestial bodhisattvas, whose existence was completely unsupported scientifically.

Hume dismissed such “superstitious” beliefs, saw them as being of value only to the uninformed. But there are good reasons for their endurance, well beyond misinformation. The Alcoholics Anonymous program has proved to be one of the most successful ways of dealing with alcohol addiction, and their “12-step” method has transferred successfully to treating many other kinds of addictions, not only to substances. The heart of the method is admitting one’s own helplessness and putting oneself in the hands of God, or some sort of trusted Godlike being – Mañjuśrī would do the trick. Relying on oneself doesn’t work, because oneself caused the problem; nor can one rely on the people around one, who work in the same established patterns in which the problem developed. It’s a very Augustinian method: one relies on grace and faith, not on works.

So the question is, what do we moderns do about this matter? If we are not convinced that gods exist, or if the God we believe in is an abstract First Explanation (let alone a First Cause) that doesn’t answer prayers, is there any appropriate way to satisfy our need for prayer in hard times?

New Atheists often don’t want to admit this point. When they accept common-sense views at odds with their exultation of science as the only true way of knowing, they do it by equivocating on their definition of “science.” One finds the point in a recent exchange on P.Z. Myers’s blog. Responding to Larry Moran, Myers attacks what he calls:

the bizarre claim that “No scientist that is also a decent human being subjects all her/his beliefs to scientific scrutiny.” I think otherwise. There is a naive notion implicit in that statement that scientific scrutiny is somehow different from critical, rational examination. I’d argue the other way: no decent human being should live an unexamined life.

“Critical, rational examination,” eh? If that’s all science is, then every theologian is a scientist par excellence. I don’t think that’s a claim the New Atheists want to be making. Rather, the “science” they are defending is a) completely empirical, and b) based on the controlled experimental testing of hypotheses. So John Pieret responds to Myers by saying:

Really? What tests did you do on yourself to see if you love your wife and children? Hormone testing, eegs, what? Thinking about things is not “science” per se. Science is empiric investigation. Nor is the question whether “love” can be scientifically investigated, the question is whether individual scientists do it before they decide who they love.

Myers’s response:

John, yes, we carried out a long period of empirical investigation. It’s called “dating”. Both my wife and I studied the problem carefully, and if I’d been a jerk or she’d tormented me cruelly, we’d probably have reached the rational decision that we shouldn’t marry.

I really don’t understand how people can fail to recognize that we do carry out critical examinations of others and ourself. Love doesn’t just pop into existence in the absence of knowledge or experience.

And as I predicted, you do have a naive view of what “scientific” means. It does not mean hormones and eegs. You don’t have to put on a lab coat to do it. It’s simple, rational, evidence-based thinking.

An excellent point by Chris Schoen skewers Myers’s attempted defence:

We’re all aware that the practice of science, while it perhaps has some blurry edges, generally relies not just on empirical observation, but also on the testing of hypotheses, and also to the related practices of replicating the results of such tests, and publishing such results for the scrutiny of other scientists. Eliding any number of these steps is a sure way to have your findings (or “findings”) mocked. And it is on these shoals that most “pseudo-sciences” founder. There is plenty of what a lawyer would call circumstantial evidence for things like ESP and homeopathy. What there is not, in support of these phenomena, is hypothesis testing, controlled experiment, and peer review.
…
No doubt the probability of denial was bound to increase in proportion to how personal the counterfactual is (your wife.) But it is remarkable how much a scrupulous scientist has left out of his definition. White lab coats aside, without hypothesis testing and publication and replication of results, Myer’s courtship is about as scientific in its method as UFOlogy. Probably less, given the number of publications devoted to the latter. Which is not to say, of course, that PZ’s love is not real, or that his knowledge of it is flawed.

Pieret and Schoen do a solid job of demonstrating that Myers’s love for his wife is not based on “science” – not, at least, on the kinds of criteria that scientists use to distinguish science from pseudoscience. In the further comments to Myers’s post, he and his defenders try to argue that Myers’s love was still better than “religion” because it was based on empirical evidence.

But this hardly satisfies. When one is dealing with individual issues in particular lives, the evidence can lead to conclusions that would be unscientific in any sense of science accepted by New Atheists. A grad-school colleague of mine, who was proclaimed a reincarnated lama in Tibet, told me that he as a child had been able to recite things he had no way of knowing without his being a lama. Based on the evidence of his life alone, rebirth was the best explanation. He had based this view on the empirical evidence of his life. I don’t imagine it would hold up under hypothesis testing in controlled conditions; but it was based on as much empirical evidence as Myers’s love for his wife.

Beyond this point, I don’t think it can be said too many times that empiricism is self-refuting. Can statements only be true if they can be empirically tested, even in the sense that Myers tested his love for his wife? Well, the statement “statements can only be true if they can be empirically tested” cannot be empirically tested. Therefore, if it is true, it is false. The appeal to empirical evidence won’t get you out of the hard work of assessing the logic of individual claims made by both “science” and “religion.”

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite’s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. To Marx opium was a painkiller, pure and simple, with addiction a possible but unusual side effect – a status somewhere between today’s Tylenol and Vicodin. (A friend once suggested we translate Marx’s phrase as “Religion is the Tylenol-3 of the masses.”)

This point about opium is supported by the wider context of Marx’s quote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” If religion is an evil here, it is a necessary evil – important to alleviate the pain that arises from living in class-stratified societies. Marx sent a copy of the text containing this quote to Ludwig Feuerbach, the Young Hegelian philosopher famous for urging the superseding of Christianity by atheism. Marx chided Feuerbach (who was far more sympathetic to “religion” than were Dawkins and Hitchens!) for thinking he could make religion go away that easily: it would never disappear until the suffering produced by human material conditions also went away. And so Marx continues:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo. (translation in Tucker, The Marx-Engels reader, p. 54; emphases in original)

Here as in so many other cases, Marx’s ideas were distorted beyond recognition by the 20th-century régimes that attempted to put them into practice. But once we understand what Marx’s ideas actually were, the next question is: was he right?

Here, I would likely make a Buddhist extension and critique of Marx. Yes, much of what we call “religion” can be viewed as a painkiller, something that helps us kill our pain, our suffering. But that suffering doesn’t come primarily from living in exploitative class societies, whether capitalist or pre-capitalist. It comes from being human beings. Imagine the classless society as best you can – wave a magic wand to transform this world into one where everyone is equal, envision hundreds of years’ worth of reflection and gradual transformation, whatever – and you will still end up with a world where people get frustrated, get angry, grow sick, and die.

The traditional biography of the Buddha tells us that he was raised in the sumptuous life of a prince, never leaving the palace, never seeing any suffering – until the very first time he left the palace, whereupon he saw a sick man, an old man and a corpse. And he realized that, no matter what the material conditions of his life, someday these too would be his fate. What cheered him up was the fourth sight he saw: a monk, looking for the way out of the suffering of this world.

I sometimes think of Marx’s thought as leaving us in the Buddha’s family palace, hoping that changes in our material conditions will alleviate our suffering. For Marx, religion is a temporary painkiller that we must take until we get a better world that doesn’t require it. For the Buddha, we live our lives in chronic pain, and this pain that can only be ended by the dharma. I think his vision is more profound and more accurate. Our pain will not be ended by changing the world, only by changing ourselves.

As a historical claim, the latter part of the sentence is laughable and merits no consideration: it takes very little research indeed to find that the drive for logical consistency far predates any modern culture wars. It can be found not only in Plato, its most famous advocate, but also in Augustine, in Aquinas, in Śaṅkara and Kumārila. One might be tempted to find an exception in Nāgārjuna and his Madhyamaka school, which try to avoid having any position whatsoever; but even Nāgārjuna relies in his arguments on the assumption that our positions should not contradict each other – should make logical sense. Fish is smart enough to know this point; the claim that the drive for consistency is a product of the contemporary culture wars can only be understood as a deliberate falsehood, a lie.

More interesting is the normative claim, the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by contradictions. After all, if that’s true, Fish may be entirely justified in lying. One can claim in the context of editorial journalism that consistency is merely a modern invention, and in the context of historical scholarship that it is an ideal as ancient as philosophy. That’s inconsistent, but consistency doesn’t matter.

Fish’s answer to the religion-science debates depends on just such a view: “the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.” In a sense, Fish is taking up the logical implications of the NOMA view more seriously than Stephen Jay Gould had himself: “science” and “religion” can remain separate domains, not because they don’t contradict each other on important matters (it should be obvious that they do) but because that contradiction itself doesn’t matter.

Fish’s argument makes the case from everyday life. It’s not hard to imagine a fundamentalist Christian medical student during the week learning biological ideas founded on the presumption that human life evolved over millions of years, and then going to Bible fellowship on Sunday and speaking about human life on the assumption that human life was created by Jehovah in one instant. People can and do live with contradictions. Why should contradictions bother anyone, beyond pedantic philosophers bothered by obscure details?

Well, for starters, most of us already are bothered. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is fairly well established in social psychology: the perception of inconsistency among our own beliefs and actions is a motivating factor in its own right, one that makes us want to reduce this inconsistency. Perhaps Fish’s preferred form of spiritual practice would be a kind of therapy or meditation that makes us comfortable with such inconsistencies. He doesn’t, however, describe how such a practice could work, nor why we might want to follow it rather than just trying to make our beliefs and practices more harmonious. So we’ve already got a prima facie reason to try and reduce our inconsistencies and contradictions.

More than that: consistency is important for the efficacy of self-transformation as well. If one is trying to practice Osho’s ideal of free expression for pleasure and sexuality, one will be hindered by simultaneously trying to practice the ascetic self-denial of a Theravāda monk; and vice versa. One’s efforts to become a better Christian will be hindered by learning in science class that core Christian beliefs are false. Attempting to practise contradictory ideals is like taking an expectorant and a decongestant at the same time: one undermines one’s own efforts. Perhaps Fish has never tried to become a better Christian or a better Buddhist or just a better person more generally, and has never had to deal with this problem; but for those of us trying to improve our lives, it’s a big issue. Consistency matters, and the differences between competing worldviews will not be resolved this easily in practice, let alone in theory.

Generally, such a law strikes me as overdue. I’ve long been uncomfortable with the idea of giving legal protection only to “religious” convictions, for the idea of “religion” so often tends to obscure more than it clarifies. Aside from the obvious difficulties in classification (does the term “religion” apply to yoga exercises? To meditation? To brushing our teeth?), the term leads us to ask the less important questions, about differences between traditions rather than within them. For these intellectual reasons I suspect it’s a category we’d be better off without, if we could be.

But here the problems with “religion” are more than intellectual. On what reasonable grounds can we proclaim that this man’s refusal to fly on frivolous grounds is less serious, less important, less well considered than, say, a Jew’s refusal to eat pork? I disagree with politically activist views that see commitment to environmental or social causes as our fundamental moral duty; but then I disagree with much of the Qur’an’s moral teaching as well. Anti-discrimination laws are specifically designed to protect those with whom we disagree. Either the law should protect all deeply and sincerely held beliefs, irrespective of their “religious” status, or it should protect no such beliefs at all.

(No post this Sunday, as I’ll be out of town, as well as starting a new semester.)

(Scroll down to read the rest of the post.)

Strange and incomprehensible rituals, aren’t they? At least, that’s how they seem at first. But if you haven’t figured it out yet: what does “Nacirema” spell backwards?

The obsessive and sadomasochistic bodily rituals that Miner describes with such scope are our own, not only among the Americans but among most Western cultures, and increasingly in the rest of the world as well: bathrooms, toothbrushes, nurses, dentists. But described in the language of the outsider, these things all come to look strange. (They also come to look like “religion,” another reason I don’t care much for the concept.)

There are many messages that one can take away from Miner’s exercise. In my view, one of the most important is that other cultures are not as different from ours as we often think they are.

I think that my post on performance theory was too strongly phrased; it sounds as if I’m saying we should always understand other cultures’ myths in terms of their content and not their effects, and understand rituals in terms of their meaning rather than effect. But I don’t believe this. I’ve been thinking about the point since writing my recent Christmas posts. In both of these posts (and the comments below) I was effectively arguing that certain rituals and myths are best viewed through something like a performative lens: the rituals are best understood as preserving family tradition, the myths as stories that delight children despite their being false statements. It’s just that these particular rituals and myths, of course, are ours: the rituals of Christmas and the myth of Santa Claus.

So indeed, the fundamental point of ritual and myth can very often be in what they do, not merely in what they mean. But that’s as true of our own cultures as it is of others’. Sometimes they make claims regardless of their truth, because of those claims’ effects; and sometimes they perform traditional actions regardless of their meaning or cognitive content. But so do we. Like us, they make statements about the physical world and its causal processes; the fact that those statements seem bizarre to us does not mean that people were only saying them for their effects.

(Sorry for the long gap in the post. I just didn’t want to give the game away, for those encountering Miner for the first time.)