Hey everyone. Welcome to our second video
in Philosophy 106:
World Religions. Good to see you again.
And in this little video I want to
accomplish two things with you.
I want to continue, you know, tracing the
threads that we started to discover
together in the first video, and think a
little bit more deeply about the origin
of religion
and its ultimate purpose. Like why is
there religion, right?
Why did we cook up this beautiful,
multi-layered series of systems that
cover the whole globe,
that interact with ultimate reality, that
help us build rituals and community, and
all the stuff we thought about before. So
that's one of the things I want to
accomplish in this video -- think more
deeply about the origin of religion.
And then the second thing I want to do
is think about five
kind of prominent answers to that
question, five prominent
theorists and their theories about the
origin
and the purpose of religion. Guys like
Freud and Jung and Frazer. And
we'll get to that in a minute. And that's
going to lead to our discussion this
week.
Our discussion prompt has to do with
these five
theories on the origin and purpose of
religion
that we're about to get into. So let's
get started.
So when did religion begin?
You know it's easy to answer
that question -- we have no idea.
I mean, we really just don't know. Think
about it.
The art of writing is,
in the scale of time, brand new
technology.
It's about 5,000 years old right? About
3,000 BC,
in the Middle East and various other
places around the world, here in the new
world, and in
China. Also at different times.
Brilliant people figured out how to
create a system of signs and symbols
called writing. Cuneiform in Sumeria,
right, was a
a wet clay tablet and a triangular stick
that they pressed down into it
to keep agricultural records and tax
records and so on
And as soon as writing was invented
people started writing
poetry, and hymns, and ritual, and
and history, and philosophy. And so
with the invention of writing of course
humankind's
knowledge about itself exploded. And you
and I can go back and
find some of those earliest written
records and kind of get a sense of what
those people were thinking.
But before 3,000 BC
it's just a blank. All we have
is their artifacts, their cave
art. Some of the most famous cave
paintings in the world
are from 15,000--20,000 years ago.
And there are lots of stone age
sculptures scattered around the world.
Almost
90% of them female figures
that go back as far as 100,000 years.
What do they mean? You know we don't have
any way of exactly knowing, but I think
there's a growing body of evidence that
those female figures had sacred significance.
There's another clue that we find in the
ancient world,
in the primordial, prehistoric world, that
might help us
address this question, when did religion
or at least religious thinking
begin? And it's ritual burials. About
100,000 years
ago we see for the first time
hominids, Neanderthals in fact, not even
Homo sapiens, not even our species,
Neanderthals doing ritual burial --
burying their dead in specific
poses with expensive and elaborately
beaded
vests, and tools, and medicine bags,
you know, as if they're prepared for a
journey. And before that
where do you find the human remains? In
the midden pile, you know, in the
in the garbage dump outside the village
site with the fish bones and the broken
pottery and
there's grandma. But something shifted
about 100,000 years ago.
Neanderthal and later Homo sapiens began to do ritual burials.
And think about it. That suggests
something doesn't it? That suggests that
they must have begun to to realize or
speculate that when the body dies the
spirit or the soul kind of goes on a
journey to
an invisible plane. And so in a way this
is the beginning of one of the great
archetypes
or universal ideas in all religion and
mythology,
namely, that there is an invisible plane
of reality hidden from us by the visible
plane.
And that invisible plane is understood
to be
superior to, and the source of, the
visible plane.
Are you with me? So the sensory world,
the physical world, is the visible plane.
And it seems that ancient people --
and we see this in all mythologies and
religions today --
it seems that about 100,000
years ago these ritual burials indicate
to us
that these people began to maybe wonder
about this, that is there an invisible
realm
hidden from us by the visible realm
from which spirits come and to which
spirits go.
They take form, they take corporeal
physical form here in the world, and then
they, when they die, the spirit goes back,
animals and people.
You know, this is again just our
speculation.
Why else would they do these ritual
burials?
So that's a starting point for us maybe
we see
as long as a hundred thousand years ago
the beginning
of religious consciousness or religious
thinking.
Now, let's turn to these five prominent
theorists that come from fields like
anthropology and psychology
and theology. The first one I want to
think about with you is James Frazier.
And again the discussion prompt this
,week I'm going to ask you
which of these five theories do you
agree with the most, or gets the closest
to what you think the origin and purpose
of religion might be.
So here we go. James, James Frazer, (1854
to 1941). He was a Scottish anthropologist.
He made a very careful study of world
mythology and
religion. In fact, he wrote one of the
great books about world mythology
called "The Golden Bough," b-o-u-g-h, bough.
Um, kind of a survey of of world myth, one
of the first guys to do that.
But Frazer argued that religion
probably began
as an attempt to influence or control
nature. We see that in primal
religions around the world, in
shamanistic
primal tribal religions, you know, the
spiritual
teacher of the tribe, the shaman, is often
charged with that job
of, you know, protecting the warriors in
battle, or weakening the warriors of the
other guys, or making it rain, or
making it stop raining, or curing
diseases, and, you know,
influencing nature. And so Frazer's,
I think, making a reasonable presumption
here.
That it does seem to be the case, and
there's a lot of evidence for this, that
spirituality and religion maybe did
originate from
our attempts to influence nature.
Frazer also argues that that religion
is kind of an
intermediate step between the earlier
and even more primitive
magical thinking, and what Frazer
calls, you know, the scientific age
that's coming.
So the evolution of humankind from
magical thinking to religious thinking
to scientific thinking. And that one day,
Frazer postulates, we will outgrow religion as
we finally figure out how things
actually work. So let's turn to our
second guy. And that's Sigmund Freud. And
I bet this is the one name on the list
that most of you are familiar with.
Especially if you're a psychology
major. Freud, kind of a big deal right?
So Freud lived from 1856 to 1939,
and he's of course a towering figure
in the field of psychology, one of the
patriarchs
of psychology along with William James
who's also on this list.
So Freud comes out of the medical field.
He's a medical doctor. He's a physician.
And he's also an atheist and a
materialist.
And so we know what an atheist means,
right? He denies the existence of God.
And he's a materialist. And that
often goes together with atheism.
Materialism is the
philosophical position
that reality is just matter.
So there's no soul, there's no
consciousness, there's no
God. What we call consciousness is just
an activity of our physical form.
It's a biological event. So anyway,
Freud's not a fan of religion. He wrote
one little,
thin, tiny book about religion. It's
called "The Future of an Illusion."
So here's Freud's take on religion: That
it's nonsense.
That it's a form of group neurosis.
That it's easier to be crazy together in
churches and mosques and synagogues than
it is to be crazy off by our self.
So we find people who share our
particular brand of neurosis
and we bind together around made-up
ideas like
the idea that there is a God. And Freud
argues that our belief in God
is kind of a coping mechanism that
arises from our earliest
childhood experiences. And
belief in God for Freud is then a
projection
of those first imprinted experiences.
When we were born, Freud argues, think
about it,
we come out of the womb, we're helpless,
vulnerable, weak. We can't even move
our hands to our mouth to feed ourselves.
Human infants are very vulnerable. Other
animals,
they drop a baby, the baby just gets up
and walks away.
But we human beings are very dependent
on our parents
for 20, 30, 40 years sometimes. So
that's how it often is with higher order
mammals that they have a longer
childhood, longer
state of dependency. So when we are born --
and Freud's right about this at
least --
we are...it's pretty scary. We absolutely
depend for our survival
on the people around us, on our parents.
And Freud argues that imprints us.
We learn two things, fundamentally, as
infants right awa.
One, that adults love us and they care
for us and they feed us, they keep us
warm, and they sing little songs to us,
and they protect us.
And two, they're huge and scary,
and crazy, and they could kill us at any
second.
So it's simultaneously comforting and terrifying.
And Freud argues, we bring those twin um
imprints into our adult life, and then
we project them
onto a fictional character called God,
who isn't really there, but we ascribe to
that being
those two qualities. That God nurtures
and
loves and cares for us, but he could kill
us
at any second with cancer
or a drunk driver in the intersection.
And that
is where our belief in God comes from
Freud argues. Yeah, look.
Freud, we would call this reductionism.
You know, Freud reduces
all religion to a kind of neurosis.
So I don't know where you are again on
the atheism to theism spectrum, but
Freud makes a powerful argument.
Let's at least give him this
piece, that
here in a college class where our job is
to try
on all these different ways of thinking,
these different perspectives, and
critically examine them. Let me ask
you a question. What
what if Freud's right?
What if we've invented the whole damn thing?
"No, there's a God!" Freud's like, well I
know you want there to be one right? So
Freud's kind of an exciting,
antagonistic
moment in our study of world religions.
He's not having it.
So let me get to the third
figure on our list of five. And his
name is William James. i mentioned him a
moment ago
he's a psychologist also he's an
American. He's also a philosopher.
And in 1900 he convened a gathering in
Edinburgh, Scotland
of all the leading luminaries in the
social sciences --
sociology, anthropology, psychology --
and it was a conference on religious
experience.
And James made a powerful argument to
his colleagues
in the behavioral sciences. He said, we
have not
taken religion seriously enough. We need
to start studying religious experience
very carefully. There's something going
on that we need to understand.
Because prior to that -- again, the
intellectual class had largely ignored
religion, it wasn't something to be
studied scientifically --
but James changes all that. And
his series of talks at that conference
in 1900
got put together into a book called "The
Varieties of Religious Experience "
It's one of the most important books in
the field
of religious studies -- required reading
for everybody who becomes a religious
studies major.
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by
William James.
But in that book and elsewhere in his
work James
makes this argument, and it's kind of the
opposite of Freud
in some ways. James argues that
religious experience has measurable,
beneficial
outcomes. And James does not take a
position on "Is there a god or is there
not a god?" or which religion is true. He's
not asking those questions.
He's saying as a scientist studying
human beings and
and their behavior in psychology and all
that stuff we have to acknowledge
that people with deep religious
convictions and people in a religious
community have better lives.
They measurably are happier. You know,
behavioral scientists
claim to be able to study things like
depression and anxiety and wellness and
happiness.
So they're measurably happier. People
with strong religious convictions and
strong religious community
have longer, more stable marriages.
Their families are more uh tightly bound
together.
They are healthier,
physically healthier, they literally live
longer. And James is like, we can't ignore
this data.
We can't ignore the efficaciousness
of religion, you know the effectiveness
of religion,
on human happiness, on human life. I'll
just drop one real quick example in here.
Some of you may have experience with
alcohol and drug recovery.
So even a passing acquaintance with it,
maybe a parent, or
a child, or a family member has been
through this.
Or maybe you got a DUI and they made you
go to AA meetings for a while.
So in the recovery world as they call it,
you know, in the 12-step
recovery world it's basically kind of a
religious
process, a spiritual process, where you
turn your life over to a higher power
and you admit powerlessness and
and slowly with the help of the
community around you you begin to
let go of some of your destructive
compulsive disorder, you know, your
compulsive drinking or drug using or
whatever it is.
And so if you have even any
experience with that
positive dynamic -- marriages being put
back together,
fathers returning to their families,
getting clean, getting sober,
then you understand James's point --
that spiritual programs often, not always
of course,
but often and by and large have these
kinds of
measurable positive outcomes in people's
lives.
And James is like, why aren't we talking
more about that?
Why are we wasting all our time arguing
about is there a God or is there not a
God?
James wants to measure outcomes, measure results.
And by the way one last piece on James.
He's not just studying Christianity or
Judaism or Islam.
He's studying people of all faith paths --
Buddhist monks, and how nuns pray, and
mystical experiences, and enlightenment
experiences,
and all of that stuff. So the fourth guy
on our list is Rudolph
Otto. And Otto is a German theologian. And
his scope is narrow. He's focusing
really just on the Bible,
Judaeo-Christian and maybe Islamic.
Certainly just
Western religion. And Otto
tries to answer the question this way:
The origin of religion
always comes back down to one guy.
A Moses, an Abraham, a Jesus, a Buddha,
a Muhammad. There's some dude that has
some
breakthrough experience, you know, Buddha
meda...now I'm
adding the Eastern guys in -- he he didn't
really do that but what the heck --
you know, Buddha meditating under the
Bodhi tree becoming enlightened.
But the examples that Otto's focusing on
are things like
Moses, you know, the burning bush.
God appearing to Moses and saying, go to
Egypt and let my people go.
And that's where Judaism really
comes from. Moses is the first
Jew many say. So Otto's claim is that
religion comes from one guy, kind of a
prophet guy, who has this
breakthrough experience which Otto calls
the "numinous
experience" from the Latin word "numen"
for spirit.
Finally, Carl Jung. And Jung is an
interesting take. We could do a whole
lecture on Jung
but...and we'll mention some of his
work in the next video --
but briefly and just to wrap up our work
today
Jung was a colleague of Freud. In some
ways a
protege. You know, Freud was the mentor in some respects
and so Jung also comes from the
medical field,
and he's also interested in
psychotherapy and psychology.
But Jung and Freud have
one of the most famous intellectual
breakups
around this question, of the value of
mythology and religion.
As we've already noticed, Freud ditched
the whole thing.
But Jung goes the other way. Jung
studies mythology and religion,
particularly Hinduism by the way,
fell in love with the Indian traditions,
more on that later,
and Jung, as as Jung studied world
mythology he began to notice -- and he
wasn't the only guy but we're focusing
on him --
he began to notice that wherever you go
in the world as you read mythology and
religion you begin to notice certain
common universal themes, images,
even whole narratives in two cultures
that had no contact with each other.
And Jung begins to hypothesize
that maybe, you know, how can we explain
this?
Maybe there is within us a collective
unconscious,
an area of our mind that we're not aware
of, that idea
shared with Freud, but for Jung it's a
collective unconscious.
And out of our collective unconscious
comes up all of these universal
archetypes
and ideas that then take on local
form in imagery drawn from our
environment and from our sociology.
We talked about that last time. But
underneath all of the myths and
religions of the world are a relatively
small
set of universal archetypal ideas
and those he calls archetypes. And
therefore Jung argues finally
that studying religion and mythology
just might be the most
important topic of all because it lets
us
read the language of the collective
unconscious
and gives us deep insights into the
human psyche,
the human soul. And so religion for
Jung, at its best, helps us develop into
our higher selves,
into our more evolved self.
So there's my little quick sketch of
these five prominent theories on the
origin and purpose of religion.
When the video wraps up here in a second
go ahead and click on over to our
discussion
thread in this module and make your
first stab at this --
which of these five theories is
the closest to your views
and why? So let's leave that there. And in
our next video
we're going to move into some of those
Jungian ideas. We're going to talk about
the archetypes further as we think more
deeply
about religion in the next video. See on
the other side.
