Note from Rowland: how someone can espouse these ultra-liberal views and remain an Episcopal priest, beats me. This essay is included, as are many of Harry Cook's articles and sermons on this website, for your (mature) reflection.

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A Perspective on Religion for Those Who Value Reason

By Harry T. Cook

Of late I have been negotiating a dense treatise on global warming and what can be done about it. Entitled A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, it is the work of Yale University economist William Nordhaus. The 234-page book is filled with graphs and figures and theories, all the yield of sound and thorough scholarship. What Nordhaus did to make his book accessible to the likes of this non-economist and non-mathematician was to place a chapter at the beginning with the heading: "Summary for the Concerned Citizen." Anybody with a high school education can read that chapter and, assuming it is read with an open mind, use that summary of knowledge to make political, personal and social choices that would definitely make a difference for the good.

I will use Nordhaus' methodology in what follows to make accessible some of the results of the work in which scholars of the phenomenon of religion have been engaged. Religion - the word is of probable Latin derivation (religare) and may go etymologically to the idea of "restraint." That makes sense when one considers the probable origins of the Jewish-Christian stream of thought among 13th Century B.C.E. migrant communities in the hill country of what is now northern Israel. Having fled the depredations of the economic oligarchies of the coastal cities of the eastern Mediterranean, a hitherto straitened people adopted what archaeology suggests were egalitarian communities organized around a shared food supply and self governed by an evolving ethic.

That ethic seems to have had its beginnings in what is now called "case law" - an if A., then B. arrangement, remnants of which can be found in Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 23.

A reasonable conclusion is that "religion" is a matter of acquired ethics not revealed dogma. It is a humanist enterprise having to do with here-and-now matters in which behavior has here-and-now consequences in that "if A, then B" system of distributive justice rather than a then-and-there retributive justice pronounced by an external force.

That understanding eliminates the need for a transcendent god that inevitably must be apprehended through some kind of revelation. If it is a self-realization type of revelation, then any person can claim to have received it on his or her own. If it is the more usual type of revelation, it is mediated through a sacred text or ritual.

The concept of a transcendent deity underlying virtually every aspect of Western religion is the beginning of all religious conceits. The existence of "god" is assumed. Or if not "existence," then the ground and source of existence, as Paul Tillich might put it. It is terribly unpopular to say so, but any such "god" is surely at some level a cooperative projection of human need and imagination. That is not to say there is no god. It is to say that human beings, at least at the present level of our intellectual evolution, have no knowledge and no known path of knowledge by which to arrive at the conclusion that our need/imagination points to any such objective reality. Those 13th Century B.C.E. communities, as primitive as we presume they were, seemed not to have cared much about a god to validate their evolving ethic. But as those among whom the ethic originated became distant memories, the oral and later written texts of that ethic took on an aura of holy writ supposedly requiring mediation by a priestly class that for its legitimacy appealed to dead ancestors as unseen deities.

The once simple and straightforward ethic was sacralized and turned into a set of complicated statutes enforced by civil and military authorities for whom might made right. It remained for the public intellectuals known as prophets to extract justice from those statutes on behalf of the poor and oppressed whose interests had been eclipsed in the process of sacralization. Twelve hundred or so years into that progression a many-times stressed people came to grips with the power known as the Roman empire, even as their ancestors had to deal with the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians and the Egyptians. Thus ensued a guerrilla war that came to climax in the destruction of that people's central cultic site in Jerusalem by the far greater power of Rome.

Soon thereafter appeared several versions of a story concerning a Galilean ethical wisdom teacher whose strategy and message were grounded in the tradition of the prophets. That teacher was depicted as having been swept up in the Roman pogroms of crucifixion. The story made him out to be not just a teacher but a dying and rising son of the Jewish deity - a proposition akin in many ways to those found in prevailing Graeco-Roman myth religions. Some Jews bought that proposition and others did not, thus signaling the split between what became known as rabbinic-synagogue Judaism and a new movement eventually denominated "Christianity." Christianity, by adopting as its administrative structure the military scheme of its sworn enemy (Rome), went in the space of 400 or so years from a troublesome minority to one tolerated by Rome and eventually subsumed by Rome, finally becoming in effect the empire itself ready for the sake of political hegemony to impose its belief system on a sometimes unwilling world. While much of what appears above in this essay is debatable, it is debatable history.

It makes a case that allegedly revealed truth, mystically ordained priesthoods and unseen but potent deities are products of need-based imagination and the desire for power. What is of lasting value is the humanist ethic that has come out of the Jewish-Christian thought stream. It is universal in that any individual or group can adopt it without reference to deities or dogma or priesthoods. Its validity is evident in its adoption and practice.

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The 1,000 or so words of the essay above would be, á la Nordhaus, the summary, introductory chapter of a much longer account of the religion of the Hebrew-Christian bible, should I ever get around to completing it.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.