Religion is natural, but is it right? Increasing numbers of people in the US are giving up the practice and belief, if polls are to be believed. Hellfire and damnation is sure to follow, according to those left in the pews, at least those of the farthest evangelical congregations. As a student of Carl Jung, I appreciate the psychology of religion, seeing its processes as deeply reflective of our individual and communal psychologies, as well as the consequence of a complex evolutionary process whose aim has been as much social solidarity and reproduction as much, or more than, philosophical truth. At base, we are not rational beings, and follow a variety of themes and images, termed archetypes in the Jungian system, which persistently guide our dreams, motivations, and cultures. We are not just economic units driven by profit and loss, but have richer dramatic lives and needs.
Father
What could be more obvious? We grow up in households with father figures who are unimaginably powerful. Food just appears, housing, furniture, love, care, and power and discipline. It is no wonder that, once we grow up, there is a father-shaped hole in our view of the world. In the usual patriarchial culture, the father stands alone, at the top, as both creator and moral disciplinarian, in an archetype that is expressed over and over again in cultures throughout the world, from Zeus to Allah, as it is in our political systems naturally as well. But the mother archetype is also in play, especially in Catholic and Hindu cultures, in the Marys and various powerful devas. Is it possible to see the world without using these instinctive lenses? That is what the scientific revolution and enlightenment attempted, in a cognitive revolution that remains, evidently, incomplete. Take prayer. In the form of requesting something from the father in the sky, it is pathetically immature and retrograde, however understandable in primitive conditions of complete existential mystery. On the other hand, some meditation, joy, and gratitude for the wonders of existence are surely healthy and consistent with mature knowledge of where we stand in the universe. Involvement with this archetype reflects quite directly how far one has gotten along the developmental road from childhood to maturity.
Heaven
The afterlife used to be a rather drab, depressing affair, in the classical Greek and Jewish systems. Then it was progressively gussied up into a lottery jackpot, in the Islamic and Christian systems. Buddhists and Hindus also find life after death, in the form of reincarnation, to be absolutely central to their philosophies. The magic of consciousness is incredibly hard to give up, and hard to get rational perspective on. It takes stringent dedication to naturalism and the evident facts of the world to accept, deep down, that death is really going to be the end- of everything. One need only think about animals- they are obviously conscious, and there are levels of consciousness all the way down the scale of evolution, to infinitesimal, then finally to nothing at all. How does that work, other than in direct proportion to their physical, brain-based endowments? What could be more clear, and in stark contravention of our intuitive and (weirdly) hopeful dream of life after death?
Tribe
We are not just endowed with intellect, but with a social nature, which focuses our striving and loyalty on the tribe. Our tribe is right and good, theirs is bad and wrong. Tribalism founds and plagues every new religious sect or philosophical school, which strains to show how it is right and its predecessors wrong. Jung vs Freud, Analytical vs Continental, Shiite vs Sunni, in endless profusion. Religions lack even the veneer of factual basis which characterize other divides like political polarizations or academic disputes. Doctrine, orthodoxy, and heresy are freely defined by whoever has social power. If one's village is Evangelical, woe to Catholics. If one's family is Seventh-Day Adventist, mere contact with outsiders is forbidden. Tribes have totemic symbols and artistic traditions as part of their identification / bonding apparatus, tokens of the archetypal processes at work.
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| Magical or zodiacal symbols in an Islamic Book of Wonders, circa 1400. |
Magic
Living in an enchanted word is natural, and wonderful. We all start there in childhood and treasure the dramatic, humanistic power of seeing the world through archetypal lenses- in animals with special totemic powers, crystals that heal, trees that listen. This is truly where traffic with archetypes is most fluid and explicit- bringing dreams to narrative life. Religious superstition raises this drama to existential levels, putting the magic on a celestial level of god(s), all-powerful father figures, and alternatives of eternal hell-fire or bliss. The chances of all this actually describing any kind of reality is nil- we are talking total fantasy. But its evident grip on billions of people shows just how powerful magical thinking is and how far we are from being rational.
Truth
All claim truth, but few prove it. Religions are notorious for splitting into sects, each possessing the final truth, the real story. Interestingly, atheists do not splinter in this way. There is plenty of bickering, about what humanism entails or is, how liberal humanists should be, etc., but there are no Seventh-Day atheists, or Twelver atheists, or other miscelleneous schools. Communism was atheistic, but was in truth a quasi-religious, authoritarian cult all its own. Once one has discarded attachment to these archetypes and the theologies they underpin, and to the need for truth as a matter of self-identification, why then it is easier to agree on what is actually true, as well as on the many areas where we just don't know, without the need to make up stories. This need, a dire need, for answers, especially to "big" questions, is a tipoff that we are dealing with archetypal energies, not with a rational level of thought.
One could compare atheism to the concept of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism- the release from the cycle of rebirth, from attachment to the archetypes, and escape to a level of intellectual / emotional freedom. Escape from rebirth is implicit, since the atheist doesn't believe in rebirth, heaven or afterlife at all. It focuses attention on this life, this moment, and compassion here rather than later. But to escape the causes of suffering, (especially the infliction of suffering upon others!), by regarding the archetypes intellectually and skeptically, and by distancing one's self from them, is far more important. To leave behind the seductive entanglements of archetypal belief and the often-abusive social relations they entail is personally momentous, and a healing balm for a planet full to the brim with faithful dogmatists.
- One moving, harrowing, story of escape.
- Viral data dump from a skeptic.
- Administration cut funding for surveillance before outbreak.
- Graph for New York.
- Unemployment-ocolypse.
