Something from last November

I was browsing some news stories a week ago when I noticed one about a Christian prayer society arranging a world-wide prayer day for the world's economies. Not only that, but some of these Christians had travelled to Wall Street to pray through the brazen bull.
It reminded me of the Israelites melting down their gold and praying for help in the desert while Moses was indulging in a little mountaineering. It's idolatry.
It's amusing that they can lose sight of their religion so much. It's a bit like Roman Catholics praying through their saints. I wonder if the jealous God really does listen to the saints' intercessions, or whether he has cast them all into hell because of his jealousy.
People always want a guide; a feeling of direction and purpose; some solidity in the shifting sands of time. Politicians don't help; they're too engaged in the highfalutin game of politics to snare anything more than a passing fancy, which is all they need. Giving people a sense of direction can safely be left to other people, which is where religions pick up the slack.
Of course, the concept applies on a smaller scale. Leading hikers requires you always to give an impression of confidence. If you become unsure of where you are and you let everyone know they become positively irrational, even if you have a foolproof plan for finding out. Saying "if there's a stream around the next bend we're here, but if not then we're here" isn't good enough. You get complaints, people wanting to stop, people wanting to turn back or try a different route: a whole disaster that they'll remember next time. I always wondered what the purpose of the phrase 'if you're not confident in yourself others won't be' was. If I'm not confident, why would I want to mislead others into being confident?
But a few experiences of that and I realise that the answer is that whereas my confidence is graded, for the ones being led it's much more of an all-or-nothing trust. I might have a minor doubt, but the smallest doubt suddenly makes them realise that the leader is not worthy of complete confidence and they feel lost. It's the feeling that matters, not the rational recognition that it's only a minor doubt.
Of course, people's nature forces leaders (in all aspects of life) to appear confident and not admit to mistakes that might give a pattern or forecast a larger problem, because admitting to doubt or error frees people's demons of doubt. Thus when the larger error emerges they feel especially let down. I didn't really want to justify chronic deception, so I'll save this for later and get back to my point, such as it is.
The terminology of hiking, with leaders and paths and getting lost translates nicely into our customary metaphors for more abstract things such as life paths and societal direction. When our leaders let us down, as inevitably they will, being mere humans, many of us will feel irrationally lost. Religion scoops up the lost and gives them a rock on which to rely that nothing else can. You can place your faith in things or people, but people lie and make mistakes, and things are transitory and easily lost themselves: all things must pass (except the Balrog!).
The very definition of an omniscient, immortal God makes Him impervious to these doubts. Religions always gain in times of trouble because they feed on the human need for direction; they provide direction that outlasts a person or a material objective, and they do this by invoking a greater power. This is why so many people convert after a stressful event. They think that they've simply realised what is important in life, but actually they've gone for what's simple, because all the little things that drive you from day to day seem insignificant and so diverse when weighed against a life-changing event; a life-changing event makes people lost; it makes them question their direction, and simply finding out that the direction can be questioned, as we've seen, can cause an extreme emotional response.
Of course, we all rationally know, when I write it here, that our direction in life can be questioned, but we don't really care until something gives us that emotion of doubt. It is only then that we grope for certainty elsewhere.
Psychologists have shown in various cunning tests (which I may add later) that humans are very good at forgetting to question the ends and focus very much on the means to those ends. We’ve even developed management-speak for it: ‘thinking outside the box’. These studies show that we don’t naturally question implicit goals, and when I suggest that this is the same thing as having a larger purpose in life, we can see that we don’t like to question these goals, or have them questioned.
I’ve touched on this subject before, when thinking about the motivations of religious terrorists: they had an unswerving faith in their religion and its doctrine, and so when they are forced to question what they are taught are parts of it, the emotional reaction is to dislike the thing forcing them to question themselves, which is western culture and its spread.
Fundamentalist evangelicals of all faiths wish to convert the world, not only to save their souls (a laudable aim), but possibly also for the probably subconscious desire never to be forced to question one’s principles of faith by coming into contact with someone who thinks differently. Many people desire and seek conformity (something which Jungian typology suggests to us, as well as simple observation), and this is yet another aspect of this same desire not to have oneself questioned: if everyone believes the same things, no-one has to explain anything, guess others’ motivations or think or communicate in any way about these things.
In fact, all these emotional responses seem very much like evolutionary adaptations to force others to accept our goals and plans; we naturally have this powerful emotional response to being questioned, and similarly, because we have evolved as social animals, we have an instinct to conform or at least not to question others.
Those of us who lack the desire to conform more than most are also perhaps those more prone to rational questioning of goals and beliefs. Which comes first (if either) is the same question as which comes first of the desire not to be questioned and the desire for conformity. I suspect that it comes from a greater ability to separate oneself from instinctive, emotional reactions and to trust the rational mind despite the doubts and uncertainties that it creates.
I believe that many followers of religion use it as a support; a crutch that replaces an inquisitive disposition with simple absolutes, all for the sake of laziness and the fear of the uncertainties that thought produces. I also have tried to suggest, by tying together various strands of knowledge and conjecture, that this is an emotional problem that is not isolated from other parts of life, such as existential dread, or mid-life crises, as it is also known, and that it causes identifiable problems in the world (such as religious terrorism).
My final suggestion, however, is that it is this fundamental divide between the emotional aspects of religious faith and the rational recognition of life’s uncertainties and unknowns that really separates science and religion. We often hear of, or read, debates between ‘science’ and religion (although actually they’re debates between scientists and religion, or sometimes not involving science or scientists) and those of us with sense dismiss this artificial dichotomy as being inappropriate: science is not a system of belief with one opinion on everything, in the way that religious doctrine is. Science is a process; admittedly a process that leads us to truth, which is what religious doctrine claims to give us by different means, but nonetheless it seems strange to compare a process or method to a set of definite beliefs.
It is the difference in attitude and character that really distinguishes science and religion: when people have these debates inevitably someone appeals to our feeling that there must be a higher truth; suggests that there is more to life than cold science and rails against the materialistic, object-oriented society in which we live. Materialism isn’t much related to science, except by the emotional distance from religion. These debates are attempting to address, in my opinion, a fundamental divide in human character: between the cold, rational, thinking side of our minds and the emotional, intuitive and unquestionable side of humanity.

Maybe this is why some doctrines of Christianity do not accept intellectual assent to the possibility of God, or the rational decision to believe, as sufficient belief; such a person remains a heathen in their eyes, because the essence of religion is not actually belief in God so much as a certain feeling; as one evangelical explained to me (I paraphrase him here): ‘the revelation of the gospels; a certain knowledge of the Truth’. The idea of absolute knowledge of something unproven revulsed me, and I had a different sort of revelation. This madness (known as faith) is apparent in many areas of life, not just in religion.
It is what made Tony Blair, our much-esteemed ex-PM, seem so terrible to me: from the moment he appeared in the media, he projected an image of a man on a mission; who knew the absolute rightness of his beliefs (even as they swapped around) and had no doubts. This is why his reforms have been so galling: it was not that he won heated debates with everyone agreeing that both sides had a point but he was right, but that he refused to accept that he other side had a viable opinion. The image projected was one of certainty, and I’m tempted to call it an unbalanced mindset.
Of course, the rational approach allows for more shifting of opinions as more evidence points in other directions, or perhaps better arguments occur, but I’d still call it more balanced, because it is closer to the theoretical ‘correct’ answer, whereas blind faith in one side or the other can be far from the truth. If the faith is questioned, or proven wrong, the mindset is also more unstable, since it is not predicated on shifting evidence or the ability to change.
If religions want to stop the haemorrhaging of followers then the dumbing-down of worship must stop. In my opinion (and no doubt many people will have taken offence at the suggestion) religion caters to the emotional part of us, and as such image is vital. A person isn’t going to have faith in the ultimate truth if it acts like a 45-year old trying to be ‘hip’ by speaking in outdated colloquialisms. He’s going to feel more inclined to believe if it has the musty, ancient awe of giant structures, recurring echoes and the continuity of millennia of traditions.
People believed in Christianity when it was all in Latin and they didn’t speak the language and didn’t even read any language. Understanding of the words is no barrier to belief (in fact, one might suggest that understanding of what is written is more of a barrier to belief). The CofE has no need to convert its poetic and rhythmic prayer-book English into modern tripe. The ties of older English unite disparate dialects rather than alienating them. The King James Bible was translated by people who were great intellects and took many years over crafting elegant and powerful phrases; to throw away the emotional impact of their work because of a modernizing agenda implies that the heads of the Church do not understand the role of religion in people’s lives.
I’m tempted to think that it’s arrogance (a traditional trait amongst high-ranking clergy) that makes them think that they can take on the rational mind and win, perhaps combined with their own ‘deep knowledge’ that they represent the Truth. However, things are far more often due to incompetence than conspiracy, and so it is more likely that they do not understand what is happening. The rock of a person’s life on which a person depends when nothing else is there cannot be an ever-shifting platform of marketing slogans and youth jargon. Modern marketing is very successful in selling products, but to treat one’s religion as a product is to misunderstand its very nature. Religion is a support (and although I consider it an unnecessary one I understand that many people do rely on it), and by making religion ever-changing religious leaders are removing that support: they are forcing people to cope with shifting ideas and ensuring that they feel alone and without the comfort of familiarity.
Perhaps I should be glad that religion is accelerating its own death, because this might make people happier to accept science, but I don’t think that this is how things will happen. I think that the CofE will simply lose followers to faiths that ignore the cult of change and modernisation that New Labour popularised, because I think that this need for some certainty will always be present in a population. These other faiths might well be less harmless than the CofE, and then rationality will begin to suffer, rather than gain.