Sunday, June 22, 2008

Religion and Excretion

It is very dangerous to turn on the television in America on a Sunday morning. I just did and I was informed by Dr James Chappell that Westminster Abbey was built in 170AD. He also told the story of Thomas Parr - 'Old Parr' - who is buried in the Abbey. He was believed to have lived to the age of 152. The post-mortem was conducted by the great physician William Harvey who remarked on the child-like cleanliness of Parr's colon. In fact, the Old Parr claim has been discredited and the Abbey was started in 1045, though there was a shrine on the site in 616. But Dr Chappell had product to shift -  a colon scourer called Dual Action Cleanse - and he wasn't going to let a few facts get in the way of his golf buggy and speed boat in Boca Raton. 'Death starts in the colon' was Chappell's primary claim. It's an old superstition. Confronted with the contrast between their exalted self-image and the horrors of excretion, people are naturally drawn to the conviction that cleanliness - getting the shit out of the way - is, indeed, godliness. There is an obvious religious structure to the idea. Excretion is an emblem of our fallen condition, of our guilt. Cleansing our colons may be sold as a medical good - though it definitely isn't - but its true appeal is salvific.
Which drive round the block brings me to Robert Iddiols comment on my post Raj and the Scientologists. Robert says I'm comfortable exposing Scientology but I am much more sympathetic to conventional religious practices 'even though both assert a similar torrent of bullshit.' (See - shit and religion again.) This is a good point, made better by my dismay at the beliefs of the inhabitants of the Yearning for Zion ranch. I seem to be distinguishing between good and bad religion. Robert finds this absurd because the literal claims of all religions are more or less equally preposterous. I think I can save myself from absurdity with two related claims: first, religion isn't about belief and, secondly, religion is dynamic. Fundamentalism of any type is superstition, the opposite of religion. Dr Chappel, the Scientologists and the FLDS in Texas are offering false certainties - false because they are certainties - that exploit our unease. In each case belonging requires absolute submission to a system which cannot be allowed to change over time - unless, as in the case of the FLDS under Warren Jeffs, it is to become even more rigid. It is also important that they are all relatively recent. Conventional faiths are all much older and the passage of time has made them diversify, change and adapt. This process is no threat to religion, the idea of a revelation unfolding in time is entirely credible. Science is exactly that. The consolations of religion are nothing to do with certainties, they are to do with our wonder and gratitude that such stories can be told at all and that, mysteriously, they express something about our predicament that can be expressed in no other way. Belief in this context is largely meaningless and fundamentalism an outrage. Fundamentalists are particularly ridiculous because, at every turn, the world refutes their position and they are obliged to twist these refutations into evidence that only they are right, that Dual Action Cleanse is, indeed, the only answer. In contrast, the dynamically, metaphorically religious cannot be refuted because they expect the world to disgust and amaze.
So, Dr Chappell, scouring colons will not take you to Boca Raton and your customers to the promised land because shit happens and that, a supremely religious statement, is my message to my congregation on this Boston Sunday.

28 comments:

  1. I always find the phrase 'Shit happens' to be quite profound. Unlike our thoughts and beliefs, excrement has a value that we absolutely know and understand the moment we produce it. Old religions too have the same kind of body-led meaning, quite different to anything that these New Age druids and Scientologists expound.

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  2. Wow, Bryan, what a post. I don't think you need a colon cleanse -- you're so damned energetic and perky so early on a Sunday morning.

    Is there some line in the Bible about the faithful "pitching their tent in the place of excrement"? Or maybe it's a poem; can't remember. All I know is, I need several more cups of coffee before this will make much sense to me.

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  3. Hi Bryan,

    Nothing you don't probably know, but the US is littered with upstart and independent churches that spin into cults fairly easily. Your remarkable article, and I thank you for it, Yearning for Zion: What next for the polygamists?, illustrates what has happened; but also what may happen, when people join and then follow sick leadership.

    There is also the phenomenon of upstart and independent congregations hiring pastors, people who walk in for the job with Bible in hand, someone who wins out in the job interview process. This too can be asking for trouble, as the congregation gets this person's spin on Biblical events, plus very possibly this same individual's way of controlling a congregation, with either no governing organization overseeing or else no one powerful enough within the "church" to complain to. These independent churches will integrate into their names, organizational-sounding words, like "Baptist" when they belong to no Baptist organization.

    So a lot of the shit that goes on in various churches, has nothing to do with whether the Bible is right or wrong or how so, but has to do with problems of organizing congregations, study and worship.

    In a couple hours, not far from where you wrote your Sunday sermon, The Reverend Daniel Smith of the First Church in Cambridge (Congregational, U.C.C.), will deliver his sermon called The Zero Milestone. The Congregationalists, the Pilgrims and Puritans, came over on the Mayflower, physically breaking from the Anglican and Presbyterian, and created near where you are, Harvard University for instance. This is also the religion I grew up with.

    Significantly, a congregationalist believes that the local church ought to have compete autonomy. And so cultish events may still occur. Yet, in a sense it is middle-of-the-road in that there is not this great big church of issuance (Roman Catholic, Islam, what-have-you) that may become corrupt from the top down, as happened locally with the pedophiles priests of the Catholic Church.

    This morning, in "Yearning for Zion," Rev. Smith will say:

    At least one thing we can learn from the story of Abraham is that being human is not about being safe or comfortable. Being human is about being uncertain and often uncomfortable. Walking with God, indeed “walking the Bible”, means stepping off the map into uncharted territory, being on the way to unknown places; being on the way to God.

    This is similar to your sermon:

    I seem to be distinguishing between good and bad religion. Robert finds this absurd because the literal claims of all religions are more or less equally preposterous. I think I can save myself from absurdity with two related claims: first, religion isn't about belief and, secondly, religion is dynamic. Fundamentalism of any type is superstition, the opposite of religion. Dr Chappel, the Scientologists and the FLDS in Texas are offering false certainties - false because they are certainties - that exploit our unease.

    Welcome to Massachusetts, Pilgrim.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  4. I believe it would have been less absurd to go along with the idea that some religions are better than others. Pick and mix seems like a good idea to me. If I was ever in need I'd definitely pick and mix.

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  5. Correction, that's his sermon "The Zero Milestone", not your article "Yearning for Zion"from which I quoted Rev. Smith. Sorry.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  6. The most pragmatic adoption of a religion I ever came across was a man who, throughout most of the troubles ran a company based in both Portadown and Newry, his adopted religion ? Plymouth Bretheren, fence squatter par excellence.
    Re human waste, one of the most profoud statements must be "spare a thought for the man who empties your septic tank, it may only be shit to you, to him it's bread and butter."

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  7. I'm very glad I read your article in the ST, grim but compelling. Warren Jeffs has a lot in common with Josef Fritzl. I guess this glimpse of exploitation and brutality is what life is like when we forget that civilization is hard work. It has to be made, taught, upheld and passed on. Shame on Texas for forgetting that and letting such brutes get a grip in the first place.

    I've found your piece a bit hard to follow, though. Maybe it's just me, but surely the urge to spiritual expression works at a deep, visceral level. Trying to understand it intellectually is doomed to failure because it doesn't work like that. Hence the anti-religious lot are wasting their time. The sages mostly advised living a certain kind of life in a certain kind of way, which largely none of us does of course. But that strikes me as the consensus view of dealing with "shit happens", not sentimental story-telling which is all about the past or the future. After all, we know that Dr Chappell will almost certainly get his speed boat in Boca Raton, the catch being that his vulgar new craft won't take him anywhere he isn't already, right now.

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  8. Brother Bryan,

    Sadly, as with most sermons I might happen to hear on a Sunday morning, I'm finding yours hard to force down the gullet. Firstly, religion is totally about belief and certainty. The religion that you speak of is a newfangled thing, a product of unbelievers who found the church experience aesthetically fulfilling and wish to continue the illusion that they are following in some ancient tradition by the historical revisionism of thinking that religion never had anything to do with beliefs. Like Nicholas Taleb and his love of the scent of church candles. The state of mind you call religious is more accurately described as philosophical.

    If religion is not about beliefs, then why do religions have them? There is nothing unreligious about fundamentalism. In fact, it is those faiths that spurn the fundamentalist certainty in beliefs that are the true oddities. Fundamentalisma are just how true religions behave in a multicultural society. Multiculturalism is a historical oddity. Cultures used to police heresies, and the religious could enjoy the certainties of their faiths without thinking that they were doing something special, or fundamental. It was just the way that everyone thought and believed in that society. You didn't have to isolate yourself in a compound to be around like believers. Like fish in the ocean, the ubiquity of your belief system was not something to take special note of.

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  9. If "religion isn't about belief," then most of what we count as religions are disqualified. Catholicism has a catechism, and though it no longer has an inquisition that burns people at the stake, it still roots out what it considers heretical belief. Most protestant sects are as much or more concerned with what their adherents believe. The first pillar of Islam is the shahadah, a statement of belief. I realize, of course, there are non-credal religions. Nonetheless, as a matter of historical fact, the major religions of the world mandate certain beliefs to their adherents. If one were to divorce belief from religion, what would be left wouldn't look like religion to most people, and it certainly wouldn't have the same cultural influence.

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  10. "first, religion isn't about belief"

    First two words of the Nicene Creed - "We believe"

    dynamic? "We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church."

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  11. If I may . . . Why would we be questioning Bryan's use of "religion", when in context he defines it, and talks about good religion versus the bad?:

    I think I can save myself from absurdity with two related claims: first, religion isn't about belief and, secondly, religion is dynamic. Fundamentalism of any type is superstition, the opposite of religion.

    Whenever we want to put religions down, we can talk as if all religions are like cement, mixed up and set. From there, we have an assumed stationary target to shoot barbs at. But, in its purist sense, religion is about one's life and the divine. Belief comes second and spins off interpretation. Bryan says here:

    Conventional faiths are all much older and the passage of time has made them diversify, change and adapt. This process is no threat to religion, the idea of a revelation unfolding in time is entirely credible. Science is exactly that. The consolations of religion are nothing to do with certainties, they are to do with our wonder and gratitude that such stories can be told at all and that, mysteriously, they express something about our predicament that can be expressed in no other way.

    No more need be said.

    That science part is interesting to ponder, that it is an offshoot of applying the best in religious dynamics (and I always want to say "mystical" in place of "religious" but "religious" ought to be asserted as well). The Jews and Christians, and others too, et al, led us to the scientific method.

    It may even be scientists accepting an incorrect spirit, or a fundamentalist's intepretation of the Adam and Eve story, that leads them to believe that the physical world is the end-all of such dynamics; this physical garden and us physical people appearing in it. Working dynamically, using this state of mind where it strains to truth, however, science achieves much.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  12. The consolations of religion are nothing to do with certainties, they are to do with our wonder and gratitude that such stories can be told at all and that, mysteriously, they express something about our predicament that can be expressed in no other way.

    But this is, surely, nonsense.

    Firstly, it would really be nice if religion's defenders could defend religion as it actually exists, and not simply defend something else good and merely call it "religion", as you've done here.

    Because what you describe is irrelevant. We can appreciate and glorify such things as a child's innocent curiosity, the deep passions of lovers, or any other predicament of the human condition without having to call any of it "God", or having to assert that certain impossible things happened in 1 AD. We need not describe any of those things in religious terms when they can be described in regular terms. That something is mysterious does not make it religious.

    Fundamentalism of any type is superstition, the opposite of religion.

    I truly wonder if you actually know anybody who's religious. These are not opposites at all, but the precise and exact same thing.

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  13. Jeez, some of the comments on here. Belief is this; no it isn't, belief is really that; religion and fundamentalism are the same; no they're not ... yes they are, and what's more, I have 95 theses signed by leading intellectuals which prove it.

    It's all about me, me, me. Read the poems of St John of the Cross, study a desert hermit or two, or one of Thailand's forest monks. They've dropped all that. It's really very simple, which is probably why it's so hard to understand.

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  14. If I may . . . Why would we be questioning Bryan's use of "religion", when in context he defines it, and talks about good religion versus the bad?

    Bryan can define his religion anyway he wants, but what he can't do is deny that the central experience of all religions, belief, has nothing to do with religion. It's just bizarre. It's as if someone said blue is the new black, and by the way, black isn't black.

    I was religious once, but when I could no longer with good conscience recite the Nicene creed in church and mean it, then I could no longer call myself a Catholic. At least I respected the Church enough to allow it to define its own identity.

    I know I'm being hopelessly and maddeningly pre-post modern. I should have just redefined what it means to be Catholic, using terms like mosaic, pastiche, quilt and other terms of gooey sentimentality. But I can't, I just can't!

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  15. Has anyone here ever had a religious experience? That's what the Bible stories are all about, in the Garden, Abraham, the prophets, on and on, Saul to Paul, Jesus, oh, I forgot Moses. What about prayer? This is all where the religious rubber hits the religious road. The different beliefs are the signs people put up along the way. But nobody goes this way because of the cool road signs.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  16. Has anyone here ever had a religious experience?

    I know I have one every time I read one of Duck's literalist attacks on religion. Keep it up big guy, you're doing the Lord's work.

    Why do so many modern atheists insist that believers must adhere to faith in its Sunday School form designed for children? We teach young kids that 2 + 2 =4, not that it only is within certain mathematical theories based upon certain philosophical assumptions that ignore the tricky conundrum of the role of the observer, not to mention the human assumptions underlying the abstract physical laws of the universe. Whole libraries are devoted to the thorny matter of where individual faith and belief ("What do I believe?")intersect with collective religious dogma ("How shall I revere?"). Scripture is not a science text, churches are full of pious doubters about this or that teaching from the pulpit and people don't worship for the same reason they take extention courses in biology or cosmology.

    Whatever happened to the notion of faith as a lifelong quest and spiritual journey? It seems today many can only conceive of it as a preparation for final exams in natural history.

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  17. Susan, the line is from Yeats, "but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement/for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent" (from memory, may be inexact). St Augustine also makes note of these matters, and Beckett after him.

    Part of the problem with religion is that it is experiential not empirical, and much of our modern mindset is obsessed with the idea of taking measurements and then analysing them statistically. But as the Zen saying has it "i know in myself that the water is cold."

    With religion i'd agree with Buddhists who say "don't believe, just try it". Belief of the strained, desperate, classically fundamentalist type, i.e. denying outside reality, seems to me necessary when there's no feedback between the creed & the believer, when it's all one-way, the believer believing but nothing coming back at him, no divine message, no inner transformation.

    With Buddhism at least i think i can say dedicated meditation will transform anyone to some extent.

    Many religions began as 'mystery cults', i.e. initiatory regimes to transform the believer. Very far from modern religion, this. i'd guess most fundies believe so desperately & ferociously precisely because they don't get any messages from the divine.

    i know a few people who have had such messages, from some god or another; one of these has been diagnosed as being bonkers. Most of them are very genial people whose 'belief' is as casual as my 'belief' that it's Monday today.

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  18. With religion i'd agree with Buddhists who say "don't believe, just try it".

    Elberry, I believe that is also a prominent theme in Judaism, which teaches that one comes to understand the law through obeying it. Then there is "Follow My way...". Non-believers love to trash this as proto-totalitarianism. The only answer to their defiant demands that they be empirically convinced personally before they can respect anybody else's belief is that pride goeth before the fall. Or alternatively to smack them around a bit.

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  19. As the Zen saying goes, "The Buddha is a shit-stick." (I.e. that stick you wipe your butt with, afterwards.)

    Having had numerous religious experiences in my lifetime, yet belonging to no formalized, organized, institutional religious group (I prefer disorganized religions), I can only say to Brian:

    Hear, hear! One of the best statements on the topic I've heard in awhile.

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  20. ''Fundamentalism of any type is superstition, the opposite of religion.''

    Is Christianity not a religion? I thought it was. To be a christian one has to have the fundamental belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ - the son of God. Everything else they hold true is, I think, up for interpretation and debate. Belief in Christ is a superstition, christianity is not a religion.

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  21. ''With Buddhism at least i think i can say dedicated meditation will transform anyone to some extent.''

    What's that when it's at home? something else open to personal interpretation even the Buddhists can't agree and not one of them has achieved enlightenment and lived to tell.

    Are the buddhists directly responsible for the extinction of certain species. I've heard there are more souls living today than have ever lived before - I expect they've got to come from somewhere...

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  22. I know I have one every time I read one of Duck's literalist attacks on religion. Keep it up big guy, you're doing the Lord's work.

    Peter, its more like I'm defending religion from the relativist attacks of the experientialists. Surely this is what you and the Juddists have been bemoaning, the creeping assault of relativism against the bulwarks of Western Civilization. Objective truth and all that. I'm paying religion the honor of believing it is what its adherents confess it is.

    You can't explain the Reformation if there were no beliefs in play.

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  23. Ian

    "I've heard there are more souls living today than have ever lived before."

    Noooooooooooo.

    Please don't tell me you've fallen for that hoary old - well, actually, quite new - myth? To the best guesstimate there have been approximately 12x as many people in the past compared to those alive now.

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  24. Ian Russell wrote, about what Elberry said: ''With Buddhism at least i think i can say dedicated meditation will transform anyone to some extent.''

    What's that when it's at home? something else open to personal interpretation even the Buddhists can't agree and not one of them has achieved enlightenment and lived to tell.


    Transform is perhaps the wrong word, but there is a lot of evidence that meditation helps people and may well be a good thing. Meditation may send some folks psycho too, but all that suggests is that meditation won't help you if you're a mentalist to start with.

    There are probably many thousands of enlightened folks around, and always have been. It's just that enlightenment isn't what, in the West, we tend to think it is - the Big Rapture, with celestial trumpets and instant transportation to another realm.

    I suspect that much of religion is passing on ancient wisdom, methods of leading a good life that have been tried, tested, sifted and sorted for thousands of years. Prayer is a good example, perhaps the best. Even if you say that prayer is only a method by which we trick ourselves into listening to our subconscious, prayer is still brilliantly effective. As a method, it works.

    So Bryan is right to say that religion is not - or not only - about belief. A lot of it lies in just doing stuff, living "as if". In fact, if anti-religious folks really wanted to be scientific about it, they should try living for a year as if they were Catholics or Buddhists or followers of Islam, and then see what the year has taught them.

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  25. Whew. Bring up religion and the cudgels come out.

    Thank you, Elberry, for giving me the Yeats ref. I used to love W.B., but haven't read him in a long time. P'raps it's time again.

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  26. Meditation is what might be called a spiritual technology. It shows up in many religious traditions, and is practiced in similar ways worldwide. No one established religion "owns" meditation, although various known forms of it were developed under the umbrellas of various traditions. (Hindu yoga, Zen Buddhist sitting, Christian contemplative prayer, etc.)

    It's interesting that in their usual rush to discredit all things religious, the attack-atheists always throw out the baby with the bathwater: throw out the good with the bad, as though nothing good could ever have been associated with religion. Such as various spiritual technologies. Of course, since one pillar of some atheists' arguments is de facto logical positivism, it's no wonder they a priori reject the possibility of the existence of the non-material. Laughably ignoring, of course, that philosophical presuppositions are equally non-material.

    Most of the self-proclaimed agnostics I've met, on the other hand, don't make that mistake, and are at least open to the possibility of the existence of a world larger than they themselves can comprehend.

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  27. ian russell said:

    Everything else they hold true is, I think, up for interpretation and debate. Belief in Christ is a superstition, christianity is not a religion.

    Christ is a name for a phenomenon. So a "belief" in Christ would not be a superstition. Accepting Christ into your life is what makes one a Christian.

    The trick can be that one may never have experienced, or have known this Christ, so this initial acceptance may be on faith. Beyond that, however, once experienced, Christ is not a superstition. "He" shows up in those religious experiences.

    But, this is similar to gravitons, say. I accept these subatomic particles on faith, even though I have never been involved with any of the experiments that support them as a phenomenon. It is not through superstition, though, that I accept them.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  28. See for yourself;

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3293237?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=2&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed

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