A
Ahimsa
Guest
Code:The conventional causal chain runs something like this. One by one, and thanks mostly to the Enlightenment, a few brave souls in Europe [like Nietzsche] came to recognize the charlatanry of the continent’s historic Jewish and Christian faiths. As they did, it became clear that more and more people would eventually come to their point of view — that such a transformation is ultimately inevitable and, once widespread enough, would usher in a new and better era of history. (“There never was a greater event — and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!”)
Code:Some alternative explanation seems in order, and a theory arguing that religiosity is driven in part by family formation, at least for some people, just might be it. In the differing dedication that men and women generally show toward religion, we have another fact that seems to fit that theory. Why? Perhaps women who are mothers tend to be more religious because the act of participating in creation, i.e., birth, is more immediate than that of men. Perhaps that fact inclines women to be more humble about their own powers and more open to the possibility of something greater than themselves — in brief, more religiously attuned. Or perhaps for both mothers and non-mothers there is something about caring for the smallest and most vulnerable beings, which is still overwhelmingly women’s work — after all, even power mommies employ women to do it — that makes it easier to believe in (or hear, depending on one’s personal belief) a God who stands in a similar all-caring relationship to relatively helpless mortals of every age. Maybe the general sex differences in religiosity have something to do with explanations like these.
Code:Which account comports better with what people actually do and why they do it, Nietzsche’s or this one? The answer seems to depend on which people we are talking about. On the madman’s model, a few übermenschen in possession of truths that would be unbearable to others spread the word slowly — in this case of the death of God, which will take centuries — thus beginning a process that will someday trickle down to the unknowing mass of men. The mechanism of such a transfer appears mysterious; after all, not many people avoid church these days because of the Copernican revolution, say, or because of Galileo’s vindication, or because of other specific events that caused some in the history of philosophy to lose their faith. But let us leave this issue of trickle-down secularism aside and give Nietzsche’s madman the benefit of the doubt for now. There are people who do indeed learn and decide, believe and disbelieve, in the way he describes.
Code:But the majority of people, to continue this complementary religious anthropology, do not re-invent the theological wheel this way. They learn religion in communities, beginning with the community of the family. They learn it as Ludwig Wittgenstein once brilliantly observed that language is learned: not as atomized individuals making up their own tongues, but in a community. Wittgenstein countered Descartes’ dualism, after all, by observing that the philosophical question he was most famous for — how do I know that I am? — contained the seeds of its destruction in the very phrasing: Only by presupposing a community of language believers, Wittgenstein argued, could this question about radical oneness make sense.
Code:So might the comparative case of religiosity best be understood for many people — not for the übermenschen of Nietzsche’s imaginings, but for at least some of the great many human beings who have lived their lives in natural families and worshipped a deity. With that connection now broken in formerly Christian Western Europe and other parts of the West, a great many people in their current peer group lean one way — the secularist way. But that ending, pace the secularists and atheists, has not proved once and for all that religion is over. It has proved rather that the kind of human community on which religious apprehension appears most dependent — i.e., one in which the natural family enjoys some kind of critical social mass — is in serious decline. Trying to believe without a community of believers is like trying to work out a language for oneself — something that a few übermenschen might be up for attempting [but most other people are not](http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/7827212.html).
