Definitions

RELIGION is a discursive formation¹ defining human existence and imbuing existence with inherent value thus providing a reference for evaluating experience (creating meaning).

MAGIC a. religious technology.² b. transgressing one state of existence for another.

MEANING is an expression of the utility (instrumental value) or experience (intrinsic value) of a mental event³ in relation to the inherent value of human existence (i.e. as defined by religion).

1. Or “discursive construct” as defined by Foucault.
2. “Technology is the usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or serve some purpose.” (Wikipedia)
3. A singular instance of or system of: experiences, thoughts, knowledge, etc.

DISCUSSION

These definitions are deliberately broad and fluid — hopefully they will change frequently.

RELIGION

3/13/2013:

And now for reality: my current “definition” of religion is circular, self-satisfied jargon.  In plain terms, it says “religion is what people in a specific place and time make it” and then has a half-assed remnant gesturing towards transcendence stuck on.  It is a poor attempt at trying to go along with contemporary, empirical ideas while clinging to nineteenth-century essentialism (or, at best, hoping to ride the coattails of existential thinkers that I half understand).

3/21/2013:

Reading within sociological Symbolic Interactionism has had me doubting the usefulness of creating definitions for religion that presume to work outside of a specific social context.  I am tempted to identify wholeheartedly with J.Z. Smith‘s criticism, below, but I don’t think it’s perfect.  And here I go down the rabbit hole again… from Smith:

I take it we can agree that the term “religion” is not an imperial category.  It is a second-order abstraction.  This changes our previous mode of discourse.  While it is possible to speak of theorizing about religion in general, it is impossible to “do it” or “believe it” or be normative or descriptive with respect to it.  Ways of meaningful speaking of first-order phenomena have become impossibly conjoined to a second-order abstraction resulting, at the very least, in misplaced concreteness.  What meaning, then, can the word “religion” have in such a situation?

College catalogs and college-level textbooks display two chief understandings.  The first employs the language of religion and postulates some essence of religion (usually vaguely defined in terms of ultimacy or transcendence) which becomes manifest in particular historical or geographical traditions or artifacts.  However, the mechanism of the “manifestation” is rarely exhibited, and the ubiquity of the alleged essence is not much insisted on after the opening chapter or first lecture in the introductory course.

[… goes on to sketch the quality of “religious” …]

It is we, that is to say, the academy, who fill these definitions with content or meaning, who give them status, who employ them as part of our language.  It is we in the academy who imagine kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, and genera–life, after all, is lived only at the level of species or individuals.  As Herb Fingarette wrote on another topic some years ago: “Home is always home for someone…. There is no absolute home in general.”  Mutatis mutandis religion in general. (Smith, J. Z. “‘Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’: No Difference at All,” published variously and available here.)

Smith seems to strip the social dimension of experience from reality by creating a false dichotomy between “imperial categories” and “second order abstractions,” which he works to undermine by equating them with a Platonic-like absolute.   His claim that life is lived “only at the level of species or individuals” and what it implies seems too clean to me.  Yes, there is no absolute Platonic ideal of “religion,” but surely individuals and species are, to a certain extent, also examples of “misplaced concreteness” as well?  To be blunt, the seeming greater reality of “imperial categories” is no more or less than “second order abstractions” — that one seems more real than the other is a matter of tempo and point of view.  Around the edges, where individuality is constructed socially or where we examine the physical material stuff of bodies, their order, their replication — is there anything here any more concrete?  The abortion debate certainly seems to underline that our cultural definition of what constitutes an individual is not clear.  Perhaps I overstretch.

Let’s look at the simple metaphor that compares “home for someone” with “absolute home in general” — this is a false dichotomy.  There is home for one person, but that person’s idea of home is contingent on other ideas and experiences of home, and there are fuzzy, interlinked social clouds of ideas of home around any one expression of home.  That, in a frozen moment of time, there are physical manifestations that are “home” do not mean that the reality of homes is anchored in physical space or even directly observable behavior.  That there is no cosmic dictionary to provide us with “absolute home in general” does not invalidate the usefulness of observing how humanity across cultures creates environments around themselves and their families, constructs spaces of physical shelter and security, etc.  Nor is this sort of abstract thinking the exclusive domain of the academic.  Any brush with difference is an occasion for this sort of reflection.  A sheltered individual raised in an American suburb exposed to a Bedouin’s tent or a hobo camp or a commune — any individual who finds many differing examples of “home for someone” begins to reflect on what and why each of these constitute “home,” even if they may not be capable of articulating clearly what this “home” concept is.  I assume our collective tendency toward hard ontological categories is an artifact of our cognition and is intimately related to language.

That “religion” is much more difficult to approach than “home” seems appropriate.  I find myself leaning toward an existentialist approach and am tempted to locate “religion” within the fuzzy-edged social space of humanity coping with mortality, being in time, and the fluidity of language/meaning and identity.  I am not prepared to give “religion” an absolute definition.  Like the discussion of “home,” I think that the social function of clear definitions is relevant only within bounded social contexts — there are not absolute languages (languages that function outside of specific social contexts).

The social context of “religion” is not just the academy, and I disagree that the academy somehow created “religion,” though certainly it has shaped understandings of it.  Rather, I think “religion” has come about in response to multiculturalism — in response to the need to describe different approaches to common circumstances.  This is sort of half-baked, I know.  I need to think on it.

“While it is possible to speak of theorizing about religion in general, it is impossible to ‘do it’ or ‘believe it’ or be normative or descriptive with respect to it.”  I think I have to largely agree to this if one assumes that the goal of “religion in general” is an absolute Truth.  As I said, there is no absolute language.  Even mathematics, the great God of the empiricists, assumes discrete entities belied by time and scale.  However, I try to avoid creating false dichotomies, and I don’t believe in the dream of founding my ideas in some sort of bedrock of absolute Truth — Russell and Gödel are the cautionary tale.  I think there are human experiences that are widely common (if never absolutely so) and that outpace language’s ability to bridge cultural divides, but that doesn’t stop us from working in the interesting interstice between ‘religion for someone’ and ‘absolute religion in general.’  Perhaps this is akin to Wittgenstein’s “of these we must be silent […] if it seems that we have talked about them […], we should deeply investigate what has been said and realize that that which cannot have been said was only shown.”  The acknowledgement that there is something that cannot be said is a beginning and a challenge.

3/21/2013: I came across a fragment Chas Clifton including in a blog entry that is thought-provoking: “[…] religion scholars’ ongoing debate over what “religion” is or whether the word “religion” is useful at all in a scholarly setting. (There are those who claim it is not, that it merely masks political and social competitions.)”  I am reminded of the bumper sticker “A cult is a religion without political power.”

6/7/2011: “religion is not an imperial category. It is a second-order abstraction resulting…in misplaced concreteness.” -J.Z. Smith

Found this and several other interesting arguments about religion in Nikki Bado-Fralick’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle. Haven’t had time to chew on it yet.

5/2/2011: I just came across Mark Oppenheimer‘s working definition for religion that he used in his 2003 book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Religion in the Age of Counterculture:

The alternative groups we identify with the late 1960s were far smaller than imagined, and some historians, easily infatuated with the new and the sexy, have been led badly astray…there has never been reliable evidence of widespread Satanism or paganism…One might argue that by excluding the preponderance of cults, sects, and communes from this study, we are denying them the status of “religion.” That is correct – but for the purpose of clarity not condescension…religion is commitment to a set of beliefs that requires meaningful sacrifice. A belief that you must tithe, or donate of a portion of your income to your church or faith community…religions require sacrifice and exclude other religions. [Quoted in this blog post.]

On the whole, I think that Oppenheimer’s exclusion of paganism and several other new religious movements is misguided. Though his definition is fairly rotten, it does have a kernel of truth to it — religion is something that requires personal investment. Invest from the Latin investire, which has many connotations of ‘clothing.’ Also the issue of sacrifice — a word with more complex etymology that could have a literal translation ‘to make holy.’ There is a larger critique of religion-as-fashion in there somewhere… the idea that paganism is not a ‘real religion’ because it does not require sacrifice is a provocative subject for debate… but I think the idea that religion requires sacrifice may need to be added to my definition in some way.

4/28/2011: At a few points, Wittgenstein spoke of theology as grammar. In my definition of religion, I speak of “evaluating experience.” It occurs to me that language may be the medium used for that evaluation — certainly is is the medium for “creating meaning.” In a natural language philosophy like (what I think) that of later Wittgenstein, religion would have formed part of the groundwork of the cultural/linguistic landscape — the ethical assumptions coded into language would have been something like theology as grammar.

4/26/2011: An interesting tidbit on the ‘substance’ of gods and a need to ‘refashion’ divinity within humanism:

“A humanist evolution-centered religion too needs divinity, but divinity without God. It must strip the divine of the theistic qualities which man has antropomorphically projected into it, search for its habitations in every aspect of existence, elicit it, and establish fruitful contact with its manifestations. Divinity is the chief raw material out of which gods have been fashioned. Today we must melt down the gods and refashion the material into new and effective organs of religion, enabling man to exist freely and fully on the spiritual level as well as on the material.” – Julian Huxley, The New Divinity (Discovered by way of Bobby.)

Of course, my definition of religion does not make specific mention of the numinous, but Huxley seems to be indicating that there is something there of value even for atheists.

4/25/2011: I just read an article on Kierkegaard which had a very provocative idea: religion is a way of existing. More specifically, it is a way of human existence. I am endeavoring to build this into my definition. Currently, the definition states: “religion is a discursive formation for evaluating experience, usually in relation to power.” While the mention of “power” has some truth, I think it is narrow and pejorative. Buddhism — that exception to most hasty definitions of religion — certainly doesn’t concern itself with any concept of universal or transcendent power. Instead, how about I say “religion is a discursive formation defining human existence, usually imbuing existence with inherent value.” Not sure about the “usually”… but it’s an improvement over the “power” bit. I can expand it farther to include, “and providing a reference for evaluating experience and creating meaning.”

MAGIC

5/2/2011: Attempted to add the concept of transgressive magic after writing this entry. It needs a lot more work, though… and possibly a greater emphasis on ‘rules’ in religion.

MEANING

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
– William James, Lecture VI, Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth

4/25/2011: Having just revised the definition of religion, I think that the definition of meaning could be improved by anchoring it to the inherent value of human existence (i.e. as defined by religion) rather than to the ultimately circular concepts of “the human condition.” So the definition was: “meaning is a quality derived from the utility of a mental event in the human condition (pursuit of eudaimonia). An expression of the utility or value of experience or knowledge in relation to matters of ultimate importance.” Instead I’m going to try: “meaning is an expression of the utility (instrumental value) or experience (intrinsic value) of a mental event in relation to the inherent value of human existence (i.e. as defined by religion).” I think it’s an improvement, but my use of value theory terms is clumsy at best… more work needed. I think it may be fruitful to add something to the word “meaning” to make it clearly different from the normal use of the word in philosophy. Perhaps “existential meaning”?

~~~

My interest in ‘meaning’ is in connection with ethics, existential meaning, or “the meaning of life.” It is not in reference to linguistic or symbolic meaning (definition). An immediate criticism of my definition of meaning is that it is circular, since it relies on poorly defined concepts such as “the human condition,” eudaimonia, and “matters of ultimate importance” — all of which could be reduced back to “the meaning of life.” My definition is probably little better than saying, “meaning is an expression of something’s relation to (partaking in) the meaning of life.”

An example of ‘meaning’ as I have attempted to formulate it: “X has utility within (informs / enriches) the human condition, therefore X has value and is meaningful.”

Perhaps a better way to formulate meaning is with a question, since it is possible that concepts such as “the meaning of life” may be wholly relative and impossible to define in any objective way. Meaning is an individual’s answer to the question “why should I care?” or “so what?” in relation to a mental event. My understanding of meaning is colored with pragmatism rather than with concern for universal truths or higher powers, though I certainly do not rule out either.

Sartre, an atheist, described meaning as an “essence.” Since there is no creator to conceive of our essence and create us, it is up to each person to create their essence individually from the world around them. Some of the Existentialist took a more negative view, asserting that there is no meaning in the world — that the essence of life is absurdity or lack of meaning. Betrand Russell and the Analytic Tradition went further, asserting that “values” lie wholly outside of the domain of human knowledge — that claiming “value” was an expression of emotion and not fact.

[Random thoughts: Is not our language itself and discursive constructs such as religion proof of the existence of ‘things’ that are built entirely of human emotion? Language and culture is a mental space that cannot exist within only one individual, thus it has an objective existence, can support general statements, etc.? If this is true, then couldn’t ‘meaning’ be anchored — at least in part — outside of the individual?]