Donald Clegg: Belief, religion can hinder search for answers
I just finished reading, for the fourth time, James P. Carse’s book, “The Religious Case Against Belief.” I’ve intended to give it a column-length review for some time now.
Carse’s dilemma is this: How, when no one within any given religion has been able to adequately define it, can one who is admittedly without religion address the issue? After all, it becomes clear in the book’s progression that Carse himself, professor emeritus of religion at New York University, is not religious in any sense that a believer would recognize.
In one sense, he doesn’t even try, as the closest he comes to defining religion is to offer up longevity as the main common thread in the world’s great religions. And by this standard, Mormonism, for instance, doesn’t qualify because it’s too new. And, to the degree that Christianity, to take another example, has turned into a mere collection of belief systems, he sees it as losing its vitality as an authentic religion.
Belief, of course, as the title clearly states, is the problem. And, since he defines belief as an oppositional force – belief is always belief against something – it would seem that he thereby undermines his own case by offering his own oppositional argument.
Addressing the problem of offering a belief system against belief, Carse writes, “There is only one defense for the apparent contradiction of dismissing belief systems by way of another belief system, as I have done: the argument presented in these pages must provide the basis for its own rejection.” And he says that any thought that he might have about bringing the conversation to an end satisfactory to himself or anyone else “is hilarious at best.”
But he does a fine job of elucidating what religion is both with and without belief. Let’s look at what he calls “civitas” and “communitas.” One is the realm of belief, the other, of religion.
Carse writes, “The difference between them? One is dependent on rulers to protect its integrity and authorities to guide its beliefs; the other is a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body. Communitas cannot be created. It evolves spontaneously out of the desire of its participants to get to the bottom of the very mystery that brings them together.”
Further, “Civitas can only be intentionally created from without. It can exist only within carefully devised boundaries. It functions most successfully when its belief system is both clear and broadly held. Communitas, because it is spontaneous, organizes from the bottom up, its structure accidental, its future open, its beliefs unformed.”
In his words, communitas is horizonal, which is to say unfixed. Provisional, rather than rigid. If one is always looking – involved in the conversation, I might say – then one is always moving, and the horizon is always changing. Belief systems stop thinking at a certain point.
It’s unfair to Carse to excerpt such short comments from what is a very nuanced argument, but in summary one must conclude that the central flaw of belief is its intentional ignorance, its closing of the conversation, while religion without belief is a conversation not only without an end, but with no clue as to where the conversation might go. The one requires closure, the other, the unknown.
As part of his conclusion, he writes, “Far from providing false or unverifiable answers to our questions, the religions provide no answers at all. … Believers, in short, are terrified by genuine expressions of religion.”
No answers, just an open-ended search, knowing only one thing for sure. We are (mostly) ignorant.