Religion as (mostly failed) technology
The world refuses to satisfy our desires, including the desire not to suffer their consequences. There are two things we can do about this: change the world or change our desires. It is incautiously assumed that these two methods are technology and religion respectively. This is an error, because religion is technology, and by no means always technology for entering an afterlife. Sometimes it is technology for changing our own desires, but more often technology for changing this sublunary world to satisfy those desires just as they are.
Christians frequently ask atheists what comfort they derive from their unbelief. Thus they reveal their own core conviction, namely that you believe only in order to get something, rather than because you are convinced that it happens to be true.
As well as distinguishing between changing our desires and changing the world, we may distinguish between technologies that work and technologies that don’t. This gives us a four-cell matrix. In the first cell, technologies for changing our desires that work; in the second cell, technologies that don’t; in the third cell, technologies for changing the world that work; in the fourth cell, technologies that don’t.
The second pair of cells contains technologies for power, technologies for health, technologies for economic acquisition, technologies for social status and technologies for emotional satisfaction. It may be objected that emotional satisfaction belongs in the first pair of cells, but as long as the desire to experience particular emotions is taken for granted and the sole question is how to satisfy them, it belongs in the second pair. Another error is over-focusing on sexual repression and so treating religion and desire as inherent opposites, for we have many non-sexual desires to which religion gives free rein.
Many people have observed that the mystical tendencies within the major religions are remarkably similar, however different the esoteric paraphernalia may be. This is because these schools all cultivate the same bio-feedback techniques for achieving goals in “inner space”, whereas the theologies and “social-space” institutions of the competing parent religions make little or no difference to the neural architecture of the human brain. Whatever mystics may say about prayer being listening to God, awareness of the divine presence, and so on and so forth, the fact remains that the word means, in English and some other languages, asking. For most believers, it means asking God for worldly health, wealth and happiness.
There are four basic modes of rogatory prayer: for Protestants, asking God directly; for Catholics, asking the saints and other officials of the heavenly bureaucracy to pull strings; for all religions, bribery and dickering – that is offering animal sacrifices, candles, good deeds or renunciation of innocent pleasures; and for charismatic Christians, sorcery. This last requires some explanation. Mainstream churches believe in asking God for what you want but also in accepting the answer No. Some, however, teach that if you ask for something in the Name of Jesus, then God is obliged to give it to you. Your verbal operation is thus coercive of the Deity. In theory, you are so sanctified that you will not claim what you are not supposed to have; in practice, you claim what you want, and whenever the technology fails, you blame either yourself for lack of faith or else your fellow-churchmen for being sinful and thus preventing God from “working”. For not only can God be coerced, but He appears also remarkably easy to put off His game.
As regards the role of religion in supporting and legitimising tyranny and extortion, everything has already been said, and centuries ago at that. However, power technology also includes networks that benefit the little man. For example, churches, synagogues and temples are invaluable to immigrants, especially those arriving destitute. They are fed, housed and employed in return for their votes and money. Here religion is the outward dress of the most basic social relationship, namely that of patron and client. You go along to get along; you convert to climb the social ladder, whether from paganism to Christianity in the 4th century, from the Baptists to the Anglicans in the 20th, or from low-caste Hinduism to Islam.
Power technology is also found on the micro scale, within the family. Men may embrace fundamentalism precisely in order to enjoy headship over their families without the bother of earning it by their virtue. The church will then tell the victims that they have to forgive their abusers. This is very convenient for the latter.
Not only religion, but all ethics, may have begun as power technology. The first man-ape persuaded his fellows that they should abstain from something – which he could then have all to himself. Or else he persuaded them that they “should” do something that was in his interest but not theirs, or that it was “wrong” for them to resist his acquisition of their goods. Ethical discourse may thus have been invented as a pre-emptive strike to hobble the competition.
So, does this power technology work? For some people, clearly; probably best for those who anyway have some talent as players of the game. The others will continue to shop around for a better “faith” that gives them more power. And so will the government.
Shit happens, most frequently in the form of sickness and injury, and there is not very much that rival technologies can do about it, even today. The choice is then between religion as fatalism and religion as medical technology. There is a certain overlap here, as some bodily illnesses are best cured via the mind, but that is not the case for the blind, the lame, the leper and so on. And who can blame these sufferers for wanting to be miraculously whole again?
So, does this medical technology work? The answer will depend on whether you believe in stories that, like the urban legends collected by Snopes.com, always happen somewhere else. Let us say ten per cent spontaneous remission and mental cure of psychosomatic ailments, as opposed to ninety percent charlatanry – whether in modern “healing crusades” or at the Pool of Siloam. It is interesting to see how many people lose their faith the moment some serious shit happens to them or their loved ones; this shows plainly that they conceived of their religion as an accident protection plan for their earthly lives, rather than, as they pretended, as love of God and preparation for the hereafter.
Scams account, of course, for a good portion of the next subject, religion as economic technology, but then considered from the other end. We all know the story of L. Ron Hubbard being asked why he founded a religion and replying, “Because that’s where the money is”. Terry Pratchett describes the first priest as the man who preferred “indoor work with no heavy lifting”, while Spider Robinson imagines a great grifters’ convention bringing together televangelists with real-estate fraudsters, card-sharps and all the other varieties of con-men. One of the best scams, and one that is not even illegal, is to persuade people that they have acute needs, of whose existence they had hitherto been in ignorance, and which only you can satisfy. This is known variously as advertising and religion. Why are the rich generally irreligious? For the same reason as drug kingpins are generally not crack addicts.
It is not that difficult to detect the religious con-men and scam-artists of our own day. We know that such-and-such an evangelist plants actors in the audience, who then pretend to be miraculously healed. We know that such-and-such a “esoteric” writer did not find his holy books in any remote monastery but sat in Brooklyn and made them all up, or that such-and-such a guru is only in it for the group sex. Let a couple of thousand years pass, however, and they will all become saints, prophets or even gods.
However, the economic relationship is often consensual; people are paying top dollar for entertainment, whether the “bells and smells” of High Churchmanship, the raucous excitement of Pentecostalism or the bizarre sideshows of Indian asceticism. The self-torturing of saints and sadhus is not a demonstration of the vagaries of the religious impulse, or even a symptom of mental disorder; it is the inevitable consequence of the carnies’ search for new economic niches in a saturated market. It is, alas, a mere linguistic coincidence that the word “shaman” so greatly resembles the word “showman”.
Another example of consensual economic technology is when the line between the grifter and his mark is blurred by “Name it and claim it” teachings. While the saying “You can’t cheat an honest man” is only partly true, the fact remains that many scam victims are trying to get something for nothing and deserve little sympathy when it all ends in tears. Prosperity churches teach that when you tithe to them, God will return you with money at a vast rate of interest; or, as they put it, He will “bless” your income. Rather than giving to the poor in order that they may be fed, therefore, these believers are investing in theological junk bonds in the hope of making an easy buck.
So, does this economic technology work? For the religious scam-artist, the sky’s the limit; for if Scientology can make money, anything can. Does it work for the ordinary believer who tithes in the hope of divine dividend? To some extent, because when the fellowship rallies round to help in a financial crisis, everyone claims that this is the yield on the godly bonds.
A third symbiotic economic relationship is when the congregation supports a minister through the collection plate. They pay him to tell them once a week that they’re saved and everyone they don’t like, isn’t. Which brings us to status.
The Old Testament talks about godly people being rewarded by respect “in the gates”; that is, where public business was transacted. A Greek might say “in the agora”, a Roman, “in the Forum”, and a modern, “in court”. The Old Testament seems to be saying, therefore, that if you walk with God your peers will fall silent when you speak. Or, in the modern idiom, “they not be dissin’ you”. Climbing hierarchies sounds so much more dignified in King James English than in hip-hop.
The main object of churchgoing is precisely the same as attendance at the cocktail party, except without the coke in the bathrooms or the quickies in the upstairs bedrooms – namely to see and be seen. It is a weekly recalibration of who is where in the middle-class status hierarchy; the underclass, of course, achieves the same result with the weekly punch-up. Religious people make a greater fuss about verbal bawdiness than about economic oppression because concern with rules of speech is a class marker and charity is not.
The Old Testament’s prediction does not always come true. One needs therefore to create one’s counter-hierarchy in which one is guaranteed a higher place. Those who have no chance of competing in Homo sapiens’ first four hierarchies – the biological, the economic, the political and the aesthetic – may nevertheless advance in the fifth hierarchy, the moral.
A claim to be better than most of the world because one has mastered true charity or divine love is simply asking for trouble, as tomorrow you may fall from so high a grace. Much better, therefore, to attract praise and generate self-satisfaction by very noisily renouncing something that you don’t much care for anyway. Butler said of the 17th-century Puritans that they “Compound for sins they are inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to”. Homophobia is an excellent example: the heterosexual can come over all superior and enjoy the pleasures of judgment and hatred without sacrificing any of his own pleasures. Another example is hard drugs, which are not generally very tempting to people who stand entirely outside the milieu that is likely to use them. The sins to which religious hierarchy-climbers are very much inclined rarely appear on the list of the things to be renounced in exchange for self-admiration; when has anyone ever boasted that they are not like unto this sinner here because they do not engage in malicious gossip?
What has too easily been assumed to be fear of sex itself, and thus interpreted in all sorts of ingenious Freudian ways, is actually nothing of the kind. Middle-class sexual anxiety is all about being caught out in violation of the renunciation bargain and so losing those so dearly-bought rights to hierarchical self-aggrandisement and general censure.
Identifying Sin in the lifestyles of others, especially rival believers, scores you points and propels you up the ladder. You also need to score points off others to pre-empt these others scoring points off you, which in these milieus can be quite dangerous – the loser can find himself being “prayed over”. We used to see the same dynamic in communist party meetings: the slowest to condemn or call for bloodthirsty measures got labelled a revisionist or even a counter-revolutionary. Never mind John Woo, for serious action just watch Brothers-in-the-Lord duelling in scriptural references.
So, does this social status technology work? If you know how to play the game, absolutely. As regards status in one’s own eyes, every time.
Many are joining the new churches out of simple human loneliness. This is why evangelism techniques concentrate on faking friendship for the punters. In the Sixties there was a cult run by one Moses David, whose cohorts recruited new members by taking them to bed. Alas, the new recruits of 21st-century fundamentalism come more cheaply; they sell their autonomy for a mess of phoney concern and a hierarchical cellular structure that acts as an ersatz family and sometimes a multi-level marketing operation.
As well as for the fellowship, people go to church services for the technology of emotional auto-manipulation. Religious art and architecture is very sophisticated neural reprogramming. Rituals fall into three categories: Boring, High and Charismatic, which attract different personalities. The deal with “Boring” is that you get to congratulate yourself on enduring it and look down on those who lack the Moral Fibre to do the same. “High” attracts those effete introverts who get off on aesthetics such as art, music and incense, and alter their brain chemistry by meditative exercises in order to achieve serenity. “Charismatics” are those with high cortical thresholds, which means that they need powerful stimuli to feel anything at all; their services are therefore arranged to work them up into a state akin to hysteria, a blend of political rally and rock concert. Such “Nuremburg Christianity” is nothing new, all religions have had their outbreaks of mass psychosis.
All three Abrahamic religions are severely conflicted as to whether the virtuous believer will be happy in this life, or must wait for the next. On the one hand, they say that their law is a user’s manual for a healthy individual and community, while on the other they warn of tribulation at the hands of an inscrutable God who moves in mysterious ways. Evangelical Christianity is perhaps the worst of the three for extending the promise of both joy today and joy tomorrow and then contorting itself to explain away present misery. If, however, you doubt that many people convert in order to acquire a technology for earthly happiness or even bliss, visit the badges and stickers section of any evangelical bookstore.
Not all emotional technology, however, is about good feelings. For Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is quite wrong. Even when adequately fed, clothed, sheltered and laid, few people seek “self-realisation”. Some will seek to be ever better fed, clothed, sheltered and laid, although these needs are theoretically finite; others will seek adulation and approval, and these needs are infinite; yet others will devote all their energies to the equally infinite pleasures of putting others in the wrong and making everyone else miserable.
“Worm Theology” takes its name from a verse in the Psalms, “For I am a worm and no man”. This offers a deal that is attractive to certain personalities: if I agree to think of myself as a worm, I get to think of you as one too. This deal is all the better because my thinking of myself as a worm can be insincere, while my thinking of you as a worm is heartfelt.
So, does this emotional technology work? There is always a conversion high, which always fades or even crashes in flames. Like all drugs, the autohypnosis of the happy-clappy churches has a tolerance effect, you need stronger and stronger doses; the working oneself up to “escape velocity” finally acquires a sheen of desperation. There are many religious people who are happy in their lives; they say it is because of their religion, and they might be right, or it may be because they have financial security, enjoyable work, an adoring spouse and cute kids and would be happy anyway. Watch what happens when they lose it all.
There is an academic debate about why conservative born-agains poll much happier than atheist liberals; it is suggested that religion does affect the brain positively. No one points out that conservative born-agains are psychologically and socially obliged to lie to pollsters. Think Bree van der Kamp. In any case, if the human brain really is wired so that believing in God makes it happy, this by no means proves that God exists. The question is whether we want to deploy religion’s emotional technology to make us happy, just like we deploy religion’s political, medical, economic and social technology to achieve our other worldly ends, or whether we want to apprehend the truth.
© Hugo Grinebiter