Religion, Theory, Critique by King Richard;

Author:King, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

RELIGION AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM

With this established, he defines religion as (1) a system of symbols that acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.9

He then works through this definition, drawing comparatively from a range of different “religious” contexts, to demonstrate the universal applicability of his definition.

(1) Symbols are public vehicles of meaning, which is itself public. They are organized into integrated systems, which constitute “models” of relations among the entities or processes to which they refer. As such, they are both “models of” and “models for” the world, and how to live in it—they both describe and prescribe: “Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.”10

(2) Religious symbols communicate meanings about the world, but also inculcate definitive and distinctive “dispositions”—tendencies, capacities, propensities, skills, habits, liabilities, pronenesses—that motivate and orient social action. Symbols also generate a susceptibility to “fall into certain moods.”11 These are the primary causal and consequential features of what Geertz calls “the religious perspective.”12 Motivations have a causal aspect—they make people act—while moods are a consequence of an actor being “properly stimulated” by symbols.13

(3) Religious symbols provide a conceptual framework for explaining circumstances in which the world seems inexplicable—“points at which impasse looms.”14 There are three main points where this may happen: incomprehension, suffering, and evil. When a mysterious toadstool grows “too quickly” in a Javanese house, when a Navaho seeks a cure from illness, or when Dinka speculate on the moral ambiguities of life, religious symbols are mobilized to give order and meaning to the chaos—in the form of a cosmological explanation, a healing ritual, and a myth that explains the withdrawal of “Divinity” from the material realm:

The strange opacity of certain empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all—no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience.15

(4) Religious symbols demand and command “faith”: “The basic axiom underlying what we may perhaps call ‘the religious perspective’ is everywhere the same: he who would know must first believe.”16 The “religious perspective” differs in this respect from others—the common-sensical, the scientific, the aesthetic—that are based, respectively, on the “given-ness” of knowledge, a systematic skepticism of that “given-ness,” and a deliberate disengagement from knowledge.

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