Douglas Anele
29 June 2008
opinion
APART from science and technology, religion is the greatest force shaping contemporary society. In Europe, there is a palpable decline of religion, which began more than a century ago.
The situation in Europe at present proves conclusively that a society can make rapid progress in enhancing the wellbeing of its people in an atmosphere of attenuated religiosity.
But there is an irony here. More than any other continent, Europe is responsible for spreading one of the biggest religions the world has known - Christianity. Yet European countries have one of the lowest growth rates in Christianity, both in terms of the number of adherents and those opting for ecclesiastical duties.
Thus, it is a matter for serious thought that Nigeria is witnessing unprecedented growth in Christianity and Islam, the Abrahamic missionary religions which, in various complex ways, served and still serve, as instruments of colonization and cultural alienation. However, and paradoxically too, Nigerians are going through hell at the moment.
Therefore, if the current wave of religiosity in the country is a force for good, why are things falling terribly apart? Past and present Nigerian rulers, including President Umaru Yar' Adua, are very religious people who pray fervently for the upliftment of Nigeria.
Still things are getting worse in all aspects of our national life, to the extent that the country is looking more and more like a failed experiment in nation building.
The question that naturally arises at this point is: what exactly is religion? What is the nature and origin of religion? Has religion been a force for good or evil?
Does the world need a new religion to replace the older ones, a religion that is sensitive to the amazing developments brought about by science and technology? The following discussion is a critical examination of these and related questions.
The term 'religion', like most words which designate various forms of human activity, is not easy to define. The major reason for this is that the very activity, or range of activities, it demotes is very complex.
To the theologian, sociologist, anthropologist and lay person, religion means different things. But it is not correct to say that whatever anyone believes strongly in constitutes a religion for that person.
Certainly, the element of "strong belief" is a component of every religion, although how strong a belief should be before it can be regarded or quality as a religious belief is not easily decidable. Atheists such as a Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Tai Solarin and Bertrand Russell, for example, had strong beliefs in some systems of propositions.
But, in the conventional sense, they were not religious. It is equally wrong to say that religion is morality, and vice versa. People generally think that religion and morality are inseparable.
Sometimes people are misled to think this way because they uncritically believe that a morally upright person must be a religion person; that one cannot be moral without being religious. But religion and morality are neither synonymous nor inseparable.
One can be morally upright without adhering to any religion, just as a very religious person can be morally depraved. Actually, religion requires morality for it to win acceptance or adherents.
That is why every religion embodies a system of moral prescriptions which reflect the socio-cultural milieu in which the religion was spawned, as well as the ethical intuitions of the most prominent personages in that religion. Now that we have clarified some misconceptions about religion, we can attempt a lexical definition of it.
Etymologically, the word 'religion' is derived from three Latin words, viz, ligare (to bind), relegere (to unite), and religio (relationship).
Thus, according to Professor J.I. Omoregbe, religion "is essentially a relationship, a link established between two persons, namely, the human person and the divine person believed to exist".
Omoregbe's definition captures some essential qualities of religion - its bipolarity and its dependence on a supernatural being believed to exist. But it does not specify the sort of relationship entailed by religion between the human being and the divine.
The human person reveres and worships the transcendental divine being, whilst the deity, God, provides protection and salvation for the worshipper, both in this life and in the hereafter. As we suggested earlier, the word 'religion' designates a complex form of human activity.
Therefore, it should not be surprising that different philosophers have posited various theories to explain religion. The German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, in his magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity, claimed that religion is essentially the alienated worship of human nature in the form of a God.
God is the product of human self-alienation because in creating the idea of God, man divests himself of his best qualities (such as justice, love, goodness etc.) and projects them to an imaginary creation of his mind - God. In God, man absolutizes his human qualities, strips them of every limitation and turns around to propitiate the object of his creation.
The logic of Feuerbach's conception of religion is a reversal of the creation story in the Bible and the Quran.
In the two religious texts, it was God that created man; in The Essence of Christianity, it was man who actually created God through self-alienation. Feuerbach held that God is nothing other than the idealized form of human nature, which shows that human nature is divine.
He made a plausible case by arguing that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of God in man (Jesus) - a doctrine which can be found in ancient Egyptian, Babylonian and Indian mythologies, thousands of years before the emergence of Christianity - demonstrates that what is actually called God is, in the final analysis, man, albeit the idealized form of man.
The implication here, then, is that when man worships God, he is simply worshipping himself. I find Feuerbach's theory persuasive. All conceptions of God, no matter how esoteric, mystical and abstract, ultimately reflect the attributes of man. Hence, I believe that it is truer to say that man created God, rather than argue the converse.
Yet, self-alienation cannot fully explain the incredible complexity of religious behaviour as it has evolved over time. Also, Feuerbach's narrowness of vision prevented him from factoring into his analysis the implications of hierarchical polytheism for his theory of religion.
The noted sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argues that society creates religion and employs it as an instrument of social control. The idea of God, Durkheim maintains, is the personification of the powerful influences of society on its members.
The Almighty God is just a symbol of the might of society, and what adherents of religions regard as the commandments of God are nothing but the moral demands of the society on its members. In
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim averred that the power and forces of the society are so strong and pervading that its members do not know the source of these influences, although they are aware of their impact on them.
There is no doubt that religion is a sociological phenomenon, like all human actualized potentialities. It is equally true that religion is an instrument of social control. Still, it is not true that society is the ultimate source of the idea of God and of morality.
After all, as Omoregbe contends, some moral reformers scathingly criticized, denounced and rebelled against their societies, by appealing to forces beyond their various social environments. Besides, ideas about God and moral prescriptions must have been articulated, in the first instance, by individuals whose visions transcended what prevailed in their different societies.
Therefore, Durkheim's uncritical hypostasization of society, as if it is a person, is wrong. Whatever influence the society might have on its individual members is always effected through people and institutions created and sustained by people. Consequently, although the notions of God and morality have some sociological roots, there is more to those concepts than Durkheim's sociological theory of religion would allow.
To close the gaps which cannot be satisfactorily filled by the previous theories we have discussed, let us examine the psychological explanation offered by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Freud was extremely interested in religion, and looked at it with the eyes of a psychologist. In his important work on the subject entitled Totem and Taboo, Freud posited that religion is the progression into adulthood of a child's attitude of dependence on the father. Naturally, a child is weak. To be continued
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