of research that would be required, it might be too daunting. If a person felt that she had to spend every waking moment studying ancient texts of one or more religion in its original language, as well as its whole history, so as to make a reasonable choice, or to have to do this for several religions, she might prefer to leave it up to the “authorities.” It was interesting to see this very thing occur after scholar John Dominic Crossan dedicated his entire life to the study of the historical evidence about Jesus. He finally decided that the historical pursuit would go on even without him, but he had come to the conclusion that the meaning of “Incarnation” was anyone opposing systemic injustice, who is thereby an embodiment of God. But he also said that he would leave theological decisions up to the theologians of the church.42 This appeared to oversimplify and intensify the tension between autonomy and heteronomy.
When one hears various religion’s claims of antiquity and sole legitimacy of the only truth, that is almost enough to want to be rid of one’s freedom, so that one would have no responsibility to have to devote one’s entire life to that search. But that is the problem created not by human nature or reason, but by the absolutized competing claims of religions in general, particularly of claims that conflate the visible/invisible, history/myth, or human/divine. Some more reasonable solution must be possible.
Any religion’s stage of rationalization is not something that can be turned back or erased. Individuals are scattered across the spectrum in their levels of understanding and criticism, and their willingness to live heteronomously or mutually autonomously, their progressivism or primitivism, and so forth. The various religions will continue to be questioned, tested, explained, and reinterpreted. For many people, this will be unnecessary since they view religions’ rituals, emotions, and beliefs too dated in their historical garb, and they feel they can live autonomously more ethically without any conflict between the present world understandings and this endeavor if they simply exclude religion from their lives. On the other hand, for those firmly attached to a religion within the changing scientific and historical understandings, there will be a continual need to try to reconcile the ancient rituals, emotions, beliefs, and even earlier examples of rationalization with these present understandings of our world, even if one can somehow justify not spending an equal amount of time and energy trying to understand other religions, since one cannot avoid the obvious question even raised by the Dalai Lama of “which” religion. Otherwise, one either splits one’s psyche into trying to hold together things that appear to be incompatible or one unconsciously distorts the position of either side to make them fit.
Innovation, discoveries, and new insights have not come from any religion’s heteronomous, absolutized metaphysics. Rather, they were stimulated in single human brains, which implies autonomy, even if others later examined the claims and agreed. By the brain’s great ability to combine human words or language, or make unique connections through the various parts of the brain and their modules, then communicated to others, ideas were sampled and put to the test. They either fit the complex schema that was developing within one or more individual mind (brain) and were adopted, or they did not and were rejected, starting with single brains. The “schemas were everything.”43 If that sounds like pragmatism as William James and other pragmatists would see it, in its best sense, it is. Even the apodictic pronouncements of the heteronomous religious institutions did not originate in that form but were once upon a time mere premonitions or sketchy ideas in a person’s mind, rather than thought to be some obvious universal and eternal truth or some divine revelation coming from another world.
These human ideas and expressions were only gradually tested in those particular cultures as temporary fits; some were rejected, others accepted because they were perhaps credible or feasible, and with religions, others were retained eventually simply for authority-sake even though they did not fit. In any case, they did not begin as Absolute authority of the “Wholly Other.” To think otherwise is to manufacture a new and unreal history. When one reads Hans Küng’s Christianity: Essence, History and Future, as he admits all the mistakes, poorly defined ideas, unrealistic assertions, power struggles, and even cruelties that he sees within the history of the Christian institution to which he belongs, that history reveals often more a stubbornness and exercise of sheer power by the institution than it shows any willingness to allow its people to think for themselves.44 We will survey his ideas in a later chapter.
But a second problem occurs with the religious’ hyperbolizing and mythologizing their claims, knowing no limits whatever. The transcendence does not mean merely that one has a more wholesome mental assessment of her conditions in life that makes things better. That should be included in the transformation of character mentioned by Whitehead. But religions’ claims do not stop here. The transcendence claimed by the religion goes beyond promising that one will find a new balance between the pleasures and the pains of one’s few short years. Nor does it even conclude with the promise that one can take heart at the time of death that one has done one’s best, and that reassurance by one’s own conscience suffices for the better life. Yet many conservative religious have even insisted that people must trust the institution rather than rely on their conscience since even conscience has become depraved. That, of course, would have horrified Kant who was convinced that one can never escape one’s conscience. But it does show religion’s unnecessary animosity toward autonomy.
Instead, religions typically promise not only transcendence of the immediate physical, material conditions that often extend far beyond the “state of mind,” but they insist that the knowledge or faith the given religion offers grants a life that is incomparable and not accessible in any way except through that religion. Whether it is merely the Absolute knowledge that puts an end to desire and therefore to suffering and to rebirth, as Buddhism professes, or is an eternal transformation of one’s being while in this mortal life, or a transformation into a utopian, heavenly post-death existence as in traditional Christianity and Islam, the answer still emphasizes that the better life is incomparable and simply is not otherwise accessible.
On the other hand, each specific religion claims that it is the only answer, the final revelation, the absolute truth, the incomparable. It is presupposed that there is no genus or species to which that religion even belongs. Many very conservative people have been taught through the influence of Karl Barth, that “religion” points to human effort, to the unsaved or pagans, which instead of being “religious,” must have a “relationship with Jesus Christ.”45 But one does not avoid contamination with what is finite or human just by denying being “religious,” since all the ideas associated with any religion are of human origin, no matter what they claim. Words and claims do not mutate from human phenomena to the “Word of God” merely by being included in a leather-bound book or scroll or by being called “sacred” or spoken by an “ordained” pastor as “Holy Bible” or “Qur’an” or called the “kerygma” (preached message), or even by people placing their hands on it while they take an oath.
Many adherents of a particular religion have been taught and then presupposed only themselves as the saved (even or especially to the degree that they insist they are not “religious”); all others are the lost, including not simply the nonreligious but those of all other religions.46 Further, many believe this cleavage or distinction is not for a week or two or even for half of the summer, but for eternity. It is not a small mistake they think the other religious or the nonreligious are making. It is the most momentous, obvious, and disastrous mistake humanly possible. Many religious people think better not to have been born than to make such a mistake for eternity.47
Of course religions also teach morality, personal responsibility toward others, and compassion for the less fortunate. Yet many nonreligious people are moral and personally responsible and compassionate as well. Religions, like all institutions, are ambiguous as Whitehead suggested. They often develop many inflexible attitudes of asserting their superiority, which the individuals within the groups would not assert on their own, not without it being emphasized by the institution itself.48 The terms “infidel” and “atheist” have been used by religious people often as cultural scare words or hate words, not mere neutral descriptions that a person does not believe
