usage to distinguish the “saved” (good or enlightened) from the “damned” (evil or ignorant) makes religions hypocritical and a threat to humanization.49
Even the religious person’s morality is not usually an autonomous decision to live morally, but rather a heteronomous demand with threats or at least a universal or Absolute heteronomous moral command. They insist they do it in obedience to God or Allah or Adonai or to follow Jesus or to emulate Buddha or because that is what Shiva did or Guru Nanak taught or is absolutely required by the Tao, Om, the “All in all,” or the truth their abbot emphasized or the Pope declared—or at least was manifest through eternal words or symbols as the eternal order of the universe or morality. It always came from some absolute “Other.”
Finally, not only is autonomy summarily annihilated by this kind of subservient morality, but even this heteronomous morality or this social relating to the nonbelievers ends up being extremely preferentially and culturally limited. It is not an accident that New Testament scholars have finally discovered that most of the passages in the New Testament that instruct believers to love, assist, and sustain those in need are talking only about helping those within the particular religious community itself, not people outside.50 So the heteronomous morality has several strikes against it, especially if Christians take seriously the wide-open moral sensitivity Jesus is alleged to have taught in the “Sermon on the Mount.”
Yet, despite the glorious promises of the religions for their “faithful” ones, many people still have preferred to be nonreligious or secular, to abstain from any association with religious beliefs and institutions. Their “freethinking” has often been misjudged as has their insistence on autonomy and their refusal to accept the usual mythologies and superstitions of the various religions. Yet, contrary to the religious people’s notions, many of the nonreligious or secular have not actually missed out on the better life, but often devoted every ounce of their being to attaining it and assisting others to do so. They have not been a barrier to humanization or humanity by squelching autonomy but have greatly encouraged it.
Unlike the religious in their culture, most of them have not abandoned this world to think of the better life only in some imaginary post-death “heaven,” nor have they deserted their fellow humans in their individualistic quest, thinking that the better life could still be theirs even if all other people missed out on it. Why else would Dorothee Solle have attacked the “individualistic” emphasis of Bultmann’s theology, and insisted that as long as anyone is not saved, others are not either?51 Nor have they been as misanthropic declaring that if one has no duty to God, neither does one have any moral duty to any human. Our co-existence makes it obvious that we do have moral responsibility to others, god or no god.
Autonomy and Resistance from Heteronomy
Authoritarianism and heteronomy are not unambiguous evils, nor is autonomy an unambiguous good. Autonomy does not mean arbitrariness. Nor does it require or tolerate antisocial behavior. Quite the opposite. Literally, it indicates only that one is somehow a “law to oneself” or “self-governing.” When used within a society that recognizes a social contract, whether explicit or merely consciously understood, autonomy means primarily a freedom to think on one’s own. But it certainly does not mean to do whatever one wants. It never did. Any social contract limits that freedom.
Further, people stand at totally different stages in their understandings of what they need and want, what they believe, what things they might allow to challenge or put their ideas and values to the test, and merely what they think they believe, which they have never questioned. That is, we all have our limits of what we can know, tolerate, and challenge, whether we are thinking of how different others’ beliefs might be from our own, or how much insecurity or personal questioning we can tolerate within ourselves.
If one can bracket out the Absolute, is there a probability that William James’ idea that the “more” life religions seek can be found in anyone who can help one be able to take one’s “next step”? Could the answer to whatever we think is wrong with our lives actually be right in front of us in every relationship, or that rather than being destined for some utopia in an invisible sphere, our real and only “home” is here and now, and we need to realize that? So far as we can tell, time in our part of the universe or multiverse runs only in one direction. Could it be that the promise of future felicitude is derived only from and understood only by human minds (brain activity), which contrasts joy with painful experiences? But when one’s brain no longer functions, and our lives terminate and its elements disperse, there is never again any person left or any thoughts of anything, much less joy or pain. Yet could that not be more than enough, received as a “gift,” not self-caused but as a gift in process. Process is life and life is process, not some “result.”
Yet religious heteronomy fights against such an idea of this, regarding it as worldliness and realism, gross humanism and relativism—so clearly, one sooner or later has to choose on his or her own either for heteronomy or autonomy. The irony is that heteronomous indoctrination very subtly corrupts the quest for autonomy. One can feel radically self-directed while being unconsciously manipulated by a cultural ideology that surreptitiously encroaches on one’s mind and life, even virtually takes over. This exacerbates the natural difficulty of one’s becoming autonomous, since, Kohlberg noted that most adults do not consistently reach the stage of rational autonomous abstractions in making moral decisions. Fears of disapproval and punishment, the specter of the earlier parental years of heteronomy, continue for many. Rather, as Hoffer said, they seek “to belong” more than anything else, to find security if not also freedom from freedom’s responsibility in belonging. 52
The real danger is not even that of “belonging” to a group. I acknowledge that the better life discovered within most religions is that of intensified, constructive human relations. It is in a sense of “belonging,” potentially rich as a support system. The problem comes only when the group’s Absolute dogma is expected to dominate if not absolutely dictate norms to each member. It was interesting that when Harvey Cox undertook to investigate in depth the new interest college students had in Eastern religions, so became a part of certain groups in various places, his conclusion was not that these university students were simply right or wrong in this spiritual exploration, but rather that their hope to escape authority, heteronomy, or rigidity of traditional religions in these new Eastern pursuits actually revealed eventually similar structures of authority and rigidity.53
On the other hand, the call to autonomy radiates from many possible sources, as Richard Rorty noticed; sometimes from abstract or impersonal sources but more often in narratives or stories such as writings or enactments through the theater, movies or videos that express cultures which present a contradictory element or a radically different ideology or basic position that exposes the areas in which one has not yet thought on one’s own. I believe, this awakening usually comes in its most potent form in very personal relations, that is, in an actual encounter with and befriending of other people whose ideas or basic orientation is so different that they appear almost threatening to one’s preconceptions—something most people have experienced.
The difference between crude clubs and stones of our ancient ancestors and the nuclear, germ, and cyber warfare available today, however, increases the intensity of the focus of such interaction with the “other” or “different,” and multiplies the need for mutual trust and respectful mutual autonomy. There is no longer another distant geographical area to which one can easily take one’s relatives and friends in order to escape the presence of this other who is now cybernetically ubiquitous.54 And war, even global warming, or complete pollution of earth can easily put an end not simply to a handful of people but to a whole nation, even to the whole species of homo sapiens, and any or all other species that might eventually replace homo sapiens. Finite limits of and the demand for long-term beneficial use of resources, spaces, and options expose the necessity of real trust of each other, of genuine social solidarity, of civil discourse, and responsible
