promised rewards can be subconsciously postponed indefinitely to the future, completely reinterpreted or de-emphasized, or even finally forgotten. Yet, as we noted in chapter 2, the exclusiveness of religion’s typical segregation of humanity may sooner or later take its toll on the adherent, despite the embrace he feels from members of the group. Unfortunately, most religious groups teach their members to look to the future for the fulfillment of all the promises, the better life, the relief from suffering, and the like, and often their attachment with this world has become so unscientific in its religious ideas that even a hope for future improvement seems unrealistic. At that point, the cognitive dissonance becomes detrimental, with rigid religion as the problem.
A member of an Appalachian fundamentalist church is promised that she need not worry about holding rattlesnakes in her hands as she dances to the music because the last chapter of the gospel of Mark promises God will not allow her to be bitten. If and when she does get bitten, and all the members get shook up over it, her consolation is that by holding that snake, no matter what happens to her in the future, she proved to herself that she was just as good as her present peers, therefore that she too had God’s Spirit and was therefore one of God’s elect. To feel equal to the others of one’s group, to feel totally accepted by them—is very important. Even more important in certain religions is one’s conviction that one belongs to God’s chosen who are the greatest and most fortunate of all. There is no greater promise or reward than being part of His “elect people.” The self-fulfillment of that promise by such groups’ rituals with snakes is less obvious than its lethal, illogical danger.
But the actual content of the promise can get altered because of one’s new self-realization or sheer accident. The fact that there is still too much conscious emphasis upon what the isolated individual can achieve (with a snake) is obvious. But the social aspect of the episode can possibly serve as the early unarticulated stages of self-consciousness that hopefully can eventually involve mutual self-identity, which is not dependent upon old images of being literally the chosen people of God or of God’s elect that have to prove the fact by handling poisonous snakes or drinking poison.
This example is consistent with the insight of present sociologists of religion, namely, that people’s primary reason for belonging to a religious communion is predominantly social, so is much more explicable from a sociological approach than doctrinal or traditionally theological one, even if the believers appear to think otherwise because that is what they have been taught by the clergy. The problem of greatest magnitude is to assist the person to realize the heteronomy and absoluteness of her picture of her religion that imposes such incredible, unnecessary, and dangerous rituals or that creates a bifurcation of humanity, which creates all kinds of mental anguish sooner or later for many people.
It is likely that the actual concrete relationships that are experienced within a group are the powers that spawn the enhancement of the self, again, not some mere predetermined “essence” of being human, whether “reason,” “love,” or “being” that is not only common to all humanity but also to divinity as in Hegel. When focus is only on some common “essence” which one realizes, if that is common also to God, it vacillates between an uncanny hubris (of having divine Mind) or, as Nietzsche said, making “God” the emptiest of all concepts. That is not much of a choice. Instead, is it not more logical that the enhanced or better self is realized rather in the actualization of the freedom to be what I choose within the limits of the same freedom of the other finite humans I relate to, with all of our particularities or unique features.
The particulars are not eliminated, but more in the terms of John Rawls’s analysis, the mutual self-realization can be experienced, because of obvious differences between the parties, only through a “hypothetical veil of ignorance.”27 The very absurdity of the “thrownness” into existence (the Dasein) of myself as well as the other person eliminates our beginning a social contract by thinking any advantages we have through birth (sexually, racially, monetarily, intellectually, etc.) over the other person are earned by us, or gives us more rights, advantages that must be accommodated in the contract. To be unable or unwilling to divest ourselves of such “happenstance” elements means we will never find a common ground with others on which to form a social contract. If one must move past thinking of having advantages of this, on the other end, one must also be able to eliminate any assumption that one deserves any disadvantages. So whether advantages or disadvantages are experienced by me, I and others must be hypothetically willing to move past these to imagine how, without them, we would formulate our social contract. To speak in terms of such mutual intentional divestment is not a luxury or merely possible alternative, but it is the obvious only alternative that results from any actual encounter with another person in which I become actually fully aware that the other’s claim of its subjectivity and freedom is as valid as mine. Sooner or later, we all realize that we live with others in an interdependence of mutual respect, trust, and responsibility toward each other. It is the reality of social life, not a mere hypothetical, or optional idea.
More specifically, in that relationship, I will not pretend I am not a male, a Christian, a Democrat, a poor person, and the like, since I am fully conscious of such. But confronted by an other who also could have been anything, as could I, for example, a rich, well-educated, female, Muslim, or a poor, Hispanic, highly educated, male, or any number of other combinations—we relate to each other in the awareness of our hypothetical “original position.” That is, we all place ourselves back into a hypothetical time or “original time” of forming the social contract without any knowledge of what our situation would actually be. So it is not a pretending but an actual hypothetical veil of ignorance of voluntarily and mutually projecting ourselves into a hypothetical “original position” of simply not knowing what status or condition or specifics we would be born into, so that, when engaged as parties of genuine mutual respect to work out a social contract, both of us would, in such social contracting, hedge our bets as we prioritize our values.
Hedging our bets, means that Rawls was persuaded that the first rule we would both agree on would likely be one of equality of all the people involved. To the degree that the formal equality of having equal voice does not necessarily work out for some exact distributive equality even of opportunities or rights, in the complexities of the real world of the application of the laws, our second rule would be that for those who were nevertheless disadvantaged in the working out of the distribution of the actual benefits of this equality, there would be a form of compensation. This shows the realization that we all have of the very contingency or nonrationality of our existence, that we could have been born in a different country to different parents, or our ethnic, economic, sexual, and intellectual inheritance might have been quite different so is not merit-based in any way.
By working from such a neutral base, we transcend our irrationally vested interests or elements of identity and actualize the value of self-integrity in mutual autonomy and equality. We agree to treat each other in this consciousness of the absurdity yet necessity of the particulars that comprise each of us and our identity, to not seize upon the accidental fortunes or misfortunes either of us might have experienced in order for one to get the advantage over the other. If we find a significant unity with each other in this allowance we give to each other’s subjectivity or we find our “I” in the other, we realize the irrationality of these unique elements, and contract with each other in such a way that each of us protects himself from being on the short end of any inequality, knowing that the mutuality of this process also guarantees we will not come out superior to the other in distribution of opportunities and rights in our society.
This sense of fairness or basic equality with each other is almost so instinctual as to be pre-reflective, yet the sophisticated human capacity to conceptualize, hypothesize, conceive of self as possibly having been born into totally different circumstances over which one has no control, and one’s ability to communicate these discoveries with others, suggests that we would be aware of each other’s needs, priorities, expectations, and so forth very early on in the relationship, so that all this would be a part of the blossoming “we-realization,” which underlies each’s self-realization. It would imply that such divorcing oneself from the accidentals or “happenstance”
