The dangers of church control of the state

Church and state have always been a dangerous combination. Religion is a major way that people determine who their enemies are, and the state fights wars against those religion-determined enemies. Part of the genius of the U.S. Constitution has been its enforcement of the separation of church and state, but this separation is currently under major attack. So what is the human basis for religion and what makes religion so different from government that the two must be kept apart?

Religion

Religion is older than government, so we should start there. Religion also existed before churches did. Religion is, at its very core, human beings attempting to understand the Universe and their place in it, and then discussing what they have learned with their fellows. Religion, then, is intimately bound up with the very characteristics that make people uniquely human. The urge to understand the Universe is a natural result of complex human language and the innate need of human beings to share their understandings with each other in the form of stories. What we today call religion is a natural outgrowth of being a human being. Religion is based in language.

Language

Language in humans has two particularly interesting characteristics. First, the motivation to learn a language is inherited. The process is laid out in our genes, and can be watched in the development of any healthy child. Each child begins by listening to the language around them, and as the brain connections develop between the hearing center and the speech center, they begin to try out making sounds. This is first babbling, which grows into words and then sentences. The same process also leads children to telling stories, beginning sometime between age 2 and age 4.

The second interesting characteristic that is if importance to religion is that human language is a set of symbols that are not tied directly to specific individual sounds. Where a monkey may make one sound-symbol to warn of snakes on the ground and another sound-symbol to warn of hawks in the sky, humans combine a series of individually meaningless sounds into each meaningful symbol. This means that instead of the symbol set of a language being limited to the number of individual separate sounds that can be made (Is it true that a cat can make between 50 and 70 different meaningful sounds?) the symbol set for human language is infinite. It is also recursive - that is, we can create language symbols that point at other language symbols and use these things meaningfully.

Sentences, syntax, narrative and stories

Which leads to sentences, syntax and narrative. All of these are required to tell stories. Language and the higher forms of human thought required for storytelling are learned, but the urge to learn them is hard-wired into each human individual’s development. These abilities are the clearest characteristic of what distinguishes human beings from our nearest primate cousins.

Sentences are a series of words used together to express a specific meaning to other people. Syntax is a set of rules for word use in sentences that tells which objects are acting, which are being acted upon, and what actions are being taken. Syntax is a set of patterns that determines the form sentences in a given language take, and the rules of syntax communicate much of the context surrounding the words in any sentence. Narrative is the manner in which language is used to explain what is happening to someone else. Narrative communicates meaning from one person to another.

A narrative consists of a series of cause-and-effect events linked together. When those events are told to another person with a beginning and an end, they are stories. Stories have been the central method people have had for communicating meaning to each other since people first existed sometime between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.

When Peter Berger wrote "religion ... [is a] ...humanly constructed universe of meaning, and he explains, ‘Worlds are socially constructed and socially maintained,’” he was discussing stories. Telling stories is the method of constructing and socially maintaining that universe of meaning. At its base, all religion is social meaning communicated through stories, and language is the medium on which those stories are built.

All religions are based on stories to carry the meaning and teach it to others. The very structure of the stories makes people ask certain questions. One such question is what started the chain of events (humanity) and another is what happens when someone dies.

Signifiers and metaphors to communicate meaning – the limitations of words

The narratives of linked cause-and-effect events that make up stories sometimes include a true understanding of what caused something else to happen. For example, the dam stored water behind it, but then it broke and caused the flood. In this case the cause of the event – the flood – is known and can be expressed in clear words.

But how does the storyteller fill an unknown gap n the narrative if the cause an event is not known? How does a storyteller communicating meaning structure a story that explains what happens to a person after death? An explanation of the nature of the Universe and its relationship to Man, for example, is quite beyond the ability of clear words to explain. That gap cannot be filled with a clear, definitive set of words of the type that can be used to tell an engineer how to build a dam or a bridge. So storytellers switch to metaphor.

The reason that some subjects can only be described in metaphor is that language is limited. For some subjects, language can be specific enough so as to adequately explain the subject, but other subjects (Man in the Universe) are quite beyond language. It has to do with the nature of words as symbols. Words are signs that the community using the given language agrees signify or points to something specific. Then ever time an individual uses a word, that word describes something by excluding everything else. If a word does not do this exclusion trick, it is not a meaningful description.

That works well as long as the word is pointing at something that can clearly be separated from the things surrounding it. But what does a language user do to signify something that cannot not be seen, measured or fully understood and cannot be separated from everything else that surrounds it. Something infinite like the Universe cannot be described since the object to be described is limitless. No word is possible that points at the object described. Language deals with this problem by resorting to metaphor. The word “God” is built on such metaphors, since no definition of “God” can fully capture whatever it is that people are attempting to point to and to understand.

When a person uses a metaphor, he is saying "I can't point directly at the item I am discussing, so I will point at something else that is in some manner similar." When the original subject under discussion and investigation is infinite or too large to be understood, then the metaphors of necessity will be things that, at best, are similar to only part of the main item.

Metaphors allow us to talk about the unknown in a somewhat meaningful way. If the metaphor is really similar to the ultimate item under discussion, it may actually provide some elements of shared meaning. But metaphors are not the actual unknown item, so a metaphor cannot provide clear and certain directions and instructions about how people should behave or act in the way the instructions for building a bridge can tell the Engineer what to do. The metaphor is always incomplete and subject to revision when a new, better metaphor is discovered or developed.

Religion and language

Since religion is essentially a human quest into the nature of the infinite, the stories we tell about God and the Universe must all be metaphors. Oh, and to use the word "God" means that you are looking at those aspects of the Universe to which you can ascribe human-like characteristics. That might be saying that God is less than the Universe - except that if both have the characteristic of being infinite, to say that God is less than the infinite Universe because certain parts are left out would be the same as saying that the infinite set of all even numbers is smaller than the infinite set of all natural numbers - clearly not true. [Though there are three different types of infinite numbers with different sizes, but that is another issue.] So religion is a set of stories used to communicate what finite people know about a subject which is infinite, or well beyond the finite understanding of humans. By the very nature of their subject, those stories are based on metaphor rather than precise language.

Written religious stories

Religion was a human practice when all humans were hunter-gatherers. About 12,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East some humans settled down and learned to live together in one place, creating towns that included people from more than one family for the first time. Those settled humans developed agriculture and established the first governments. The development of governments was accompanied by the development of hierarchies of rank and aristocracies. An aristocracy is a small group of people who perform a coordinating function for society rather than working to produce their own food. They have to be supported by the food-producers in society. The aristocracy of religious leaders and the aristocracy of administrators were small, so they consisted of much the same families. The stories told by the religious leaders justified this social invention of an aristocracy. The aristocracies, both religious and administrative quickly became hereditary, since training was done in the family. This is in contrast with the aristocracies in hunter-gatherer societies in which the best and most experienced people were the religious or war-band leaders.

Something strange happened in towns in the Middle East about 5,000 years ago. Writing was invented. One of its first uses was to write down the stories that explained and justified the society and its ways of life.

All kinds of stories were written down. They included local histories, stories and myths from neighbors and conquerors, and anything else that seemed important to maintain the culture. Writing was something the aristocrats took advantage of, since it made them able to direct people to do things at a distance and over time. The religious leaders wrote the stories told by earlier religious leaders since written stories and myths can be retold in an unchanging manner. The religious stories were the ones that were kept over time (how long do you keep business records?), leading to the oldest books in the Middle East – the Old Testament and Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.

There is a subtle danger to writing down the metaphors that are the basis of a religion however. Metaphors are used by religions to explain and pass on an understanding of things that cannot be made explicit. Written documents, however, are not limited to such metaphorical subjects. In fact, writing probably developed first as a way of transmitting specific directions over distances and time to others who were to carry out those directions, and only later was adapted to recording the metaphors that are at the core of the religious experience. Individuals who performed both governmental duties and Priestly duties would be used to taking explicit directions from written documents.

The danger is that religious leaders who gained that status because of inheritance or family connections and the ability to read and write would have insufficient understanding of the religious mysteries that they were handling to know that metaphors were necessary for religious subjects and that metaphors are not directive language Such men would begin to take the metaphorical language and use it as a basis for religious directives to direct and limit men’s actions. In short, the mixture of organized religion and its offshoot, government would lead to inappropriately turning religious metaphors into literal instructions that "God" said had to be followed.

Writing down the religious metaphors also damaged religion. The written document provided a false certainty to what should have been a tentative understanding of religion. With written stories as the source of the stories that communicated the meaning of religion the narratives were permanent and inadaptable to the understanding of the audiences. The permanence of writing the stories separated them from any connection to the immediate reality perceived by the audience.

Metaphor became easier to confuse with things that could be communicated literally and precisely. Writing the stories down may have made the words permanent and easily reproducible, but since they were metaphors that only resembled the religious subjects being discussed, that false appearance of permanence was achieved by a loss of the ability to adapt the stories to the current reality. That led to a misuse of the stories and myths on which religion is based.

That confusion made it easy for Priests in the religious hierarchy to use the written documents to intimidate parishioners with false directives that seemed to be as precise as the written word itself. Such religious directives are not the essence of religious meaning, however. They are political documents used to direct the behavior of the people in the congregation. Until the European Religious Wars were over, government used its police and judicial power to enforce such religious directives. King Charles II was replaced by the British Parliament because Charles did not understand the futility and destructiveness of attempting to enforce religious beliefs using government police and judicial powers, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 led the American founding fathers to write the separation of Church and State into the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When religion is confused with the powers of government

This confusion of religion and of government is not over yet.

When the Pope claimed the other day that religions which are not Roman Catholic and part of the traditional Catholic hierarchy are less than fully Christian, he was making a political statement and a power-grab. The Pope was not making a religious statement. He was demanding to be acknowledged as the top ranking Christian in the world. But hierarchical power is political, not religious.

Evangelists and Fundamentalists claim that all religion flows from their book, but which one is it? The Bible? Which Bible? Or is it the Koran? Each chooses one of the books and asserts that to be 'Christian' (or Muslim) you must accept their doctrine. When they make that assertion, they are making a power grab similar to what the Pope just did. What they are doing is not religion. They are not communicating social meaning about humanity and the Universe. They are playing politics and demanding that you choose them as your hierarchical leader to support.

Those political actions establish a hierarchy of coercion, not a communication of meaning. There is no religious meaning in a hierarchy of Priests or Preachers, just a choice of political leaders.

The doctrine of “Separation of church and state” separated the religious hierarchies from the government ones, and took the power of coercive enforced law away from religious leaders. Enforced law is a part of governance by the government, not a part of religion. Coercion does not communicate meaning. It forces approved behavior and punishes unapproved behavior. That's government.

If this concept of religion is communicated to the politicians in robes trying to take over the state, this nation will be a lot better off - and so will the religions. The religions can focus on explaining the unexplainable meaning of the Universe instead of coercing everyone to behave and dress as they demand.