On the Memetic Algorithms Web page on the Internet, H. Keith
Henson illustrates the lifelike quality of memes by recounting
an episode from his time as a student (University of Arizona,
1960). Having to fill out a form on which religious affiliation
was to be disclosed, he chose the denomination Druid, after
having initially tried MYOB (the acronym for Mind Your Own
Business). As he stated, "It was far too good a prank to keep it
to myself." Replication mechanisms, in addition to a healthy
dose of social criticism, soon had the university record almost
20% of the student body as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids,
Southern Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, Zen
Druids, Latter-Day Druids, and probably a number of other
variations. Once the question regarding religious affiliation
was removed from the entry form, the chain of replication and
variation was interrupted.
There are many aspects of the relation between religion and
language embedded in the anecdote. In some of the themes to be
discussed in the coming pages, the humorous aspects will
resonate probably less than questions on how religious
experiences extend from early forms of human awareness to the
current day.
Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the most
probing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, being
subjected to antireligious indoctrination, or even repression,
does not result in the abandonment of religion. Ignorance,
primitive living conditions, extreme tolerance and liberalism,
the possibility to freely choose one's religious affiliation
from the many competing for each soul might lead to skepticism,
if not to outright rejection of Divinity. In other words,
conditions that seem to support religious beliefs do not
automatically lead to practical experiences of human
self-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditions
generate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is no
simple answer to the question of why some people are religious,
some indifferent, and others actively against religion.
Enlightenment did not result in generalized atheism; the pressure
of the church did not generate more believers. Scientific and
technological progress of the magnitude we experience did not
erase the verb to believe from among the many that denote what
people do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and this
applies to religion as it applies to all other forms of belief,
is part of the practical experience of human self- constitution.
It involves our projection in a world acknowledging distinctions
that are pragmatically significant and synchronized with the
dynamics of life and work.
The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. We
humans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities,
forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through many
filters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, in
particular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probably
as good a source as any reference book) defines religion as
"belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and
worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe."
Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practical
experience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks.
The manifold relation between literacy and religion can be
meaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context of
the constitution of religion. Its further development into
different theologies, and its embodiment in various churches and
other institutions connected to religion, also help in this
understanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure of
religion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, and
the dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflect
adaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make it
fit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formed
and transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion,
especially language after the experience of writing, developed
practically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth to
incipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitive
expression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, and
sound, to a more self- organized system of expression becoming
communication. During the process, presented here in compressed
form, writing appears as a result of interactions between the
experiences of language and religion.
That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that will
eventually lead to literacy has already been generously
explained. It has also been pointed out that with writing
emerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many more
practical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy and
religion are intertwined in ways different from those
characteristic of other human practical experiences. In the
historic overview to be provided, these peculiarities will be
pointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of human
self-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of genetic
replication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetic
transmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together,
and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequence
of generations. The role of scale of human experience, the
relation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, and
other aspects, the relation between individual and community,
and between right and wrong will also be addressed in their
context. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments
will be employed to clarify what religions have in common.
In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that
living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity,
Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a
mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese
worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification
with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines
or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day
is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other,
but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in
accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living
according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the
less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving
up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and
especially involving relativity in the search for options
leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a
framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the
transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values
of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty
embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject
human existence to doubt.
In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the
desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given
scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts
involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the
past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts.
The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
in the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through a
religious past to which they have lost any meaningful
connection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians
try to reconnect to the world of experiences to which they
traditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts,
allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselves
with the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of a
new pan-Turkish empire.
In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism,
as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the
shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned
obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of
redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding
that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences
just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in
different contexts and with different motivations. This might
sound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes of
existence and faith, or lack thereof.
Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better or
worse, it has played an important role in the history of
humankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: We
cannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The new
world order brought about by the downfall of communism in the
Soviet Union and East Europe raises even more questions
regarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- forms
of religion that replace official atheism religion or disguised
forms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent do
they reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy or
safe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature were
all affected by a change in their details: different ways of
preserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towards
authority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not in
the fundamental acceptance of Divinity.
Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance,
religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merely
ceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with the
newest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks.
Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religious
ceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is the
appropriation of social, political, and moral causes, as
religion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, and
progressive, or conversely as the guardian of permanent values,
justifying its active role outside its traditional territory.
This ascertainment is dictated by the pragmatic framework of the
dynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by the
memetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reason
for not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, no
matter how exciting this might appear.
But who made God?
The variety of religions corresponds to the variety of pragmatic
circumstances of human identification. Regardless of such
differences, each time children, or adults, are taught that God
made the world, the oceans, the sun, stars, and moon, and all
living creatures, they ask: But who made God? Trying to answer
such a question might sound offensive to some, impossible to
others, or a waste of time. Still, it is a good entry point to
the broader issue of religion's roots in the pragmatic
framework. The commonalties among the majority of religions, to
which comparative studies (especially those of Mircea Eliade)
point, are significant at the structural level. We have, on the
one hand, all the limitations of the individual human-one among
many, mortal, subject to illness and defeat, object of passion
and seduction, deceitful, limited in understanding of the
various forces affecting one's projection as part of nature, and
as part of the human species. On the other hand, there is the
uniqueness of the immortal, untouchable, impervious, omniscient,
entity (or entities) able to understand and unleash forces far
more powerful than those of nature or of men, an entity (or
entities) upon which depends the destiny of all that exists.
Through belief, all the limitations of the human being are
erased. It is quite instructive, as well as impressive, how every
limitation of the human being, objective and subjective, is
counteracted and given a life of its own in the language housing
the progression from man to gods or to God, on one side, and to
the practice of religion, on the other.
The various gods constituted in the world's religious texts also
recount what people do in their respective environment, natural
or tamed to some degree. They tell about what can go wrong in
their life and work, and what community rules are most
appropriate to the pragmatic context. The value of rain in the
Middle East, the fine- tuning of work to seasonal changes in the
Far East, the significance of hope and submission in the Indian
subcontinent, the increased role of animal domestication, the
extension of farmland, the role of navigation in other parts of
the world are precisely encoded in the various religions and in
their books. These books are bodies of explanations,
expectations, and norms pertinent to practical experiences,
written in very expressive language, ambiguous enough to
accommodate a variety of similar situations, but precise in
their identification of who is part of the shared religious
experience, and who is outside, as foreign and undesirable, or
foreign and subject to enticement.