Religion and the Universal

February 15, 2007

I have been thinking a lately about my newfound fascination with human origins. The topic is a logical departure from my dissertation, which was about more than just pilgrimage, but also the ways that human beings cognitively relate to place. In other words, I have always been chasing something that resembles human universals.. and this move backwards into prehistory enables me to talk with a little more precision about human beings as human beings.

Being embedded now in a Religious Studies department I also feel the need to develop a stronger point of view on the nature of religion. That seems like an obvious issue to have under my belt.. and one which will form the way I teach religion. So how could I define my current point of view on teaching religion? Here are some ideas:

• Religion should be studied as a part of human evolutionary history. It is a human development and therefore connected in some basic ways. It is not a collection of disparate views concerning the nature of God or the world. This calls for not a "world religions" approach to the subject, but a class that looks at religion as a whole.. as a human trait.
• The development of religion is associated with language and art and therefore to study it one should pay careful attention to these two evolutionary siblings. In teaching religion this should mean the introduction of at least general ideas about the way language, metaphor, and art are interconnected.
• I have read on the internet testimonials from religion instructors who present material about different religious traditions in such a way that believers from those religions could assent to the material. The goal would thus be descriptive.. and the material conform to the self-conception of believers. The notion that religion should be seen as a whole lends itself to a more contrastive approach (though not confrontational). In teaching the hajj, for example, my goal is not to get people to understand the significance that an individual Muslim finds in a certain action, but rather to place that event in a wider spectrum of human religious practices. This naturally leads to a more heretical manner of teaching.
• Teaching religion implies a fascination with human meaning creation. There are the Dawkins and Dennets of our world, but while they may be correct about the factual wrongness of belief in God, they are narrow-minded in their disinterest with respect to human cognitive creativity. Note Dawkins at the beginning of The Selfish Gene labeling all pre-1859 attempts to understand the origin of life as useless. Like I said, correct.. but missing something too. If we are going to talk about human meaning creation then we are talking about cognitive science.. and thus we are back to fundamental human traits.
• When it comes to the study of a particular religious tradition, such as Islam, my approach will be marked by attention to human social settings. For example, the topic of Islam and the city will be amenable to this approach since it emphasizes the way religion interacts with and grows out of a particular social setting. Likewise the study of patterns of religious change or the development of interpretive strategies.. both represent a chapter in the long line of human inventions of tradition.. and both have human cognition as their ultimate explanatory mechanism. What will not be an interesting topic is an explanation of the exact nature of the differences between the four major Sunni schools of law.. or the ins and outs of the debate about the "createdness" of the Quran.