30 January Daily Question

What is religion?

Much of how I view and define religion was been influenced by a book that I read recently by Jared Diamond, called Guns, Germs, and Steel. In it Diamond goes through much of human history, from the very earliest forms of humans to the modern day. In this he defines the very traditional institutes such as the Abrahamic religions and most Eastern religions as such, but he also widens the definition to include things such as Communism, Liberalism, and Nationalism as forms of religion. Many people will use religion as a “dirty” word sometimes in order to discredit someones belief in a system as based on illegitimate reasoning, but Diamond doesn’t cast judgment upon this fact. He lists 6 major functions of “religion”, each of which have grown or shrank in importance as time has gone on. The first three are the “traditional” aspects of religion: Supernatural explanations for the natural world, diffuse anxiety of dangers beyond human control, and presenting comfort in the face of pain, suffering, and mortality. The final three are new aspects of religion. “Those new functions of religion have been to teach obedience toward political leaders, to justify the moral codes of peaceful behavior toward strangers within one’s own society and to justify moral codes of killing enemies belonging to other societies with which one’s own society is at war”. Under this definition Patriotism like that which is described in the reading could be defined as a form of religion, as the ultimate good is that of state rather than a god. “In many of the earliest states, religion and patriotism were one and the same, since the religious leader of the state was also the government leader.” This is required almost to keep together large bodies of diverse citizens, to bring a common cause to keep us together, so in a way religion is still the glue that holds the world together.