by Siderea

Many people make the mistake of equating religion with religious belief. A religious belief is an assertion about how something in the world is. For example, it might be the assertion that there is a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, conscious, non-material being with an interest in human affairs who exists somehow "outside" nature and natural law (e.g. gravity) and who has taken certain specific actions like creating the universe and sacrificing his son. Another example religious belief assertion is that there are a cohort of human-like beings, exempt from many (but not all) natural laws, who live on a mountain in Greece and will punish those who do not venerate them. Another example is the assertion that there is a semi-conscious non-material part of human beings which is recycled from one human being's death into another's birth, until such time as that recycled element achieves certain deeds or properties in the course of a human existence, upon which it is no longer recycled.

But a religion is far more than its assertions about the world we live in. Those assertions may be core to the religion, they may be critical in shaping the rest of the religion, but there's far more to a religion than that.

Religions, contrary to what many atheists seem to think, do not seem exist primarily to provide assertions about how the world is.

Of all of the rest of what a religion is -- and there's a lot -- one part is that religions come with a whole lot of teachings about how things should be. In particular, they have a whole lot to say about how people should behave.

In other words, a religion has assertions about the world, which are descriptions, and it also has rules for conduct, which are prescriptions.

In fact, that might be a useful rule to differentiate between a religious belief and a non-religious belief. Clearly, our culture makes such a differentiation, and that seems to be the line along which it is made. For instance, there are people who assert that there is a non-material part of humans which is conscious and persists existing after death: a belief in ghosts. While it may be rooted in a religious paradigm, it also may not. In our culture we don't consider a belief in ghosts to be a "religious" belief. I submit that's because a belief in ghosts does not generally come with an implicit or explicit prescription for how one should conduct oneself. A belief in ghosts is descriptive of the world, not prescriptive.

I submit the hypothesis that the way our culture constructs the idea of "religion", something has to have both descriptive assertions and prescriptive assersions to get called a "religion".

This prescriptivist part of religion is its morality, its moral teachings, its values.

This morality may have any of a number of ostensible relationships to the descriptive part of the religion. A religion may teach that if one is not good, one will be punished by a supernatural entity the existence of which it asserts. A religion may teach that the best way to live for maximal human happiness was revealed by supernatural agency. A religion may teach that correct conduct will effect supernatural reward. And so forth.

But in all cases (at least all I know of; fill me in if I'm missing something) the prescription part of a religion is held by that religion to follow from the description part of the religion. That is, because there is a god who told us to behave in certain ways, therefore we should behave in those ways. Because this way of life was revealed by supernatural agency, therefore we are assured it is optimal. In no religion that I know of is the belief in the descriptivist assertions of the religion considered to be incidental to its prescriptions (though I have met individuals who hold that position towards their religion). To my knowledge, no religion says "We prescribe certain conduct. And, by the way, we happen to think there are little green men on Mars. But that's just a coincidence."

I would submit that this moral dimension of religions may be even more "what religion is about" to most religious believers than the assertions. I think most theists of all stripes would agree that in principle it's not enough to, for instance, "accept Jesus into your heart" if you don't also "live a Christian life". Replace as you will with "think there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet"/"Submit ("Islam", literally) to the will of Allah", or "venerate Buddha"/"follow the Eight-Fold path", etc. etc. etc. Even the "faith, not works" crowd still seemed to have ideas about what you should be doing with yourself.

To go off on a minor tangent: it is this, I think, this primacy of the moral dimension of religion in many theists' minds, which causes the worst reactions atheists get from theists. Because if you think the whole point of religion is morality, someone who rejects all religion is rejecting all morality, and that is downright scarily sociopathic.

I've heard from a lot of young atheists who left their families' faiths, and I've been noting how so many of them express their contentions with religion in terms of that religion's descriptivist part, and not at all in terms of the religion's prescriptivist part. They, quite reasonably, say they left their religions because they stopped believing, or had never really believed, in the descriptive assertions of their religions -- they didn't believe in the posited existence of a god. If, from their families' point of view, the bulk of a religion is its prescriptions for right conduct, the preoccupation these young people have with whether or not the descriptive assertions of the religion are right must strike them as profoundly confused and missing the point. From the point of view of these young people, their families freaking out over a question of mere cosmology is a gross overreaction.

Which is not to say I think its trivial -- or, heck, possible -- to remedy that particular conflict. Or desirable. I am not prescribing, only describing. End tangent.

So now I've described two part of religion, its descriptivist assertions and its conduct prescriptions. There's more.

Not only do religions exist in a intellectual dimension (a body of ideas and knowings about the world) and this moral dimension, religions exist in a social dimension.

Religions are tribes. They are non-geographical nations. They are societies -- whether vast, complex ones greater than nation-states or tiny little gatherings of the few -- with all the appurtenances thereto: norms, folkways, customs, conventions, protocols, social structures, boundaries, hierarchies, etc., etc., etc.

When you join a religion, you are not merely accepting as true its description of reality or agreeing to obey its prescriptions, you are joining a clan of sorts with all that implies about interpersonal relationships and the social construction of one's own identity. Conversion is often a process of acculturation.

There is a venerable history of belief without membership. "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church --//I keep it, staying at Home" (Dickinson). That tradition also typically eschews referring to itself as religion, and, for that matter, those who do clearly belong to religions often seem to look down their noses at these free spirits, save on those occasions it is expedient to some point to clasp the wayward believer to the bosom of organized faith and recognize them as a prodigal son.

A fourth part of religion is its physical expression. Religions have material culture. Religions have stuff. Land, buildings, candelabras, vestments, relics, idols, books, beads, chalices, wine, knives, axes, etc., etc., etc. There are objects in this world which truly have no purpose but for use in religious worship. Religions also have sensory impressions, as an Episcopal priest once termed them to me, "Smells and Bells". They have their musics and their incense, their calligraphy and their vaulting domes, their glass-stained pools of light and their flickering candles, their ecstatic dancing and their endless kneeling.

Maybe there are more parts than that. Those four parts I sussed out by using Jung's paradigm of the four functions, the way folks used the then-new periodic chart to suss out the existence of vanadium. The four functions don't map to them exactly (no, they don't fit, please don't try to force them; something will just break), but they did point out the existence of these things to me.

Further commentary on the above:

(1)

This captures some of what atheists are getting when we say "atheism isn't a religion". Atheism has no prescriptions, no congregations, and no stuff. There are, mind you, atheist and agnostic organizations which attempt to do the prescriptions, congregations and stuff parts, but none of that is intrinsic to atheism and not only do most atheists have nothing to do with that, the vast majority aren't even aware such things exist and are rather dubious about their value when brought to their attention.

Atheism exists solely in the descriptivist dimension. As such it is analogous to a religious belief as opposed to a whole religion. It's merely an understanding, not a whole way of life.

But only analogous. It's only sorta-kinda a description of the world. Atheism has solely a negative statement. It says not "X is true of the world" but rather "X is not true of the world. What is true? Don't know. But that answer? Is wrong."

Atheism delegates the problem of describing the world. Or, if you will, black-boxes it. The vast majority of atheists say that the job of describing the world is science's. But even that's not required. Technically, atheism is merely a disbelief in gods. How an atheist choses to explain the world is not delineated by atheism.

This, btw, is why there's a movement (hey, I've heard it from three separate sources, it must be a movement) among atheists to go a step further and call themselves "naturalists", in opposition to "supernaturalists". (The problem with this is that "naturalist" also means "someone who likes to go around without clothing." Though that intriguingly suggests a group of sky-clad unbelievers; perhaps I should get in touch...)

(2)

This also touches on why it is often so excruciating to leave a religion. It is also (or it has) a culture, which is an enormous part of identity and community. Julia Sweeney in her "Letting Go of God" speaks very movingly of this, for instance, of how proud she was, even as a child, of the literary tradition of her religion, of how her doubt was read by her family and by the community she grew up in as a rejection of them and their culture, "As if I had told them I wasn't an American any more."

People's relationships to their religions involve all five dimensions, and they can be just as deeply invested in their religion's culture, society, and stuff as they are with the religion's beliefs prescriptive and descriptive. Or more so, as the existence of Humanistic Judaism attests.

The reasons people belong to their religions aren't simply that they think its descriptions are true. Were that so, their memberships would be much more brittle. They embrace the whole of their religions, and can treasure those other parts very much.

So even if someone is convinced that the descriptive parts of their religion are false, they aren't necessarily going to reject the whole religion. It would be unreasonable to expect them to, when such a large part (just how much varies from person to person, of course) of what they value in the religion -- possibly a majority of it -- is not the description.

(3)

All of these five dimensions can reinforce the others. In fact, I suspect a good gauge of the memetic success of a given religion is just to what extent that religion has maximized those reinforcing effects, to leverage its "stickiness".

As explained above, the Description can justify the Prescription. Stuff -- from impressive buildings to sacred texts to psychoactive pharmaceuticals -- is useful in convincing people of the Description and Prescription. Culture can normalize adherence to both Description and Prescription (not only are we going to recite from our holy text, we're going to put it on as a play with music, dress up in costumes and get drunk) and shape the Stuff (must make music and costumes and wine!) Congregations bring peer-pressure to bear to keep members believing in both the Description and Prescription, and the Description may construct the congregation ("body of Christ") and the Prescription order them to form congregations and how. And so forth.

I'm reminded of St. Augustine's angsting over the role of music in Christian worship. Yes, OK, music (Stuff) magnifies the glory of the Lord (Description)... but it can also distract worshippers from contemplation of heaven by its seductive and worldly beauty (people pay attention to the Stuff and ignore the Description). This particular tug-of-war got played over and over again through the centuries in the Catholic church: trope, trope, tro--PRUNE! trope, trope, tr-- PRUNE!

Balancing these different things, such that the Description and Prescription can maintain the necessary central role, can be tricky. I have the hunch that it is these different forces which result in quite a bit of dynamics and drama within religious organization.