Atlases, Web shrines and a gathering of new research into
age-old spiritual questions
Sunday, June 10, 2001; Page BW13
Everyone who contemplates God is faced with the same insoluble
paradox: We are finit beings trying to sort out the nature of an
infinite power. Since no one can prove or disprove God's existence, the
soluble question centers on why people believe in God and adhere to
religion.
Counting the Believers
Whatever your personal answer to this question, the levels of belief in God
and adherence to religion are simply staggering. The newly released second
edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches
and Religions in the Modern World, edited by David B. Barrett, George T.
Kurian andTodd M. Johnson (Oxford Univ., two vols., $295) reports that of
the Earth's 6.06 billion humans, 5.137 billion of them, or 84 percent,
declare themselves believers who belong to some form of organized religion.
Christians dominate at just a shade under 2 billion adherents (with
Catholics counting for half of those). Muslims number some 1.1 billion;
Hindus, 811 million; Buddhists, 359 million. Ethnoreligionists (animists and
others in Asia and Africa primarily) account for most of the remaining 265
million. But as the editors report in this magisterial compendium of
statistics on religions that scholars of the subject will refer to for
decades to come, such overall numbers tell us little. There are, in fact,
10,000 distinct religions of 10 general varieties (in decreasing size and
inclusiveness -- cosmoreligion, macroreligion, megareligion, etc.), each
one of which can be further subdivided and classified.
For example, Christians may be found among 33,820 different denominations.
The variety of non-Christian religions is also stunning, with their
worldwide distribution outstripping Christian religions despite the tireless
efforts of evangelists to convert as many souls to Christ as possible.
(One irritation I find with this encyclopedia is its Christian bias: Its
senior editor, Rev. David B. Barrett, heads the Global Evangelization
Movement, making one wonder if all these data are being collected to
calibrate how long it will take to reduce this rich diversity to one
cosmo-macro-mega Christian religion.) Table 1-2, for example, tracks the
number of Christians (69,000) and non-Christians (147,000) by which the
world will increase over the next 24 hours. Global Diagram 3 reveals the
global convert/defector ratio, adjusted for births and deaths, indicating
that the sphere of evangelism continues to expand into non-Christian belief
space.
The Shape of Faith
A strikingly visual companion to the encyclopedia is the New Historical
Atlas of Religion in America, by Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow
(Oxford Univ., $145).This reference work is packed with 260 sumptuous color
maps and charts, printed on thick glossy paper to enhance the fine detail
and shades of geographical differences among the various religious sects
that inhabit the landscape. This new edition of religious historian
Gaustad's 1962 classic includes the arrival of religious colonialists to
the New World over the past four decades, including Hindus, Jains, Sikhs,
Buddhists and especially Muslims, who have enjoyed a fourfold increase in
America. Likewise, the Bahai population in America has increased in numbers
nearly proportional to the membership drop in many mainstream religions,
such as Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians. By contrast, Southern
Baptists might better be labeled "All Over America Baptists," as their ranks
have swollen well into the northern territories. Likewise, the "Bible Belt"
is now wider than a weightlifter's leather girdle. Most revealing
in the atlas are the historical maps and charts that track the changing
demographics of American religion. Conservative pundits who proclaim
that we need to return to the good old days when America was a Christian
nation had better look closely at Figure 4.16, showing that church
membership as a percentage of the U.S. population over the past century
and a half has increased from 25 percent to 65 percent. If
America is going to hell in an immoral handbasket, it is happening while
church membership is at an all-time high and a greater percentage of
Americans (90-95 percent) proclaim belief in a God than ever
before. Religion of the Healthy-BodiedWhy do so many
people believe and belong? One answer is that it is good for us. Studies
show that religious people live longer and healthier lives, recover from
illness and disease faster, and report higher levels of happiness. While
most of these effects are probably due to lifestyle, diet and exercise
(e.g., religious people drink and smoke less), there is
something about having family, friends and a community that
enhances life and longevity. Aging With Grace: What the Nun
Study Teaches Us About Leading Longer, Healthier and More Meaningful
Lives, by David Snowdon (Bantam, $24.95), explores this thesis
through a remarkable survey of 678 nuns ranging in age from 75 to 104.
Snowden, once a Catholic altar boy and now a distinguished
epidemiologist who directed the study from the University of Kentucky's
Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, reports his findings in a loving and
elegantly engaging style. As the book of Proverbs proclaims, "A merry
heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones."
It turns out that a powerful predictor of which nuns would live the
longest was the positive emotional content contained in their youthful
writings, even when the analysis was controlled for age, education and
linguistic ability. The lowest emotional group averaged 86.6 years
old at death, the highest emotional group averaged 93.5 years old at
death. Snowdon also argues that profound faith, prayer and contemplation
"have a positive influence on long-term health and may even speed the
healing process," but then oddly concludes that "we do not need a study
to affirm their importance to the quality of life." I have no doubt that
Snowdon is right about the importance of community and close
relationships, but you don't need God or religion for that. All humans
benefit from any type of social commitment because we are a social
primate species. Brain FaithIn view of such universal
needs, what is the undergirding foundation for the panoply of religious
faiths? Michael Horace Barnes, a professor of religious studies at the
University of Dayton, argues in Stages of Thought: The
Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science (Oxford Univ.,
$45) that the commonality is to be found in the thinking process itself.
Barnes uses Piaget's stage theory of development to argue that cultures,
like individuals, develop in stages from easier cognitive skills to
harder ones, and that not only religion and faith but science and reason
have followed this general pattern. Both religion and science evolved
from simple stages to complex ones because complex cognitive thinking
first requires simple cognitive technologies such as writing and formal
logic, as well as simple social institutions that reinforce those skills
as precursors to formal religions and sciences. Barnes is
certainly correct about science and technology; they are cumulative and
complex, and depend significantly on what came before. I'm not so sure
about religion. Is monotheism really more cognitively challenging than
polytheism, itself more complex than animism? Might it not be the
opposite? Isn't the world much easier to explain with one God than many
-- and aren't many gods, in turn, simpler than the spirit-haunted world
of so-called primitive peoples? Getting PersonalA
stronger case for Barnes's cognitive model can be made for religion and
especially theology, which has turned the question of God's existence
into a quagmire of syllogisms and contorted logic. On one level, it is
that very stage of advanced cognitive development that Huston Smith
rails against in Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human
Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (HarperSan Francisco, $25), a
passionate personal manifesto for why society must return to its more
fundamental roots of basic spirituality. While not completely
disparaging science (his oncologist did save his life, after all), Smith
claims that it has trapped us in a reflexive worship of technology, a
values-challenged liberal democracy and higher education, a morally
sterile legal system and a cowardly media. It is a closed system that
excludes old-time religion. To get it back we must exit the tunnel and
embrace the sacred: "The sacred world is the truer, more veridical
world, in part because it includes the mundane world." Religion matters,
he says, because "there is within us -- in even the blithest, most
lighthearted among us -- a fundamental disease. It acts like an
unquenchable thirst that renders the vast majority of us incapable of
ever coming to full peace." Maybe for thee, but not for me. And
that's the problem with Smith's book. It is, by its nature, personal and
anecdotal, and so ultimately can tell us nothing more about why God and
religion persist for anyone beyond the author and those he copiously
quotes in support. The Believing AnimalWhat can inform us
about these persistent questions? Although it has its limitations,
science is the best method ever devised for answering questions about
our world and ourselves. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary
Origins of Religious Thought (Basic, $27.50), by Pascal Boyer,
is a penetrating scientific analysis of religion. As an anthropologist,
he understands that any explanation must take into account the rich
diversity of religious practices and beliefs around the world, and as a
scientist, he knows that any explanatory model must account for this
diversity. Boyer is at his best in describing the countless peculiar
religious rituals he and his anthropological brethren have recorded --
and especially in identifying the shortcomings of virtually every
explanation for religion ever offered. As a consequence, however,
Boyer himself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation because he
knows that religion is not a single entity resulting from a single
cause. "There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and
common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of
aggregate relevance -- that is, of successful activation of a
whole variety of mental systems." Here the book bogs down in the
jargon-laden field of cognitive science, as the author struggles to
unite an array of disparate findings but comes up empty-handed.
"Religious persons are not different from nonreligious ones in essential
cognitive functions," Boyer concludes. Then what is the origin of
religious faith and belief? For Boyer they "seem to be simple
by-products of the way concepts and inferences are doing their work for
religion in much the same way as for other domains." In other words,
religion requires no special explanation, an answer many will find
unsatisfactory. Plug It In and It WorksWhatever its
origin, what of religion's future? One avenue for the ever-burgeoning
religious landscape is cyberspace, the subject of the aptly titled
Give Me That Online Religion, by Brenda Brasher
(Jossey-Bass/Wiley, $24.95). It is a delightful romp through the new
world of cyber-spirituality. Global prayer-chains, e-prayer wheels,
cybercast seders and neo-pagan cyber-rituals are all practiced from
home, finally making Martin Luther's proclamation of "every man his own
priest" a virtual reality. The book's Web-like design and typography
make it fun to surf. Even mainstream religions have gone online,
offering adherents and potential converts a smorgasbord of doctrines to
download (except Scientology, whose lawyers pounced like a Torquemada on
an ex-member who was posting the church's religious documents
online). Much of this book will leave you LOL and ROTFL (that's
computer-ese for laughing out loud and rolling on the floor laughing),
my favorite example being Brasher's discussion of the more than 800,000
web "shrines" devoted to Lady Diana and other celebrities. "Scanning fan
sites, it is easy to believe that the spiritual discipline of
imitato Christus has been replaced by imitato Keanu
Reeves." For those who do not wish to risk choosing the wrong God to
achieve immortality, read about the transhumanists, who believe that
some day we will be able to download our minds from our protein brains,
which survive only about a century, to silicon-chip brains that can last
hundreds of centuries, by which time they will be downloadable into
something more permanent still, quite literally ad infinitum. Heady
stuff for us finite beings to contemplate. • Michael
Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and the
author of "How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science." His
latest book is "The Borderlands of Science."
©Copyright 2001, The Washington Post Company
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