[lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 11:24:53 +0900
On 2005/05/27, at 7:53, Graeme Wend-Walker wrote:
> Religion (I figure) is a faculty. You've got it and you can use it
> well or
> use it poorly. Using it doesn't have to involve actually calling
> yourself
> "religious" or identifying with anything in particular. I suspect
> we're born
> with a sort of "polymorphous spirituality" that gets shaped in the
> same way
> our other faculties, potentials etc. get shaped. Unfortunately,
> this faculty
> often gets twisted.
Max Weber offers an alternative hypothesis, that some of us are born
"religiously musical" while others are not. On this account,
religiosity is something like a talent for music or languages, a
knack for fixing automobiles, or the ability to play basketball like
the kid down the block or like Michael Jordan, something that only
some of us are born with.
An interesting, if minor, data point. While studying Chinese popular
religion in a village in northern Taiwan, anthropologist Steven
Harrell collected information from 14 informants: 3 were, he says,
village theologians, who had each constructed his or her own
idiosyncratic elaboration of the world view on which Chinese popular
religion is based; 1, an old woman, was the village atheist, who said
flatly, religion is nonsense; the remaining 10 said only "we do this
because its the custom."
Cheers,
John McCreery
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