Beyond Tradition, Maybe

There may be a place for religion even if superstition is abandoned. But it will not be your father's religion...

Typical religions rely upon belief, supernatural explanations, and other hocus-pocus. But the questions religions supposedly answer remain, even if the supernatural and hocus-pocus is abandoned. Are these questions to be dismissed as immature or deluded?

The simple question of "who am I?" comes to mind. It's an interesting question if only because of the many answers it can trigger, all correct in their way and yet none somehow comprehensive or satisfying.

Now some assert philosophy contains religion, the essence of religion. However, philosophy seems a bit too intellectual most of the time. One of religion's appeals is its connection to visceral experience. We feel passion in religion, but hardly ever are we so moved by philosophy.

While some say it's good that philosophy avoids the morass of human emotion and passion, and offer arguments that these are primitive aspects of our make-up, few with these opinions have parachuted.

And even on a strictly intellectual basis, philosophy fails to engage the concerns people feel when they consider personally just who and perhaps even more importantly WHAT they are. Glib answers of being human fail to inform or illuminate associated issues like persistence and origin, even for those who recognize both the reality of their conception and that death ends their life. Even these people wonder (when they find time) just what they are -- What is being alive? And the common answers to this question seem more to demonstrate contemporary paradigms than they point to any enduring or comprehensive reality.

For instance today the non-religious person often answers this question (of who/what we are) by discussing neurological epiphenomena: I am only a construct of my nervous system, with self-awareness and internal modeling of my external circumstance including remarkably, modeling of my internal modeling! Such recursive descriptions manage to convey the ephemerality of existing intellectually, and even a bit of the paradox, but fail to explain how few if any of us PERCEIVE our ephemerality. We are ephemera conversing and acting on the world as if we are not ephemeral! And even more confounding, our ordinary definition of the ephemeral does not include the ability to act on matter. But we certainly do so.

So we may be tempted to resort to that old label "soul", but its considerable baggage of predestination and afterlife, let alone the persisting question of origin, hardly make this label rewarding. More recently the term "being" -- "I am a being" -- has appeared. It too gives no hint about persistence, nor offers any explanation how we manage to control the body and change the world we live in.

So these reifications seem inadequate if not obstructive deceptions. Some term, some model must be more precise and comprehensive than these. Another framing of this question involves dismissing "thingness" in lieu of process, which certainly makes a better match with our existence than more traditional ideas. But when we try it out -- "I am a process (of my nervous system's functioning)" -- we don't FEEL ourselves as a process. Might this be some sort of deception perpetrated by our own nervous systems, the very mechanism that has created (and evolutionarily invented) us? And if so, why? Why do we see ourselves as an object even though we actually are an ongoing process?

An obvious explanation invokes basic survival issues: we are more effective, and we have a greater chance of surviving, if we view ourselves as beings, as things (humans) rather than as processes, even though we are processes!

Of course all this could be viewed as philosophy. But it seems better categorized as some hybrid of philosophy and neurology, admixed with experiencing. It seems this is quite exactly what religion has been (admittedly with far too little information most often mixed with a great deal of fantasy and even politics).

From the perspective of this process model we are obviously just another natural phenomenon, albeit a sentient one. Also by this model we are different from other creatures on the planet only by degree. Lastly, our "place in the universe" becomes both a lot more obviously tenuous as well as quite miraculous.

In addition, aspects of existing such as ethics become "simple" pragmatics, despite the howls of protest from every rank that fears it will likely lose its place in the sun.

So perhaps there can be a religious perspective that incorporates these elements without falling into fantasies or vestments. Perhaps even this is more purely religious than previous efforts. So also might it be philosophy, if one can allow wet factors like neurology in the mix. And finally, perhaps it is even a special sort of physiology, one that requires a catechism whose goal is no different from those of tradition: to help us see past our "base", i.e. animal, natures.