کتاب هفتم، فصل پانزدهم: وقتی در مورد دین صحبت می‌کنند، نمی‌دانند از چه می‌گویند

Book 7: Religion, Belief, and Skin in the Game

Chapter 15 They Don’t Know What They Are Talking About When They Talk about Religion

The more they talk. the less you understand—Law or nomous?—In religion, as in other things, you pay for the label

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they think they mean by what they said—hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed-up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric. Since Socrates we have had a long tradition of mathematical science and contract law driven by precision in mapping terms. But we have also had many pronouncements by fools using labels—outside of poetry, beware the verbalistic, that archenemy of knowledge.

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Different people rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion,” nor do they realize it. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals—the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist it had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East. Throughout the ancient world, law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing. Early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its origins, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court formally handled final sentencing. Further, Theodosius’s code (compiled in the fifth century to unify Roman law) was “Christianized” with a short introduction, a blessing of sorts—the rest remained identical to pagan Roman legal reasoning as expounded in Constantinople and (mostly) Berytus. The code remained dominated by the Phoenician legal scholars Ulpian and Papinian, who were pagan: contrary to theories by geopoliticalists, the Roman school of law of Berytus (Beirut) was not shut down by Christianity, but by an earthquake.

The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses different words: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come,” only merging with this one in the eschaton.

The Egyptian Copts have been increasingly persecuted by Sunni Muslims, but the Coptic Church stands against the creation of a self-governing state somewhere in Egypt, using the argument that it was “not Christian” to want a political entity in this world.

Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor. As an illustration of the symbolic separation between church and state, the title Pontifex Maximus (head priest), taken by the Roman emperors after Augustus, reverted after Theodosius, in the late fourth century, to the bishop of Rome, and later, more or less informally, to the Catholic Pope.

For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law—and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.

When the nation-state dream came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab used to say “Jew” he largely referred to a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew was no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew was simply defined as someone whose mother was a Jew. But Judaism somewhat merged into nation-state and now, for many, indicates belonging to a nation.

In Serbia, Croatia, and Lebanon, religion means one thing at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.

When someone discusses the “Christian minority” in the Levant, it doesn’t amount to (as Arabs tend to think) promoting a Christian theocracy (full theocracies were rare in Christian history, just Byzantium and a short attempt by Calvin). He just means “secular,” or wants a marked separation of church and state. Same for the gnostics (Druids, Druze, Mandeans, Alawis, Alevis) who have a religion largely unknown by its members, lest they leak and get persecuted by the dominant majority.

The problem with the European Union is that naive bureaucrats (those fellows who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism, say, as just a religion—with its houses of “worship”—when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and rejects the institutions of the West—those very institutions that allow them to operate. We saw with the minority rule that the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer must be stopped before it becomes metastatic.

Salafism is very similar to atheistic Soviet Communism in its heyday: both have all-embracing control over all of human activity and thought, which makes discussions about whether religion or atheistic regimes are more murderous lacking in pertinence, precision, and realism.

BELIEF VS. BELIEF

We will see in the next chapter that “belief” can be epistemic, or simply procedural (or metaphorical)—leading to confusions about which sorts of beliefs are religious beliefs and which ones are not. For, on top of the “religion” problem, there is a problem with belief. Some beliefs are largely decorative, some are functional (they help in survival), others are literal. And to revert to our metastatic Salafi problem: when one of these fundamentalists talks to a Christian, he is convinced that the Christian takes his own beliefs literally, while the Christian is convinced that the Salafi has the same oft-metaphorical concepts that he has, to be taken seriously but not literally—and, often, not very seriously. Religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and, to some extent Shiite Islam, evolved (or, rather, let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal. The literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation.

As Gibbon wrote:

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

LIBERTARIANISM AND CHURCH-FREE RELIGIONS

As we mentioned, the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate tried to revert to ancient paganism after his father’s cousin Constantine the Great made Christianity a state religion almost half a century earlier. But he made a fatal reasoning error.

His problem was that, having been brought up as a Christian, he imagined that paganism required a structure similar to that of the church, ce genre de trucs. So he tried to create pagan bishops, synods, and these kinds of things. He did not realize that each pagan group had his own definition of religion, that each temple had its own practices, that by definition paganism was distributed in its execution, rituals, cosmogonies, practices, and “beliefs.” Pagans did not have a category for paganism.

After Julian, a brilliant general and valiant warrior, died in battle (heroically), the dream of returning to ancient values ended with him.

Just as paganism cannot be pigeon-holed, the same applies to libertarianism. It does not fit the structure of a political “party”—only that of a decentralized political movement. The very concept doesn’t allow for the straitjacket of a strong party line and unified policy with respect to, say, court locations or relations with Mongolia. Political parties are hierarchical, they are designed in a way to substitute someone’s own decision making with a well-defined protocol. This doesn’t work with libertarians. The nomenklatura that is necessary in the functioning of a party cannot exist in a libertarian environment fraught with fractious and vehemently independent people.

Nevertheless, we libertarians share a minimal set of beliefs, the central one being to substitute the rule of law for the rule of authority. Without necessarily realizing it, libertarians believe in complex systems. And, since libertarianism is a movement, it can still exist as splintered factions within other political parties.

NEXT

To conclude, beware labels when it comes to matters associated with beliefs. And avoid treating religions as if they are all the same animal. But there is a commonality. The next chapter will show us how religion does not like fair-weather friends; it wants commitment; it is based on skin in the game.