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In the first two parts of this month’s series, I’ve explored what I’ve referred to as the pathologies of human ideology, those aspects of human ideology with a strong potential to turn their ideologies toxic. With an emphasis on their manifestation in religion, as is fitting for a show focused primarily on the philosophy of religion, I looked in particular at the pathology of dogma, the pathology of hegemony, and the pathology of nihilism. In this essay, I’ll be explicating my thoughts on how human ideology in general and religion in particular can escape from these pathologies and play a healthy and important role in human life.
To review, following philosopher Julian Baggini (2003), a dogma is a belief that one holds as being indefeasible—not in any way subject to revision, review, or reconsideration—when that degree of certainty is unwarranted. Hegemony, following theorist Antonio Gramsci, is an apparatus of social control, a cultural milieu in which the various institutions of our society and their concomitant hierarchies of power are framed as being natural, inevitable, and unavoidable. And nihilism, following philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1968) and Nolan Gertz (2019), is a rejection of the world as it is, perhaps in favor of some imagined or future reality, perhaps in favor of nothing at all.
My thinking on dogma, hegemony, and nihilism for most of the history of the Satanist Reads the Bible project was that they are particular to religion and not as much of a concern in what might be called secular ideologies, but last month I encountered a work that shifted my view on this matter: The Myth of Religious Violence by Catholic priest William Cavanaugh (2009), in which Cavanaugh describes how the category of “religion” has been constructed by Western cultural hegemonies so as to marginalize certain discourses and authorize the power of the State. My opinion on the nature of dogma, hegemony, and nihilism was, as it turns out, itself a product of hegemonic thinking. And indeed, we saw in the last two essays how dogma can manifest in nationalism, and how hegemony and nihilism can manifest in our beliefs in and actions toward our present capitalist economic structure. So, in this essay, I intend to address not only how religion (such as it is construed in the West) can be healthy, but as well, how we can take a healthier approach to all of our ideologies.
I can’t provide a comprehensive model for what healthy ideology looks like within the scope of this essay because there is seemingly no limit to the number of forms that religions or other ideologies can take. Such a project would likely require a lengthy book, at the minimum. Simply put, there are far more ways that ideology can be healthy then there are ways that it can be toxic; the toxic aspects of ideology are merely human flaws to which we are particularly susceptible. I’m also not suggesting that I have provided a comprehensive picture of the ways that ideology can be toxic. Dogma, hegemony, and nihilism may not be the only pathologies of human ideology. But we can frame the matter, as philosophers often do when trying to sort out what’s what, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Necessary conditions are those which are always present with the subject in question. Oxygen, for example, is a necessary condition for fire. It is not, however, a sufficient condition for fire, sufficient conditions being those with which the subject in question is always present. Everywhere there’s fire, there’s oxygen, but fire is not everywhere that oxygen is. Being a grandfather, to take another example, is a sufficient condition for being a father, in that everyone who is a grandfather is also a father.
Applying this to the present subject matter, the absence of dogma, hegemony, and nihilism (or at least their minimization) is a necessary condition for the ideology in question to be healthy. I am not claiming that this is a sufficient condition, whether all ideology absent dogma, hegemony, and nihilism is necessarily healthy, and indeed, I don’t even know whether this is the case. It’s something I hope to continue exploring and investigating. But this framework will at least serve us as a starting point.
Religions are often conceived of as being essentially systems of beliefs. I find this account overly reductive—there is a great deal more to religion than just belief—but it’s undeniable that belief and religion are tightly interconnected. As I mentioned in a recent essay, this is particularly true of Christianity: belief is the underliying mechanism of the Christian religion. Belief, in Christianity, is the very means by which one attains salvation. How, then, can Christianity escape from dogmatism? A non-dogmatic Christian seems to be almost a contradiction in terms. And yet I do not think that such an approach to Christian religion is at all impossible; in fact, I believe that it follows necessarily from authentic Christian faith.
To say that one is certain of what and who exactly God is is to limit God to what the human mind is capable of conceiving. If one is to believe in God at all, then it seems necessary as well to have some conception of God, however abstract, but to cling to these conceptions too tightly seems to me to be not only cosmically arrogant, but also self-defeating. The God of Abraham is asserted by all three of the Abrahamic religions as being essentially infinite: not bound to finite duration, nor finite space, nor finite knowledge, nor finite goodness. For one to claim, then, that one knows God’s mind or God’s plans or God’s being or nature is to claim knowledge of the infinite. This is either to usurp the position of God or to reduce God to something finite and knowable, both of which contradict the fundamental message of Christianity and of all the Abrahamic religions.
One of my favorite passages among all the sacred texts I have ever read is from the 18th surah of the Qur’an, titled “The Cave.” As with the rest of the text, what we are reading when we read the Qur’an is (ostensibly) the words of the angel Gabriel, instructing the prophet Muhammad on what to say to his followers. The verse reads: “Say: ‘If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea itself would run dry before the words of my Lord had run dry, even if We provided its like to replenish it’” (translation by Tarif Khalidi). In his excellent book Reading the Qur’an (2017), Muslim scholar Ziauddin Sardar puts the matter thusly:
The most important guidance given by the Qur’an… is a riposte to all people of all faiths: that God Alone knows all! It is a reminder that ultimately faiths define their differences in terms of practise, worship and rituals, ordered by theological, that is human, interpretation. But flawed human beings can have only a tenuous hold on weighty theological distinctions about the nature of God, the Hereafter, the nature and circumstances of forgiveness and redemption and other such issues…. [T]he Qur’an is… telling us clearly and repeatedly… that giving in to… the desire to appropriate and domesticate God to our level of understanding and pronounce definitely on matters that belong to God alone… is the most basic distraction from the true path of faith, which is doing good, bringing forth justice and equity in ourselves, the life of our society and relations with other peoples.
pp. 238-239
German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich argues in his book Dynamics of Faith (2001, originally published in 1956) that it is not only possible for faith and doubt to coexist, but that faith cannot exist at all without doubt. “Faith,” he says, “is certain in so far as it is an experience of the holy. But faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a finite being” (p. 18). Faith, for Tillich, is the relationship one has to what Tillich calls their “ultimate concern.” Rather than being a certainty in the absence of evidence (which Tillich refers to as “idolotrous faith”), true faith, is, for Tillich, the immediate experience of relationship to this ultimate concern. That one is experiencing this relationship is a matter of certainty; it is, as William James would say, a “face to face presentation of what seems immediately to exist” (1982, p. 424). But the exact contents of this ultimate concern is a matter that can and must be doubted: “[This doubt] does not question whether a special proposition is true or false,” Tillich says. “It does not reject every concrete truth, but it is aware of the element of insecurity in every existential truth. At the same time, the doubt which is implied in faith accepts this insecurity and takes it into itself in an act of courage” (p. 23).
A further step away from religious dogmatism is the non-realist conception of religion, which I’ve spoken about before. Non-realism (or anti-realism) with regards to some discourse means that the entities posited by that discourse are understood as not being real. Non-realism is the attitude that most people take towards characters in works of fiction. Most of us are non-realists with regards to Star Wars, for example. Star Wars features characters that we care about and stories that are important to us, but we believe that the characters depicted don’t exist and that the events depicted never happened. Religion is typically approached in a realist way and I’m not decrying that in itself, but there are non-realist approaches to religion as well and they effectively evaporate the problem of dogmatism. A realist Christian believes that Jesus was a real person who was in fact the son of a real God and who was crucified as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind. A non-realist Christian, in contrast, might believe that Jesus was a real person who was crucified by the Romans but that God is not a real being (beyond perhaps a symbol of the “abstract divineness and moral structure of the universe,” as William James or Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it) and that the story of the Passion of Jesus, though deeply important to this person, is allegorical.
Much as it might seem that Christian non-realism is a theoretical position that no one actually holds, they do indeed exist, however much they might be an extreme minority. The English theologian and philosopher of religion Don Cupitt is a notable example. Don Cupitt’s website has a page on his non-realist Christian beliefs. I’ll quote a section from this page by way of example:
…For realists, everything is out-there and readymade. It comes down to us from God and Tradition. For the non-realist, we have had to make all our own language, and all our own knowledge. As the phrase goes, ‘It’s all yours’. Can we get used to that idea? Cupitt thinks we must, as soon as possible.
The Non-Realism of Don Cupitt, n.d.
The escape from hegemony is a more difficult matter. Hegemony often mandates participation. American capitalism is a massive hegemony, but it’s extraordinarily difficult at best to extricate oneself from it and to not participate in it in any way. Historically, those whose dominance the hegemony reinforces have reacted with overwhelming violence towards those who refuse entirely to participate.
Satanism, being a countercultural religion, does not itself have a hegemony (at least that I know of), but I participate in the hegemonies of other religions regardless. Such is particularly evident at this time of year; if you’re an American in December, Christmas is going to happen to you whether you like it or not. The suggestion that anyone might greet others at this time of year by saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” so as to be more inclusive has been construed as a “War on Christmas.”
The power of hegemony lies in its invisibility, in its presentation of its contents as being natural and inevitable rather than being historically and socially constructed. Thus, counterhegemonic religion and ideology acknowledges that its contents are a particular way but could have been some other way. It might seem defeating for a religion to acknowledge itself as being a particular configuration of human spirituality rather than just the way that things naturally are, but I don’t think that this needs to be the case. That human spirituality has consolidated around these particular configurations does not make them any less meaningful or important. Indeed, I find that recognizing the stories for what they are makes them more meaningful. A given religion isn’t just the way things are, independent of us, but is rather intimately connected to our history and to who we are as humans. I’ve often seen it argued that religion, as compared to science, is invalidated by its historicity: Christianity, for example, is not something that would be rediscovered should humanity somehow lose all of its knowledge and memory, in contrast to scientific laws such as the ideal gas law. One, I think that this misunderstands the nature of scientific laws, which is something I’ll be covering in future episodes on the philosophy of science, and two, while it’s true that Christianity might not reappear in its exact form, its core tropes have appeared in multiple religions throughout history and I think there’s good reason to believe that they would appear again in different forms. But our religions, such as they are, are our stories from our particular history, and for me at least, that makes those stories more meaningful than whatever scientific laws we might rediscover should they ever be lost.
I also think that it’s important that counterhegemonic ideology confront society’s prevailing hegemonies. Again, participation in hegemony is difficult to avoid at best and compulsory at worst, and so an ideology which is not directly hegemonic itself may still tacitly reinforce other hegemonies. Christianity, for example, has actively supported the hegemony of patriarchy for its entire history, and so for a given congregation to merely refrain from such active support is insufficient; it remains the case that God is, throughout Christendom, described as and largely understood as being a man, which is theologically problematic as well as patriarchal. Such an understanding will persist unless actively countered.
The nihilisms of human society in general are similarly difficult to escape from. I wrote in the last essay about the nihilism of advanced industrial capitalism, in which participation is compulsory. The general means of escaping from this sort of nihilism is likely beyond the scope of this project, but I think religion can be a means to it, provided that the religion in question is itself not nihilistic. The existential philosophies of the 19th and 20th century—those of Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others—arose in response to the recognition of existential nihilism, the acknowledgement of the absence of objective meaning and purpose in life. Without suggesting that we all need to become existentialists, I think it remains vitally important for each of us to recognize that we’re going to die and that we don’t know what happens after. In this way, we see that death and suffering themselves bring meaning into our lives. Traditional Christianity posits the Garden of Eden as a lost ideal, along with the New Heaven and New Earth promised in the Book of Revelation, both of which obviate both death and suffering and thus the possibility for any sort of meaningful existence. If we could only ever experience joy there would be no reason to value it or to shape our lives so as to seek it out. If we could never die, there would be no reason to find meaning and value in life at all. More broadly, an indefeasible certainty in a particular afterlife is a dogma and would seem to usurp the position of God.
Religion can reinforce or be absorbed entirely into existential nihilism, responding to the existential question of how we should live our lives in the face of absurdity and death by saying, “It doesn’t matter because there’s another world after this one.” Or, religion can symbolize and structure our relationship to this world, acting as a framework for what is most important to us in this life given that we’re all going to die and don’t know what happens after. This requires an examination of what in this life is important to us, what gives us purpose and meaning, and this is a project in which humanity has participated throughout our history. We’ve recorded our thoughts, fears, questions, musings, hopes, and yearnings on this matter in our art, our music, our poetry, and in our sacred texts, giving us ample precedent and context for this journey.
The general model of religion in Western society seems to me to be something that is handed down to us. Religion in the West is like a menu at a restaurant: lots of options to choose from, but there’s no chance of you going into the kitchen to make something for yourself. The idea that anyone would ever do so is sometimes construed as being bizarre, even dangerous. This is what we saw a few episodes ago with the Branch Davidians: a conception of even Christianity that doesn’t fit with what’s on the menu is construed as something weird and antisocial. There are, it seems, certain models for spirituality that the respectable Westerner needs to accept; the notion that these models exhaust the possibilities for human spirituality is itself a dogma. Considering the matter in terms of how this dogma serves elite, privileged groups, we can see that this dogma is also a hegemony. And when religion is construed so as to adhere to social morays rather than to fulfill our spiritual needs as humans, its true target—authentic spiritual experience—is annihilated and replaced with an imagined order absent any basis in reality. Religion ceases to be the worship of the transcendent and becomes the worship of the status quo. Religion ceases to be a way of transforming ourselves and becomes a way of maintaining the existing social order. Capitalism got you down? Well, no need to worry, that’s just the way of things, and it’ll all be better in the next life. Western gender constructs leaving you feeling alienated from your body and your identity? Well, in this world, according to God’s book, men are the ones with penises and women are the ones with vaginas and you had better get with the picture so that you get the right afterlife.
I’m finding the food metaphor to be quite apt, because I think humans intrinsically have a kind of spiritual hunger. I don’t think atheists are exempt from this either. Watch the old episodes of Cosmos with Carl Sagan and tell me that he’s not expressing a profound spiritual yearning.
The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.
Malone, Sagan et al., 1980
It seems to me that the way that Sagan answers such mysteries—with what we might call a scientific mysticism—is as much a religion as anything else we’ve construed in that way. Einstein often spoke in religious language, as do many scientists who take an otherwise atheistic worldview. In the book The God Delusion (2008), prominent biologist, atheist, and social critic Richard Dawkins spends several pages reconciling his antireligious views with the fact that Einstein—a fellow scientist whom Dawkins reveres—often spoke of the universe that he studied in religious language.
It seems, unavoidably, that religion is good for us, supporting our mental and physical health as human beings; extensive documentation of this fact is provided in neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg’s 2018 book Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality, a book which I’ll be covering in more detail in a future episode. One might counter that no health benefit is worth forsaking the real world for one that might better fit our hopes and aspirations for ourselves, and I fully agree: that would just be another nihilism, another rejection of the real world for some other, imagined world. But one of the core theses of the Satanist Reads the Bible project is that religion need not take that stance. There are non-dogmatic and counterhegemonic options for religion which do not reject this world in favor of some other world. They may not be what’s on the menu at our local church, but we can find inspiration there while reading and interpreting the relevant sacred texts for ourselves.
This is what Satanism is for me. These aspects of opposition and contradiction are present to such a degree in my religion not because they are indeed, objectively, the most important aspects of the spiritual reality of the cosmos, but because they are those aspects which are most important and most meaningful to me personally. Satanism is not a religion that I have found, but rather my religion, a religion truly of myself, not invented ex nihilo but rather from a process of constant dialogue with other religions. I cook my own food, I write my own poetry, I play my own music, and I believe in my own religion. I do not mean for my religion to be a rejection of religion in general, and I think that when it becomes so, it is a weakening of its Satanic nature. For Satanism to be what it is, it must exist within the general milieu of those religions which have posited Satan as an entity in the first place. It must exist in contradistinction to the religions to which it is a counterpart, not as something apart from them.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Baggini, J. (2003). Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Cavanaugh, W. T. (2009). The myth of religious violence: Secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict. Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (2008). The God delusion (1st Mariner Books ed). Houghton Mifflin Co.
Gertz, N. (2019). Nihilism. MIT Press.
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Malone, A., Haines-Stiles, G., McCain, R., Oyster, D. F., Weidlinger, T., & Wells, R. J. (1980, September 28). The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Documentary]. Australian Broadcasting Commission, Carl Sagan Productions, KCET.
Newberg, A. B. (2018). Neurotheology: How science can enlighten us about spirituality. Columbia University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Sardar, Z. (2017). Reading the Qur’an: The contemporary relevance of the sacred text of Islam.
The Non-Realism of Don Cupitt. (n.d.). Retrieved December 23, 2020, from http://www.doncupitt.com/non-realism
Tillich, P. (2001). Dynamics of faith (1st Perennial classics ed). Perennial.