Conclusion
Religion has emerged in this study as an aboriginal tradition of serious communication with powers that cannot be seen. The problem of validation of the “worlds beyond” does not seem to have a single answer.
Neither autonomous expression of a genetic heritage nor direct imprinting of parental attitudes nor arbitrary transfer of information can account for it. Instead, I propose the existence of biological patterns of actions, reactions, and feelings activated and elaborated through ritual practice and verbalized teachings, with anxiety playing a foremost role. Religion offers solutions to various critical situations recurring in individual lives. Through manifold forms and functions of ritual behavior and cultural interpretations, religion can still be seen to inhabit the deep vales of the landscape of life. Religion follows in the tracks of biology, even if it is closely related to the aboriginal invention of language, which brought the great opportunity for a shared mental world. At this level, what matters is not the success of “selfish genes” in procreation, but coherence, stability, and control within this world. This is what the individual is groping for, gladly accepting the existence of nonobvious entities or even principles. Baffling details of experience thereby fall into place, and reality itself can “have speech,” logon echein, as the Greeks would say. This is the creation of sense.If language brought decisive progress in sharing, storing, and processing information, the next momentous step occurred with the invention of writing some 5000 years ago. With it was ere« 178 ated a new form of objectivity beyond the spoken word as encoded in individual brains. Rituals of validation and oaths in particular could have lost their function as against the use of written documents. With Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, literacy attained its most salient triumph.
The sacred scriptures guarantee once and for all the words of god spoken to his prophets and envoys. Writing drastically reduced the need for interpreting signs and for recourse to paranormal experiences of ecstasy and mysticism, but it gave rise to interpretation in a new quest for making sense amidst the gaps of the evidence. Yet most elements of more ancient religions have subsisted both at the official and the subcultural level, including the use of oaths and omens. It is difficult for humans to get off the old tracks of construing sense in a world full of disconcerting events, scandal, and trickery.It could be the case that the third step of information processing we are experiencing just now is about to bring the most crucial changes. With the electronic network of a computerized society, shared information and corresponding programs become ubiquitous and definitely independent from the individual. This is experienced, for instance, as the “loss of the subject” discussed in literary circles. The individual finds herself or himself in the solitude of arbitrariness while being controlled by new and ineluctable dependencies so subtle and efficient that the older forms of communication look awkward and antiquated by comparison. Admission and exclusion now depend on bits or bytes, on access numbers and codes, and validation occurs by pressing a key on a keyboard.
If this is to be the future, religion, stuck between nature and network, might cease to function—that is, religion in the sense of serious, nonobvious communication based on the antecedent sense-structures of life. Collective ritual may be supplanted by electronic self-engendering games within the brave new world of virtual realities. Still, insofar as the biological basis of life can hardly be abolished, “real” reality will make itself felt time and again as against its virtual counterfeits. Perhaps more disquieting are the likelihood and dangers of regression, of fundamentalism or even primitivism revived. The contents and prospects of religion remain thoroughly problematic—and fascinating. Even within a world dominated by self-created technology, humans still will not easily accept that constructs of sense reaching out for the nonobvious are nothing but self-created projections, and that no other signs from the universe around are there to be perceived except for the irregularities resounding from the first big bang.