SITUATING RELIGION

Beyond Culture

“Neither history nor anthropology knows of societies from which religion has been totally absent.”¹ The observation that practically all tribes, states, and cities have some form of religion has been made repeatedly, ever since Herodotus.

The ubiquity of religion is matched by its persistence through the millennia. It evidently has survived most drastic social and economic changes: the neolithic revolution, the urban revolution, and even the industrial revolution. If religion ever was invented, it has managed to infiltrate practically all varieties of human cul­tures; in the course of history, however, religion has never been demonstrably reinvented but has always been there, carried on from generation to generation since time immemorial. As for the founders of new religions, such as Zarathustra, Jesus, or Mo-

hammed, their creative achievement consisted in transforming, reversing, or rearranging existing patterns and elements, which continue to carry an undeniable family resemblance to older 2 forms.

The civilizations that will come into closer view in this book, mainly the Mesopotamian, Jewish, Greek, and Roman, are con­tiguous and were in contact for a long time. While they devel­oped under comparable climatic, economic, and social condi­tions, they also present glaring contrasts and revolutionary changes, from monarchy to democracy, from temple economy to monetary systems, from illiteracy to writing.

Culture has been defined as a “realized signifying system,” a social system characterized by standard forms of communica­tion.³ Anthropologists see not just one system of this kind but an apparently boundless variety of them, although this variety seems to merge into a yet undefined conglomerate today. Hence the principle held by the leading schools of contemporary social sciences: each culture must be studied in its diversity and relative autonomy. In consequence, the very concept of human nature has come under attack. In what has been termed “new dualism,” nature is excluded from cultural studies.⁴ Humans are defined by culture far beyond their natural makeup: “there is no human nature apart from culture.” Likewise, “humanity is as various in its essence as it is in its expression.”⁵

This exclusively cultural approach would make any investi­gation into the natural elements or foundations of a phenomenon such as religion worse than heresy from the start. It is now com­mon to integrate religion into culture, to view it in relation to specific groups and epochs. Religion is thus posed in contrast to nature and cannot be treated as a general phenomenon deriving from human nature.

Some of the most important and influential anthropological

studies of civilizations and religions in our century exemplify this view, exploring the Nuer or the Azande, the Andaman islanders or the Argonauts of the Western Pacific.⁶ “Religion as a Cultural System” is the title of a famous paper by Clifford Geertz.⁷ In the 3 wake of Emile Durkheim religion has been seen, first of all, as a social phenomenon; Durkheim replaced the concept of religious ideas by that of “collective representations.”⁸ More recent de­cades have brought into ever sharper focus the forms and func­tions of communication within social groups.⁹ This line has been followed in the successful development of semiology, structur­alism, and poststructuralism.

Important studies along these lines have been carried out in the field of Greek religion, especially by the Paris school of Jean- Pierre Vernant.¹⁰ In these works, Greek religion emerges in the context of the Greek city state, the polis as it has evolved begin­ning in the 8th century b.c. The details of myth and ritual, and especially of sacrifice, are seen as objective agents in their re­spective contexts marking distinctions and correlations, normal­ity and deviation, within the structure of a particular ancient society. The impulse provided by this approach has been effective far beyond the specialized circles of classical philology.

Yet if cultures remain enclosed each in its own signifying sys­tem, what about the interactions of cultures, influences, and traditions that link the present to the past? What about our own chances of transcultural understanding of other civilizations whether past or present? And do we account for the ubiquity and persistence of a phenomenon such as religion?

An alternative thesis may provide a basis for dealing with such questions. It proposes that there are phenomena common to all human civilizations, universalia of anthropology; they may be but need not be called characteristics of human nature. Religion belongs with them. Cultures interact; there are exchanges and conflicts, breaks but also continuities even within historical change. Above all there are basic similarities in all forms of hu­man culture, inasmuch as everywhere people eat, drink, and def­ecate, work and sleep, enjoy sex and procreate, get sick and die.

There is no denying either the general or the biological character of these processes. Cultural anthropologists will claim they are trivial; it is only the cultural elaborations and differences that 4 make these phenomena at all interesting. But they are there.

What is startling is the ubiquity of certain less trivial phenom­ena, which are culturally determined in every case and yet not generated nor explicable in isolation.

The worldwide similarity of religious phenomena is easy to point out: they include formalized ritual behavior appropriate for ven­eration; the practice of offerings, sacrifices, vows and prayers with reference to superior beings; and songs, tales, teachings, and explanations about these beings and the worship they demand. Normally, religion is emphatically accepted. If voices of skepti­cism arise, it is deemed wise to silence them. “The fool says in his heart: there is no god”¹²—but most are not so foolish as to speak out. Even rhetoricians know that “one has to worship the divine: nobody opposes this exhortation unless he has gone mad.”¹³

Nevertheless it is notoriously difficult to define religion in a general, transcultural way. Most attempts work at the level of

ideas or symbols. Jan van Baal, for example, defines religion as “all explicit and implicit notions and ideas, accepted as true, which relate to a reality which cannot be verified empirically.”¹⁴ This comes close to the older concept of religion as belief in the 5 supernatural, while disregarding the practice of religion which is not necessarily based on so-called true belief.

Numerous other proposed definitions and pertinent method­ological reflections have been offered on the subject of religion.¹⁶ Here, as Benson Saler has recommended, it will suffice to assem­ble some elements that characterize religion in almost every in­stance.¹⁷ This attempt to grasp the distinctive features of religion remains at the level of observable behavior; the claims of factual truth or real existence of the gods are not of primary concern in the study of past religions.

The first principal characteristic of religion is negative: that is, religion deals with the nonobvious, the unseen, that “which can­not be verified empirically.” Protagoras the sophist spoke of the adeldtes, the “unclearness” or “nonevidence” of the gods.¹⁸ Re­ligion is manifest in actions and attitudes that do not fulfill im­mediate practical functions. What is intended and dealt with can­not be seen, or touched, or worked upon in the usual fashion of everyday life. This is why strangers are usually puzzled by reli­gious practice. Conversely, we are tempted to suppose that any-

thing puzzling and not immediately apparent may be religious— a problem often met in prehistoric archaeology; drastic misun­derstandings may of course occur.

It is true that this unclearness is often emphatically denied by the insiders. “The knowability of god is clear among men,” St. Paul wrote in Romans, “for god has made it clear for them. For the invisible (characteristics) of him are seen by the mind in his works, from the creation of the world... In both these argu­ments, from the mind and from the world (kosmos), Paul was following Greek popular philosophy.¹⁹ The very emphasis, cir­cumstantial argument, and special pleading of his claims ac­knowledge the difficulties of access. Even St. Paul’s most opti­mistic formulation retains the “invisible.” Adelotes can neither be abolished nor denied; it can be given a positive twist, however, by proclaiming it a secret.

To get beyond the barrier of unclearness, special forms of ex­perience—meditation, vision, and ecstasy—are commonly in­voked; thus the paranormal range of feelings is called upon to establish direct encounter with the supernatural. Yet the remark­able fact is not the existence of ecstasy and other forms of altered consciousness; it is their acceptance and interpretation by the majority of normal people. The ecstatic phenomena are inte­grated into religion and confirm existing belief, and these man­ifestations are themselves shaped by cultural training and prac­tice insofar as they become communicable and accessible to others. In fact, they are judged and selected by an existing reli­gion’s own categories: “test the spirits.”²⁰

The second principal characteristic of religion stands in an­tithesis to the ineffable: religion manifests itself through inter­action and communication. It is thus a relevant factor in the systems of civilization. Even the lonely ascetic communicates, as he becomes the object of admiration, propaganda, and pilgrim­age. In fact, religious communication always focuses in two di­

rmions. toward the unseen and toward the contemporary social situation. Through attitudes, acts, and language certain non- obvious entities or partners with special characteristics and in­terests are introduced, recognized, and tended.²¹ Distinct from humans and still analogous in many respects, they are deemed superior specifically because of their invisibility, the supernatural as such. People give them various names, class them as spirits, demons, gods, or equate them with long-dead ancestors.²² Reli­gion thus becomes a “culturally patterned interaction with cul­turally postulated superhuman beings.'"* Communication with these entities interferes with normal relations within society and thus often turns out to be a special form of indirect communi­cation, using the supernatural to strengthen the effect of intended conventional comiiiumcarion. In this sense one might even say rhe divine is a social too! to manipulate communication.²^ At any rate, it is the practice of interaction, together with its conse­quences. that makes religion “uniquely realistic.’'

Implicit in the first two is the third characteristic of religion: its claim for priority and seriousness, for which Paul Tillich used the term “ultimate concern." R< itgim: is thus set apart from other forms of symbolic communication, from play and from art. Al­though in play as m ritual there is an element that transcends reality, an “as if" structure which creates unseen partners with whom to interact, these playmates can be dismissed at will. In religion there is a postulate of priority and necessity, of certainty that given thoughts and actions are essential and unavoidable. All other plans, projects, predilections, or desires are down­graded, foregone, or at least postponed. Spartans stopped war­fare to celebrate their festivals even at crucial moments; Jews decided to die rather than defend themselves on the Sabbath.²⁵ Even the Roman senate, relentlessly repressing the infamous Bac­chanalia in Italy, respected the “necessity” some people felt to carry on their ritual according to tradition.²⁶ Religion is serious; hence it is vulnerable to laughter and derision.²⁷ But the unseen, in the form of personal partners, calls for submission and ven­eration, and the ego has to take second rank. As supernatural

power spreads to objects, these acquire limits of access or use, whether as taboo or just sacredness. Religion can be deadly se­rious in the most direct way, sanctioning violence in a terrifying S spectrum, ranging from human sacrifice to internecine wars, from witch-burning to an Ayatollah’s fatwa—and no less shock­ing acts of self-sacrifice, down to mass suicide.²⁸ This absolute seriousness, derived from dealing with unseen superiors, is the prerogative of the sacred that characterizes religion.

Religions, both past and present, appear in special cultural, social, and historical settings; they can be elaborated as symbolic systems and interpreted in fascinating ways. Yet this universal and prehistoric phenomenon cannot be explained by or derived from any single cultural system. The search for the source of religion calls for a more general perspective, beyond individual civilizations, which must take account of the vast process of hu­man evolution within the more general evolutionary process of life. This process was once hypostasized as Nature; we may still use it as a metaphor. In this sense the history of religions implies the problem of “natural” religion. Cultural studies must merge with general anthropology, which is ultimately integrated into biology.

Sociobiology?

To introduce biology into cultural studies is to enter a battlefield. For a long time many philosophers, historians, and sociologists, confronted with the success of natural sciences, have been build­ing up defenses against biologism, or biologistic reductionism, as it is called.²⁹ The other side has been making use of the tre­mendous progress in molecular biology and genetics. Ethology, the study of animal behavior, was brilliantly developed in mid­century by Konrad Lorenz and has been popularized even in its application to humans. At the same time the study of primates, especially chimpanzees, has expanded greatly and established be­yond expectation how close they are to humans. With the re­finement of evolution theory, sociobiology was proclaimed as

“the new synthesis” by E. O. Wilson. This has not silenced crit­icism at all; controversies are bound to continue.

Darwin’s theory of evolution made a lasting impression on theories of culture in the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism 9 applied the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest to group selection. Certain social groups would prove to be more suc­cessful than others and oust their rivals in the end; morality and religion could be made factors in the process, strengthening or weakening the group’s fitness. These theories conceived interac­tion as a struggle or battle, neglecting the role of cooperation. This school of thought appears unattractive and naive in retro­spect.

A new and more specific approach was inaugurated by Konrad Lorenz’s book On Aggression, first published with the less ag­gressive title Das sogenannte Bose in 1963, a work distinguished by the author’s special skill in understanding animals.³⁰ In estab­lishing homologies in behavior of different species and decipher­ing the function of their signals, Lorenz insisted on the positive role of so-called evil behavior, or intraspecific aggression, for the preservation of the balance of life. He showed similarities, anal­ogies, and even continuities between animals and humans in the field of anger, fighting, and war, but in particular he described the establishment of bonds of friendship and solidarity through common aggression, symbolized in aggressive display. By ex­trapolation it would seem possible to explain the success of re­ligious solidarity on the basis of the aggressive acts of hunt and sacrifice.³¹

Lorenz’s claim that zoology could throw light on the condition humaine immediately provoked critical reactions from sociolo­gists and social anthropologists; the thesis of aggression was met by counteraggression.³² Critics judged it was dangerous to derive human values from animal nature, to see biological inheritance as determining human practice, and, in particular, to make ag­gression an inherited and hence immutable trait of the human race. Humanization and the very progress of civilization seemed to be at stake.

'rhe conflict was restarted in a new key through E. O. Wilson’s concept of sociobiology proposed in 1975.³³ Its opponents pro­tested again that any thesis about genetic determination of cul- 10 tural behavior, norms, or values would destroy the hope for pro­gress in humanization.³⁴ Self-determination, free will, free choice among various possibilities—these seemed the marks of culture. The advocate of what looked like biological automatism was marked as reactionary. Cultural autonomy was the banner raised against biologism.

The basic hypothesis of sociobiology is the “coevolution of genes and culture,” with constant feedback between the two. From its Darwinian inheritance sociobiology takes the concept of survival fitness, related to the chances of procreation, and tries to correlate certain institutions or ideas with such fitness. “Cul­tural success consists in accomplishing those things which make biological success (that is, a high inclusive fitness) probable.”³⁵ Misfits will diminish in number and gradually disappear. Cul­tural progress and modification of genes go together.

Sociobiology could be called the computerized version of so­cial Darwinism. Whereas Lorenz had still largely relied on ob­servation and empathy, evolution theory now moves along the lines of game theory, models of which can be tested by computer programs. In this context one basic idea of social Darwinism, the principle of group selection, was exploded immediately, by dis­proving the claim that group solidarity would naturally win in the struggle for survival. It is the genes, not the individuals, that get passed on; hence it is the cheater within a group who enjoys the greatest advantage and by this very fitness will multiply his genes. “The selfish gene” has become a catchword of the new approach.³⁶ It remains true, however, that certain strategies of behavior within a group will prove to be more successful than others and thus make a difference even in gene selection.

The technical problems of evolution theory and sociobiology cannot be discussed here in any depth. They include the very formulation of the definition of “fitness” in a way that is not circular;³⁷ and the alternative of continuous evolution amenable

to statistics versus sudden and unforeseeable catastrophes or “figurations.”³*

The most complicated issue is still how to verify the connec­tion between cultural phenomena and biological preconditions. Even primitive functions of life and simple processes of growth depend upon the interaction of many genes and numerous in­termediate stages and agents that make up the phenotype. Be­havior is hopelessly complex already at the level of primates. In response to ever changing situations, behavior will always pre­sent a mixture of innate responses and learned programs.³⁹ Even in the realm of animals it is very difficult to isolate one from the other by experiments; at the human level experimentation is not possible.

In addition, in human social life quite different levels and criteria of success come to the fore; these cannot be represented by a single set of numbers in computer games. There is always variety⁷, and seldom extinction. No doubt dominant members of a society have more chances to raise their children success­fully; but it appears that again and again special elites rose to power who produced fewer children but, through an elaborate culture, kept control over their inferiors who produced more children. Should this be called a lack of fitness of the ruling class?

Sociobiology has had some success in interpreting rules of marriage and sexual taboos in relation to the probabilities of genetic relationship and hence to the spread of selfish genes. Such studies focus on cultural institutions or patterns directly linked to physical procreation. An alarming study shows that male ag­gressiveness is deliberately cultivated in a primitive tribal society, so that killers have more chances to beget children than their more peaceful kinsmen.⁴⁰ However, it is not possible to run ex­periments that use neutral test groups to test the validity of these conclusions. And how can we know whether some rule or insti­tution has been in effect long enough, through a sufficient se­quence of generations, to produce a marked change in the fre-

quency of the respective genes? How many generations are needed to make a sizable difference?⁴¹

¹

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“Religion constitutes the greatest challenge to human sociobiol­ogy,” E. O. Wilson wrote.⁴² No doubt religion has appeared as a new phenomenon in the course of evolution. Chimpanzees, for all their genetic closeness to man, have neither art nor religion.⁴³ All the same, the practice of religion must be extremely old. It is certain that the basic religious structures had evolved before hu­mans reached America, for despite thousands of years of isola­tion, the religions of American aborigines remained comparable and similar to their Old World counterparts in many respects. In fact, there are clear traces of religious practice since the Upper Paleolithic that can be brought into line with attested religious phenomena.⁴⁴ Still earlier, Neanderthals practiced ceremonial burial of the dead; many think that religious ideas must have accompanied such activities about 100,000 years ago.

In a naive way, an explanation of religion as expression of cultural fitness had already been advanced, on the basis of social Darwinism. Otto Gruppe wrote in 1921: “Individuals who make themselves appear to possess supernatural powers get a great advantage out of this, which is easily seen because they exercise some power on the society in which they live; but they also give some advantage, less easily recognizable but nevertheless quite real, to their own group in the struggle for existence, through their purported powers and by facilitating the growth of a com­mon societal will.”⁴⁵ Can this be rephrased to mean that religion, once entrenched as a cultural phenomenon, brought definite ad­vantage to certain individuals and thus was likely to multiply their and their adherents’ chances of offspring and hence their genes, to the detriment of the nonreligious?

The fitness of religion in the sense of procreation and survival value is not at all agreed upon. Many religions call for renunci­ation of worldly goods and retreat from competitive struggle, as Buddhism and Christianity notably do. Christianity has extolled

martyrs and altruistic self-sacrifice. Drastic examples of self­destroying religious behavior include saints starving themselves to death and sectarian groups committing collective suicide. Still—the very propaganda effect of martyrdom proves that, on balance, even these may be strategies of success. The loss is matched by an increase in acceptance. Propaganda, by its very name, is a form of procreation. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”⁴⁶—a striking metaphor of biological growth. Self-denial is to result in multiplication; the grain of wheat dies to bring forth a rich harvest.⁴⁷ Cases of self-sacrifice occur even lower on the evolutionary scale: some male spiders lose their life at copulation, bees work to exhaustion to feed the queen’s off­spring. In fact, the individual’s sacrifice for the benefit of his or her genetic relatives can be seen as a strategy to multiply the genes shared by the family. This is “inclusive fitness,” a concept developed by William Hamilton ⁴⁸ In an analogous way, even religions that proclaim self-sacrifice may be basically adaptive.⁴⁹ Because on the whole the history of religions has been a story of success, a good strategy for survival in the long run must have been at work. In other words, a certain survival fitness of religion has to be granted.

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In contrast to the foregoing, another school of thought imputes to religion the very opposite of survival fitness; we may call it the opium thesis.⁵⁰ Religious ideas and practices are accused of fulfilling human wishes in a fantastic, unrealistic, and possibly detrimental way, just as drugs do when they provide the illusion of happiness while misusing and overriding the normal cerebral functions.⁵¹ Not that this would make religion exempt from bi­ology: even the spread of malfunctions is a biological fact. But is illusion dysfunctional? The discovery of endorphins, natural pain relievers in the brain, rather points to the positive biological function of illusive happiness to overcome dramatic crises of stress and pain. A case could be made even for the sociobiological advantage of religious illusions.

Ancient religions normally gravitate to the dominating classes and the representatives of power. After the triumph of Christian-

ity, for many centuries of European history that has also been the situation of the Christian churches. Islam expressly claims to direct law, social order, and political authority. Successful relig- 14 ions tend to use power and even violence to suppress dissident groups or rival religions, both within and beyond their territory. Christianity as well as Islam have become world religions by ousting the more ancient forms of religious polytheism, and they remain adamant in fighting atheism. The same militancy occurs on the individual level: within strictly religious societies a non­religious child, rebellious in feeling and behavior, will hardly have a chance of survival.⁵² Yet if the dominant majorities are stabilized by religion, there are also minorities that persist through their religion, some of them retaining special influence just by remaining a religious minority. Some disadvantaged mi­norities survive in a kind of niche existence for millennia, held together by their religion. The dominant religions of course pre­sent advantages to their adherents and disadvantages to their opponents, so they are bound to have momentous effects on se­lection. Nonetheless, minority groups still survived centuries of Christian and Islamic rule.

It is notable that many religions urgently advocate procreation within the group. Isolation and procreation became the Jewish strategies for surviving the historical catastrophe of the Babylo­nian exile; in reinforcement, Mosaic law forbade the use of es­tablished forms of birth control such as homosexuality, prosti­tution, abortion, and exposure of children. In effect, a Jewish population explosion occurred in Hellenistic times. A similar sexual morality caused Christian groups to grow beyond pro­portion within the Roman empire. Until the present day Ca­tholicism and Islam both passionately oppose birth control. Is it a biological instinct, the thrust of selfish genes, that works behind the laws of Moses or Allah?

It is true that different attitudes of competing religions toward birth control can dramatically change majority-minority rela­tions—witness the case of Lebanon, where Moslems came to out­number Christians; but even the catastrophe of Lebanon did not lead to annihilation.⁵³ And even if the premise of social Darwin ism should materialize in extreme cases, and some religious groups do get exterminated, historical catastrophes, short lived and exceptional as they are, will not have much el feet on the IS genetic pool within a heterogeneous world society.

Another hypothesis traces religion's success to ecology. One example is Roy Rappaport’s study of pig festivals in New Guinea, in which he explained the festal cycle in such terms. The pig population is left to multiply and would grow out of hand, but they are sacrificed and consumed when they are about to become too numerous. Thus the ritual slaughter functions as a homoeostat to prevent overexploitation of the environment.⁵'¹ In this way the stability of the social system within the environ­mental balance is maintained through regulation motivated by religious restraint. Should we assume that, in the long run, only the religious individuals, sensitive to the control imposed by oth­erworldly regulatory systems, managed to survive in stable hu­man societies? Alas, ecological caution is anything but universal in religions. In the island of Malta, the proliferation of gigantic temples admired by modern tourists seems to have gone together with an ecological collapse and the final decay of the Early Bronze Age civilization.⁵⁵

It is tempting to assume that the very advantage secured by religion is stability and thus continuity of culture. As the “soft­ware” of civilization became too precious and too complicated to leave its preservation to individual choice or chance, new in­stitutions had to arise to guarantee social cohesion across long spans of time. Incipient forms of culture observed in other pri­mates, such as washing grain in water or transporting stones to crush nuts, can be lost again without endangering the species. For homo sapiens, the technique to preserve fire did need con­tinuous care. But this may be just an instance of the necessity of culture: it cannot be lost without catastrophe; it cannot be put at stake by experiments. The permanent authority of ancestors or immortal gods provides the needed stability.

Yet as provider of continuity, religion remains paradoxical

from the sociobiological perspective. Survival fitness, in the long run, means adaptability to changing conditions; in the cultural systems the key to success is the ability to learn fast and to keep 6 learning in a changing world. Religion, however, strives to teach the unchanging “eternal truths,” and to make sure that beliefs and attitudes remain unchanged. What kind of fitness is it that renders people unfit for change, and how can we say that it has been successful?

A final surmise is that the success of religion may be attributed to its providing a heightened endurance in the face of catastro­phe, encouraging procreation even in desperate circumstances. This comes close to the “endorphin” hypothesis. We humans are capable of experiencing states described as “loss of reality”— chimpanzees are apparently immune to this—in such diverse manifestations as extreme patriotism, the fascination of games and sports, the scientist’s or artist’s proverbial distraction or rather concentration, and, not least, the fervor of religious be­havior. In such cases the mental system overrides reality, and the invisible gets the better of the obvious. Although religious ob­session could be called a form of paranoia, it does offer a chance of survival in extreme and hopeless situations, when others, pos­sibly the nonreligious individuals, would break down and give up. Mankind, in its long past, will have gone through many a desperate situation, with an ensuing breakthrough of homines religiosi.

These positive or self-stabilizing functions of religion seem more or less plausible and are not mutually exclusive; it is difficult, however, to find concrete evidence for them, especially since the ubiquity of religion means that neutral test groups are not avail­able. But even if accepted, these functions do not in fact prove any correlation between religion and gene selection. Religions are established by learning, they are propagated both through imitation and through explicit verbal teaching. Traditions devel­oped in this way can evidence a kind of cultural fitness for sur­vival without any genetic basis. The Roman Catholic Church has been working successfully for about sixty generations, led by an elite that explicitly renounces physical procreation. Jews have been living in relative isolation with special marital rules for about 100 generations, yet there are no Jewish genes. The success of particular forms of religion appears to be due to organization, propaganda, power, or fashion, with many different motives de­termining individual choices or attitudes, rather than to physical procreation.

One religious institution does focus on sexuality; it is circum­cision. While this ritual has been strictly practiced for thousands of years, it has no more bearing on procreation than eating or not eating pigs; neither practice will provide a genetic basis for the eventual success of either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.⁵⁶ Circumcision functions as character indelebilis of a certain community⁵⁷ and possibly as a traumatic, unforgettable individ­ual experience;⁵⁸ that is to say, it functions at the social and psy­chological, not the genetic level.

In contrast to the practice of circumcision, human sexuality as such has a clear biological function and pedigree. During ado­lescence humans everywhere and at all times will spontaneously discover sexuality along with new feelings and behavior, while cultural and educational efforts to repress them normally fail. Postmoderns have pointed out that sexuality too takes different forms in different civilizations and hence should be considered a cultural construct or even an “invention.”⁵⁹ But such variations and deviances are slight in the face of overwhelming uniformity. The biological program develops on its own according to pre­determined patterns, which reach back far beyond the emergence of humans and have long been inscribed in the genetic code. It has never been shown that religiosity rises spontaneously in such a way; religion depends on the formative impact of cultural learning. The prospect for discovering religious genes is dim.

What remains is an intercultural family resemblance of religious phenomena throughout the world and over the ages. Likewise, the emotional aura encircling religion cannot be easily dismissed.

Biologists hold that each of our spontaneous feelings can be qual­ified as the reflection of some biological function.⁶⁰ “Memoirs most easily recalled, emotions they are most likely to evoke” are 8 invoked by Lumsden and Wilson to testify for biological foun­dations/’¹ Konrad Lorenz has drawn attention to the shudders of anxiety or even of elation that we still experience, shivers run­ning down our backs and arms in appropriate situations, which are nervous reactions intended to raise the mane at the back and head, as they still do among gorillas and chimpanzees. For us, “hair-raising” survi ves mainly as a metaphor, but once it was part of the aggressive behavioral program.⁶² Today, when we speak of the sacred shivers of awe that characterize religion in partic­ular, we may be forgetting that origin.⁶³ Yet anxiety linked to aggression through biological inheritance manifests itself in our emotions, including patriotic and religious enthusiasm.

In this context, it may help to take into consideration more closely the most important universal of humans: language. Lan­guage is learned in childhood in every society, together with the various special phonologies and semantics that make crosscul- tural understanding so difficult. Language is linked to an unin­terrupted chain of historical tradition;⁶⁴ it has never—in tens of thousands of years—been reinvented.⁶⁵ Language is exclusively human, even if chimpanzees can be taught its rudiments to a surprising degree.⁶⁶ But it is no less true that language has a bi­ological foundation, most evident in the development of a vocal apparatus which is missing in chimpanzees and whose presence in Neanderthal man is doubtful. A genetic alteration was critical to its development. Language also has a clear socio biological function. In fact it has become one of the most important con­ditions for survival in our social systems: an individual incapable of speech usually drops out. Thus gene selection has been asso­ciated with social functions within the evolution of culture. If language is a phenomenon of cul ture, culture has determined and continues to control the genes in this case, while language still remains to be taught afresh to every generation. Human lan­guage thus may be called a hybrid of culture and biology.

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necessarily leave archaeological traces, yet funeral practice is well attested for Neanderthal man, while his ability to speak is in doubt.⁷³ We are free to imagine that a richer palette of rituals existed among hominids at an early stage, such as dances in the context of hunting, warfare, or mating display, but also venera­tion, even worship, of the unseen.⁷⁴ This could be called a com­plex of prereligion, perpetuated to a large extent in the rituals of religions we know. But it must remain a guess.

The possibility of a sociobiological derivation of religion thus remains shrouded in prehistory. The idea is attractive. There is a vast expanse of time available for the evolutionary process, with tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of generations to fill the hiatus between chimpanzee and homo sapiens, whereas in other cases studied by sociobiology the problem of the time span involved seemed insurmountable. Religion, stemming from time immemorial and often characterized by the principle of un­changeable continuity, might well provide a model case for the “coevolution of genes and culture.” Yet there is no way of testing this hypothesis, be it through 30,000 or 300,000 or 3,000,000 years, through 1,000,10,000,100,000 generations; by scientific standards, the hypothesis loses its point. We can only vaguely reconstruct the decisive cultural conditions. While uncertainties multiply with time, the evidence evaporates. Sociobiology, in­sisting as it does on precise parameters in mathematical models, cannot find appropriate applications in these realms. Probabili­ties, selective observations, and hunches will have to take its place.

We may still view religion, parallel to language and to art and mostly in close symbiosis with the two, as a long-lived hybrid between the cultural and the biological traditions. Another hy­brid among anthropological universalia might illustrate the com­plexity of the issue: the case of the incest taboo, a social rule that immediately concerns procreation and often assumes religious dimensions. That the incest taboo is practically universal among human societies has long been recognized, not without amaze­ment. It has been taken to be the very mark of culture.⁷⁵ It was

another surprise when proofs accumulated that forms of incest avoidance are not confined to the human species hut are common among most higher animals.'⁶ The biological advantage is clear in this case, since inbreeding has specific risks and dangers. But how did the biological recommendation enter human conscious­ness, to be transformed into spontaneous feelings as well as ex­plicit verbalized rules of cultural institutions? This puzzling ques­tion has not been solved. Is it that random rules, adopted by chance, took root through their genetic success? But the effect only manifests itself through a long sequence of generations; it is hardly perceptible in individual experience. Norbert Bischof has devoted a painstaking study to this problem.⁷⁷ He ends up with a metaphor: social rules, if general and persistent, must somehow “fit the landscape.”

It is the landscape, formed by age-old geological events, that makes water concentrate into rivers and flow in a preestablished course and sets limits even to the chaotic turbulences of weath­er.'³ How the architect perceives the landscape, or the landscape influences the architect, is still a mystery. Natural religion, that is, basic and common forms of addressing the supernatural, did not develop in a void but through adaptation to a specific “land­scape,” conditioned by the age-old evolution of human life. If there are certain predilections and attractions as well as fear and revulsion, feelings of needs shaped by biology, this complex may account for the stability of belief and concomitant behavior.

To use another metaphor: verbalized culture, transmitted by teaching and learning, may be called the “software” of humanity, easy to copy and to pass on regardless of its complexity. Still, the question is whether this software can be chosen and modified arbitrarily, or whether it remains bound to certain preconditions of the original programming, to patterns and effects left by the “hardware” that generated it.

The biological organization of the brain and other cybernetic systems of living beings existed long before verbalized culture; that it continues to influence our behavior and communication cannot be denied. Aboriginal programs of action, sequences, sen-

timents, expectations, notions, and values are inherited from the most distant past. Some of the most obvious are the search for food, fear, flight and aggression, and of course sex. Even mean- 22 ings have their prehistory. It is notoriously difficult to construe semantics from pure logic, but quite easy to recognize certain reactions that have adaptive or communicative functions: a leop­ard, a snake, “fight or flight”—these are meanings which ante­date language by far. The chicken knows the flying hawk before it has any experience of it; the cock knows the weasel;⁷⁹ certain monkeys have distinct signs for leopard, eagle, and snake.⁸⁰ The process of setneiosis, the use of signs and symbols, operates within the whole sphere of living organisms and was evidently invented long before the advent of man.⁸¹

This does not mean that genes prescribe culture—clearly, they do not. But it could be said that they give recommendations that become manifest in the repetition of like patterns, “the kinds of memories most easily recalled, the emotions they are most likely to evoke.” The biological makeup forms preconditions or “at­tractors” to produce phenomena in a consistent fashion, even if these patterns are created and recreated afresh in each case. Sci­entific proof of such connections by means of statistics or exper­iment will remain impossible; what can be shown is the near­universality and persistence of patterns through place and time, and the existence of certain analogies or even homologies in structure and function in animal behavior.⁸² This suggests that details and sequences in rituals, tales, works of art, and fantasies hark back to more original processes in the evolution of life; they become understandable not in isolation nor within their different cultural contexts, but in relation to this background.

The sociobiological question of the survival value or multipli­cation value of language, art, and religion remains open. It is probably important to realize that we are not dealing with a one­dimensional process, so that the answer cannot be just one for­mula. There is probably a cluster of factors in evolution and a cluster of functions served by new avenues of communication; functions may also be lost or altered. Nonetheless certain per-

sistent and permanent patterns emerge and even seem to control interactions, since all these events occur within a unique land­scape to which they are adapted. What we discern are the tracks of biology followed by cultural choice.

To sum up: the thesis of sociobiology in the strong sense of “co­evolution of genes and culture” cannot be verified in the case of religion, as such evolution antedates observable periods and re­mains too complex to establish unequivocal relations between the two. The absence of evidence is still not a license to separate culture from biology or religion from substructures formed within the evolution of life. Religion’s hybrid character—be­tween biology and culture—calls for an interdisciplinary meet­ing of methods: derivation should go together with interpreta­tion. In this sense, an analysis of religious worlds in view of the underlying landscape may be attempted.

A Common World: Reduction and Validation

In human history language has been the decisive phenomenon, analogous to religion and related to it. Ever since the Greeks, language, logos, has been judged the crucial difference between us and other species: man is the “animal endowed with lan­guage,” zoon logikon.³³ The course of evolution has been one of growing success in obtaining and processing information, in con­tinuous feedback between the environment and living organ­isms.⁸⁴ The nervous system gave rise to the possibilities of learn­ing, that is, of storing information and modifying programs in the course of the individual’s life. “Software” of this kind, how­ever, remains inseparable from the “hardware” and is destroyed with it. The effects of learning cannot persist; only the genes preserve information. The cycle of birth and death can be breached to some extent through sharing and passing on infor­mation. Incipient cultural tradition of this kind remained rudi­mentary, even if the distance from amoeba to ape was immense,

until the momentous advent of language. Through., language in­formation can not only be acquired, processed, and stored in­dividually. but fully transferred to others, to be processed and recalled in parallel efforts. Corresponding to the neural functions of sensation and of motion are two main forms of verbal inter­action: to state the facts and to command action, which means sharing the sources of information on the one hand, and partak­ing in the results of information processing on the other Through copying and exchange, programs and information have become largely independent from the hardware and from the accidents of individual death. Information survival asserts, itself side by side sen th and even instead of genetic survival.

Language development means nothing less than the advent of a common mental world, allowing not only for common actions and common feelings but for common thoughts and plans, con­cepts and values. All humans henceforth are linked to an unin­terrupted chain of tradition, taking over the mental worlds of their elders, working on them and passing them on.

Religion, defined at the level of communication, belongs to this mental world, and by virtue of its seriousness it claims preemi­nence. The problem of religion, in consequence, may be restated in the form of a question. How and why, within this common mental world shaped by language tradition, have certain realms been established for which no evidence exists, and for which we claim dominion over communication and action by virtue of se­riousness? Is this a by-product, a degeneration, an “opium ef­fect,” or on the contrary some kind of a priori condition for a common world? If we adopt the Durkheimian concept of “col­lective representations,” we might ask, why do people accept them, and why certain ones among them?

The suspicion has been voiced repeatedly that religion is mainly trickery and make-believe produced by those who profit from it. Forms of deceit abound already at prehuman stages.¹⁵ All the greater is the possibility of verbal deception. Information can be withheld or distorted. The unseen in particular can be the object of manipulation. Among several species of monkeys, for

example, an individual disturbed by an intruder may avoid con­frontation by staring into a corner and voicing sounds of alarm, as if reporting “there is a monster in the corner.”⁸⁶ But this would be a grossly insufficient foundation for the origin of religion. Even among monkeys the trick cannot be repeated very often without being recognized and losing all of its force.

The point is that the common world of language characteris­tically produces contents beyond any immediate evidence. Com­munication works via signs, and what they refer to must be guesswork at first, to be confirmed by repetition, by context, previous knowledge, or additional information and experience. Some signs will remain opaque and yet are stored in expectation of later clarification. As learning takes precedence over experi­ence, a personal encounter with what has been learned and known in advance may or may not follow in the span of a life­time. Language refers to objects far away as well as to the past and to the future, segments of reality inaccessible to verifica­tion.⁸⁷ Fiction, dreaming, and the workings of imagination evi­dently have some function for the individual, preparing or re­hearsing human activities or helping with solving problems while avoiding direct confrontations. Thoughts or plans can be ex­pressed or manipulated collectively through speech. Worlds be­yond experience, or at least some misty provinces or blind spots, thus grow out of the process of linguistic communication. They may be reshaped by misunderstanding. This even happens within religious tradition, producing strange and fascinating items. Ely­sium, a name for a blissful spot in the beyond, seems to have emerged in such a way.⁸⁸ An accumulation of preformed, ver­balized traditions will always transcend individual experience. Nobody has seen the phoenix, but all know about him.⁸⁹

Such a process of accumulated verbal tradition can be antici­pated by ritual, which refers through formulaic acts to nonpres­ent partners,⁹⁰ and is strongly reinforced by art. Ever since the Upper Paleolithic people have drawn pictures of well-known ob­jects, bisons, horses, or mammoths, as well as of baffling, enig­matic icons that demand special interpretation. We are at a loss

26

abolir how to understand the painting called ^uthc sorcerer” of the Tro is I'rcrcs cave, or those corpulent fernale idols which have been called Venns statuettes.⁹¹ Do they reproduce reality, or do they refer to the supernatural, to some Great Goddess?⁹² Most people today have seen pictures of angels, dragons, or the phoe­nix; it is by way of illustrations that we form our ideas about these creatures.

If a body of supernatural entities, communicable through lan­guage and pictures, comes to occupy a certain space in our com­mon mental world, it is subject to the controlling functions of reduction and simplification. In the face of the constantly grow­ing accumulation of data infiltrating personal experience, the common world must be simplified. Sheer addition of individual knowledge would soon surpass the capacity of any available sys­tem for recording it, even within a small group and within a few generations. Tradition consists of condensed, systematized infor­mation. Language continually operates in this way through two of its main functions, generalization and metaphor; these are strategies to keep the sign system finite. Logical functions too work to that end, through negation, class-inclusion, the consti­tution of patterns and analogies.

In The Function of Religion Niklas Luhmann stated that the main process of creating sense in the interactions of a system with its environment was “reduction of complexity,” and he takes this to be the achievement of religion in particular.⁹³ By a process of reduction, religion provides orientation within a meaningful cosmos for those who feel helpless vis-à-vis infinite complexity. Certain religious systems go further than others in this function. One way to effect a radical reduction of complexity is to devise a dualistic system, positing two containers in which to place any new phenomenon or experience. Hierarchies and links of causality also effectively reduce complexity. And there is an avowed tendency in speculative religion to reduce reality to the most simple and general concepts: the One Cause, the Sole Being, the One.⁹⁴

It is easy to make further suggestions about what makes reli-

gjon “good to think” in a mental world.⁹⁵ Language itself, as a signifying system, seems to be in need of an “ultimate signifier,” the absolute, god?⁶ This may also serve the function of the al­gebraic x to solve the conflicting equations of life. Oppressive domination, for example, is easier to bear if the oppressor is dominated in turn by a god?⁷ Likewise, an insecure and unjust distribution of goods is brought into balance by a transcendent gift system?⁸ Affliction is made bearable by an ultimate if non- empirical answer to the grieving one’s question, “why.” To intro­duce the unseen is to interrupt the closed functional chain of events—which also means that religion is never fully integrated into any system of society but retains some character of “other­ness.”

Basic categories of being, of causality, and of goodness are reflected in the traditional predicates of gods or god as immortal or timeless, creator of the world, and the ultimate end of human destination. Even these a priori categories have been linked to biological evolution by the evolutionary theory of knowledge. They have been developed in the measure that they proved success­ful in managing an increasingly comprehensive objective world?⁹ In realms beyond experience, these categories develop with un­common ease, assisted by the mental device of self-reference to create an infinite series. The unattainable extreme, perfection, is found in the supernatural. In language, this will be expressed by the superlative: god is the first, the highest, the strongest, the absolute.

&&

In all such reflections about the conditions and functions of re­ligious concepts within a mental world, validation remains the crucial problem. As Richard Gordon put it, how is it possible “to validate the existence of a purely imaginary world?”¹⁰⁰ The monkey trick of the monster in the corner cannot be repeated. There is disbelief as well as belief, distrust as well as trust, there is forgetfulness to match the acquisition of new information; there is manipulation and countermanipulation, concealment

and deceit. Each person will end up with a very personal selection that forms her or his mental world. Is it possible to isolate the common and authoritative elements? Or are the possibilities of 28 fantasy infinite? Yet gods are not just another chimaera.¹⁰¹ How to substantiate the claims, postulates, and threats of religion?

Three main approaches are used to account for the uniquely realistic appearance of religious worlds. The reasons for accep­tance, persistence, and preponderance of religion may be found either within the message transmitted, or in the circumstances of transmission, or in the special organization of the recipient. All these possibilities have been explored and discussed; they may well be combined.

The modern and sophisticated approach has been to look for reasons of stability within the message; this is the structuralist model.¹⁰² It postulates that certain correspondences, equations, and reciprocities stabilize themselves in various and repeated forms of communication and thus give a powerful meaning to traditions which operate within a religious group. One might metaphorically speak of “resonances” accompanying the mes­sage—the way a radio or a similar electronic device sometimes creates its own piercing sounds. Reinforcement through reso­nance would especially apply to ritual, the concomitant means of religious communication. Should we look at religion as a form of resonance, of mental self-replications within a cultural sys­tem—replications which, functional or dysfunctional, arise and preserve themselves through their own structure to form part of culture?¹⁰³ This would mean abandoning attempts at making sense.

Within the process of religious transmission, a strictly biolog­ical hypothesis would assume that some form of “imprinting” happens. Biological imprinting is restricted to certain conditions, to special functions, times, and situations; in other words, it is totally dependent upon the “landscape” of a well-programmed species; it has unchangeable consequences. A newborn duckling, after leaving its egg, takes for its parent whatever creature makes the first contact; later experience cannot change this.

In humans too the brain is quite pliable tn the earlier phases, anil certain phenomena come at least close to imprinting. Child­hood experiences play a decisive role for the development of the personality, including sexual maturity, political attitudes/'⁴ and 29 religious propensities. Strong formative forces radiate from the mother and the father alike; “phenotypical cloning” is a catch­word that has been coined in this context. No dependable au­tomatism has been detected, however, comparable to that of the duckling. On the contrary, striking and drastic failures of peda­gogic attempts to fix religious attitudes in children abound.

Finally, in examining receptivity to religious messages, it would be easy, probably too easy, to postulate that archetypal images of religious entities, of god or gods, are present in the human makeup and can be activated by appropriate stimuli with indelible results. This would be equivalent to “innate release mechanisms” as discussed in biology,¹⁰⁵ another form of prede­termined programming, like that of imprinting. It means that fixed action patterns are activated through specific combinations of stimuli, without regard for individual accidents. This too re­sists verification.

The observable forms of religious transmission are learning processes effected through ritual and language. The most salient features in this process are repetition plus more or less harsh forms of intimidation. Repetition is a major factor in learning, and it is critical in ritual. There is no transmission of religion without ritual. A primary function of ritual is to initiate the young into the customs of their elders—the very epitome of cul­tural learning, which relies upon memory.¹⁰⁶ In the same spirit, it is for the sake of the whole community that “collective repre­sentations” are inculcated by ceremonies repeated at regular in­tervals.¹⁰⁷ Celebrations of festivals have become central manifes­tations of religion. People perform prescribed acts, learning that these have always been done in that way; in this context, they are also told their collective lore, their myths.¹⁰⁸ Two sign sys­tems, ritual and language, come together to reinforce each other, to form the mental structures that determine the categories and

the rules of life. The most effective elements arc dance and song, in which repetitive rhythms and sounds combine to create the great collective experience.

30 A major force in this process is paternal authority. All higher animals are programmed to learn from their elders. In human society the role of the father has been especially magnified. An intense father-son relationship is the vehicle of many cultural traditions. Religions used to stress the importance of parents while presenting god or gods as superfather or mother, and par­ents did not fail to use that opportunity to enhance their own prestige.¹⁰⁹ When children saw how their parents deal with gods “in supreme seriousness on behalf of themselves and their off­spring,” wrote Plato, how could they venture to despise reli­gion?¹¹⁰ In such a two-way process, authority is stabilized through religion and religion through authority.

Some special forms of learning are made indelible “at a stroke,” without repetition, usually in situations of utmost ex­citement. Every individual will have unforgettable memories of this kind, especially of a painful or humiliating character. Forms of “anxiety learning” have been studied in animals. Observers found special neuronal processing and memory for anxiety­arousing events;¹¹¹ the resulting behavior seems close to super­stition.¹¹² Teaching by threat and maltreatment is customary in many civilizations without qualms. Exotic initiation ceremonies come to mind;¹¹³ some European communities used to teach youngsters the place of boundary stones by boxing and flogging them at the spot.¹¹⁴ One drastic way to create an unforgettable and unbreakable bond is to commit a common crime, using ag­gression to overcome anxiety.¹¹⁵ A special thing to do in manip­ulating anxiety is to handle blood, which is required in many forms of sacrifice and purification. Terror does not develop ra­tional abilities, but it leaves its marks. Thus we approach the “seriousness” of religion from the experience of fear.

There is no denying that anxiety is often evoked to validate religious messages, and that it has its repercussions upon the substance of religion. To transmit religion is to transmit fear.

“Fear, first of all, produced gods in the world,” primus in orbe decs fecit tirnor, Statius wrote. While this is a criticism from his standpoint, which is that of ancient philosophical enlighten­ment,'¹⁶ it shares the self-interpretation of many religions. The main word to characterize gods and religion in Akkadian is pu- luhtu, fear. An Assyrian king, in all his arrogance, will proclaim himself the one “who strongly knows the fear of the gods and goddesses of heaven and earth.”¹¹⁷ For “the fear of gods creates kindness,”¹¹⁸ or, as Solomon put it in one of his most quoted sayings, using the Hebrew variant of the same Semitic word: “The fear of god is the beginning of wisdom.”¹¹⁹ The equivalent Greek expression, theoudes, god-fearing, occurs as a mark of moral distinction in Homer. “The divine is fear for prudent mor­tals.”¹²⁰ Another Greek word commonly associated with reli­gious rites is phrike, hair-raising shudder. Moderns came back to the suggestion that awe was the basic religious feeling;¹²¹ Ru­dolf Otto substituted a neo-Latin term, mysterium tremendum, shivering mystery.¹²² Shudders of awe are central for the expe­rience of the sacred. The very means of indelible transmission, threat and terror, are correlated with the contents of the religious part of the mental world: the prerogative of the sacred requires the fear of god.

Yet anxiety, fear, and terror are not just free-floating emotions brought on by psychological fantasy. They have clear biological functions in protecting life. Seriousness means giving priority to certain vitally important programs.¹²³ The utmost seriousness of religion is linked to the great overriding fear of death. The value of religion, manifest in the forms of religion’s cultural transmis­sion and in the insiders’ confessions, is that it deals with the “ultimate concern” and thus fits the biological landscape. The drama of religion’s interaction with the unseen by manipulating and displacing anxiety takes place with death as the backdrop. Man knows about death, and that death cannot be abolished, but this knowledge develops in a peculiar way. Personal death is a reality beyond imagination, an x, an unknown, inaccessible to experience; the experience of other people’s deaths, however,

prompts imaginative dealings with the unknown within the com­mon men.tai world, with displacement, disclaimers, shifting sab- iurates, and continuing indelible shock, assuaged or rekindled io 32 turn.

Anxiety was bound to multiply at the human level, the level of a conscious representation of the world both near and far, of past and future. We may wonder how herds of African zebras and gnus are able to graze in the presence of lions. The lions will attack at some point, but only at the moment of immediate dan­ger does an animal take flight; the others save their energy and go on grazing, and before long so will the animal that escaped the predator this time—what else can they do? But humans, as they consciously seek to control their environment, storing rec­on ecuons and anticipating the future, cannot forget the presence of lingering lions. They can try to attack and to kill, rhe predators in turn; they may succeed in creating a peaceable environment: this is one reason why many primitive cultures enjoy the sym­bols of killing.⁵²⁴ Yet man will fail in his attempts to remove all anxiety-arousing dangers from the world, especially as his vio­lence meets with the violence of other mend²⁵ Death remains· the constant.

To shield mental life from despair and depression, which are factually lethal, there must be counterforces, optimism, faith, or “opium.” This may be the final necessity for sharing fictitious worlds which employ seriousness, nay terror, to counter worldly fears by fear in a hierarchy that reaches toward the absolute. “The highest fear is the fear of god,” Aeschylus stated,¹²⁶ and he was not alone in offering this message. “The fear of god drives out the fear of men.”¹²⁷ As religious reality claims precedence over mundane reality, frightful dealings with death and killing gain overwhelming importance in the form of funerary and sac­rificial rituals?²*

This apparently negative preoccupation of religion is just a foil for what is really at stake. A resounding voice in the self­interpretation of most religions, diverse as they may be in other respects, is the longing for life?²⁹ “Give us life, life, life” is the

reft am of an African harvest ritual.Abura. kcv word of the Zoroastriau religion, means Lord of life. Egyptian gods carrv the sign of life, in their hands. Cheeks were keen to find the meaning of life, m the name of their ruling god Zens. The I ivmg God is a basic concept in the Old and even more in the New Testament.’” “I am alive, and you will live,'"' is Jesus’ final message to his apostles.Gods grant life, gods protect hie, just as their wrath can destroy life. The impetus of biological survival appears internalized in the codes of religion. Following this im­petus, there is the postulate of immortality or eternal life, the most powerful idea of many religions.¹ ” Even self-sacrifice is for the sake of eternal life. The negation of death presupposes the tact of death. The idea of the supernatural emerges within the landscape of nature. Religion’s seriousness, so manifest in our feelings, reflects the hard rocks of the biological landscape, the dangers, limits, and the drive for the preservation of life. Religion keeps to the tracks of biology. Some extremists may happen to get off the tracks, but they will disappear unless they somehow make their way back.

Life's achievement is self-replication, self-regulation, and ho­meostasis. Hence the gods are the most persistent guarantors of order, the forceful regulators. Life needs seclusion for its own protection, building up cells to separate what is inside from the outside; the religious worldview usually adopts some privileged center to keep in touch with the divine despite chaotic or dia­bolical surroundings. If reality appears dangerous or downright hostile to life, religion calls for something beyond experience to restore the balance. Catastrophes do happen; but in the wide­spread myths of the flood the endings always tell of the survivors preparing to offer sacrifice.“⁴ Religion is basically optimistic.