http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file
   For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
  ==========================================================
[last 3 chapters of this file deleted]

"THE DIVINE SUCCESSION, A Science of Gods Old and New"
by
 Alfred de Grazia  (c) 1983

CHAPTER EIGHT

INDISPENSABLE GODS

We have progressed so far from the early chapters of this book that a
review of them is probably needed, a final commentary on the divine
succession and historical religions. Historical religions conserve the
memory of a certain time when the world was created and humans came into
being. None says that mankind always existed, or that he evolved
mechanically by random association of particles. A purposeful act took
place at a certain time. Most religions say that mankind was subsequently
destroyed and recreated. Almost always the extermination of humanity stops
short at a surviving couple or the equivalent. The subsequent homologue of
the first chaos is a subsequent set of catastrophes by flood, fire, wind,
and earth movements.

To preserve the memory of the first time of creation is a function of
rituals, liturgy, anniversaries, and sacrifices. Many religions have
strenuously sought to reproduce, short of deliberately re-annihilating
themselves, the exact circumstances of chaos and creation. They have
obsessively kept forms, practices, and words that go back to the
beginnings of all religion and the first experience with the gods.

All historical religions are therefore highly conservative and weaken
their foundations as soon as they admit deviations. The function of
inescapable and exactly repetitive practices and symbols is to relieve the
massive anxiety stored from the earliest times by confessing what happened
in those times and reliving them successfully.

What appears to be radical in religious history is reactionary.
Practitioners of the religion, wrought up beyond sufferance, find even the
rigid rites of their church insufficient to recapture the moments of chaos
and creation. Prophets, apostates, evangelizes, and orgiasts arise. So do
whirling dervishes and berserkers. They are chiliast or millennialists.
They proclaim the end of the world while demanding that everyone
acknowledge the full and immediate meaning of the creation of the world.
They prepare to die and be saved in the recapitulation of the original
catastrophic times.

All historical religions are based upon punitive gods, are self-punitive
and are punitive towards others. Gods are adjudged good to the degree to
which they refrain from destroying their creatures. Humans exist by divine
tolerance. A common word for a good person in most religions is
"god-fearing". Personal merit through skills, altruism, and dogmatic
belief and practice is sometimes, but more often not, a guarantee to a
greater of lesser extent of the gods' benevolence; never is merit a
perfect or universal guarantee. This belief in the denial to merit of its
due is not, therefore, as some think, a connivance of religion with the
envious mob.

Sacrifices are forms of punishment of the self and others to forestall,
and therefore to control, a punishment from Heaven. The concept of
representation effectively lets a partial sacrifice stand for a full
sacrifice and a sacrifice of others stand for a sacrifice of oneself.
Sacrifices are said to be gifts freely given; yet it is acknowledged that
withholding sacrifices will be followed by divine retribution. The more
valuable the sacrifice, and the more strict the rules under which
sacrifice and all other kinds of punishment occur, the more pleasing to
the gods.

Guilt is self-punishment. It is the refusal of pleasure to some negative
degree. We often knows it in its late and rather pragmatic sense: guilt
is what makes a fickle creature responsible; without guilt, personal and
social discipline would be impossible. To get relief from guilt, one
follows religious directives or some secularized substitute such as
warring for one's country or pursuing "the work ethic."

But primeval guilt originated from the terror of "the other self," the
terror produced out of the minute systemic delay of instinctive impulses.
At the same time, the heavens were turbulent and terrifying. To control
one's unbalanced self, one signaled the gods to arbitrate; and the gods
responded, saying, "Your soul is a struggle of good and evil. We, with
your cooperation, will take care that the good dominates you. You are not
sick. Be hopeful. Help is on its way." This formula, although it can be
called delusion, was a great invention. Granted the essential incurability
of human schizotypicality, it alone could lead to a manageable psychic
world.

Important anniversaries or holy days are celebrations of divine
destruction and near escape from destruction. Every truly religious
anniversary celebration is therefore ambivalently tragic and joyful.
Anniversary excesses and orgies, at both extremes of somberness and
exuberance, are nevertheless occasions for the relief of tragic memory,
more or less deeply suppressed. Anniversaries cluster around the great
cycles of the ages, which give evidence of having been common to most of
the world's cultures. Calendar diversions, not psychological changes, have
driven apart the anniversaries of different cultures; they are farther
apart in days than they are in mind. The end of the year inspires
saturnalia in many cultures. Also thus, Roman Catholic and Greek churches
mark a different Easter holiday for unessential reasons. Anniversaries
sometimes are pulled together in a given culture by their original
proximity during a cycle such as a solar year and by their psychological
resemblance. Thus, Venus (perhaps at -3437 B.P., where Before Present
=1984 A.D.) and Mars catastrophes (perhaps in -2671) occurred around March
23, close to the Spring equinox; the holidays were merged ultimately, and
are submerged at Easter time in Christendom and comparable holidays in
other cultures.

Sublimation, like ritual, is universal in religion; it pacifies,
dissembles, represents, and rationalizes the strict conditions of the
fatal times. Sublimation becomes more secular and pragmatic with the
evaporation of stored anxiety over long periods of prosperity and peace.
Disaster, deprivation, and frustration raise anxiety levels; they cause
reactions against secular sublimation occurring in the artistic, social,
political and religious spheres; these activities are attacked as
irrelevant and blasphemous.

Furthermore, all religions incorporate directives for every aspect of life
-- work, sex, property, power, relations, health, and knowledge. Humanity
was created and made deistic at the same time; the human mind is not
logical, but it is wholly occupied by a way of looking at the world as a
supernatural creation. The question of separating special values and
calling these "the province of religion" has no meaning to a mind that was
originally formed with every value at stake.

Religious practices are basically similar everywhere and have been from
the start. Permutations of practices are innumerable. The new humans
executed religious observances among their first acts. In this sense, all
the world's religions came from one religion, that of the first and only
band of humans. Then different experiences befell the different peoples.
Some were non-catastrophic experiences and these brought many minor
changes. Other experiences were catastrophic -- global and intense -- and
these reinforced the basic resemblances of religions while at the same
time prompting many minor variations. Thus ultimately, history came to
witness a similar succession of great gods ruling amidst a congeries of
ethnic religions.

One god has been replaced by another on various occasions. Almost always,
the replacements successful because of unconscious techniques of
cross-identification and rationalization. Sometimes men sought to replace
gods by deliberate choice, with or without the help of events such as
cultural amalgamation; invariably then compulsion and heavy propaganda
were employed. Such occurred when Hinduism moved over Southeast Asia, when
Christianity came to dominate the Roman World, and when Islam moved across
Asia and Africa.

The replacement of all gods by materialistic and atheistic ideology is a
special case, discoverable, in non-catastrophic times, among philosophical
schools such as the ancient cynics, among scientists and humanists of the
post-enlightenment, and among communists.

Invariably secular replacers have argued the lack of empirical proof of
the existence of gods; they have also stressed the contradictions of
ruthlessness and mercy in the concepts of god; and they have attacked the
behavior of religious establishments. As alternative behavior they have
recommended principles of brotherly love, cooperation, and mental health,
among humans, or principles of an ideally organized state that provides
enough goods to satisfy people's needs without recourse to supernatural
agents.

The major proof that such ideologies might succeed is based upon the
waning of the gods when societies possess a pragmatically optimistic
morale and are materially prosperous or believed to be potentially so, as
recently. Then the gods have seemed remote and unneeded; considerations of
logic and efficiency would appear to dictate their abandonment, removal,
and forgetting.

Even under optimal conditions of prosperity, secular morale, compulsion
and propaganda, the replacement has proceeded slowly and painfully. At the
peak of their success, the ungodly ideologies have been undermined by new
gods (e.g., Christianity in the Roman Empire), resisted successfully by
the masses (e.g., communist Poland, 1945--1983 A.D.), transformed into
secular religions of temporary duration (e.g., Roman Emperor worship, der
Fuhrer Hitler, Comrade Lenin), or transformed into pseudo-scientific
therapeutic or philosophical sects employing substitute semi-divine
agents (e.g., gurus, anthroposophists).

The fundamental obstacle to ungodliness has been the construction of the
human mind. Inasmuch as the events of creation that split the hominid
character introduced the splitters as gods, humans become god-seekers as
part of becoming human. The particular manner in which the universe was
seen for the first time implied perforce the instrumentality of divinity.
Self-awareness, formed a nature which was unceasingly prone to discover
gods.

Far from being an afterthought, the gods were a first thought. To excise
this thought, after thousands of years of experience with it, was not only
most difficult pragmatically, it was structurally impossible, at least as
long as the origins, function, and mental structure of religion were not
understood.

To forget the gods is impossible; the memory deck can only be reshuffled.
To retain self-awareness without schizotypicality is a contradiction in
terms. Human creation involved a basic reconstruction of mammalian mind;
to extinguish this essential schizotypicality would restore man as an
instinctive mammal, but is in any event now physiologically and
psychologically impossible. Symbolism as the effect of the split self,
flows naturally and cannot be obliterated. By the same logic and dynamics,
treating symbolically with both the "other self" and the "outsider-others"
must inevitably result in projectional thought, that is, treating the
"outside other" with the same mechanism and feeling that the self utilizes
in dealing with its "own other."

All of this process is transactional and the transaction is of the essence
of human being. Therefore a group mode of projection, a group
communication, is inherent in the individual-social complex. Thence,
naturally, whatever is unanswered and questionable becomes a matter for
resort to authority -- that is, a prevailing, preponderant group opinion.
Since the group is forever under historical and existential stress, it is
forever seeking authority and incapable of receiving satisfactory answers
to its questions without a symbolic, abstract and animate referent that
provides solution. Thus it happens that, if humans exist, god exists. God
is the closing of the circle -- both question and answer. But so
inextricable are the question and answer that only logical artifice can
distinguish and designate the two.

Man's need to control the terrible and the terror causes him to invent
gods. Nowadays, if one were asked how to control or stop an advancing
comet, he would dismiss the possibility, and say that we must await it. He
is not prepared to undertake all the actions that ancient man had ready
just for such approaching catastrophes -- propitiation, sacrifice, ritual,
saturnalia, "going on the warpath." Nevertheless, as catastrophe
approaches, at first slowly and then rapidly, and then hysterically, the
modern human will act like his ancestors, including the excesses of guilt
for not having foreseen the deserved end of all folly. He will draw upon
the dwindling and remaining reserves of the "old time religion."

If the fossil voices telling us of the nature of the gods and of the rules
for man's behavior respecting the gods are distorted and incorrect, and
though they are not valid and reliable guides, yet these voices have told
us things of positive value. They have given us foundations of history.
They have recounted the basic facts of existence repeatedly. They have
conjured existences differing from ours. They have in effect performed
innumerable experiments with the allegedly divine from which we can learn
what not to do religiously, and to a lesser extent what to do.

Perhaps the greatest lesson they have taught us (by negative inference) is
that the religion of today and tomorrow should not be sought in the
religion of the past: that humans, until they reach some certain level of
perfection cannot be trusted to have known and arrived at the nature of
the gods. Whenever historical man has said "Let us change our religion,"
(even if he does so in the name of preserving the old religion) he is
saying "We were wrong about god and religion and it is up to us now to
find a new way to god and a new religion."

The gods have retired into new forms, but they still operate through the
busy humans whom the poet Rilke called "the bees of the invisible." The
gods are still everywhere and are not as remote as our scientific texts
would have us believe. They are in astrology, in magic, in
fortune-telling; they fly to the scenes of disaster; they augment the
forces of authority; they heal and console; they scare; they make anxious;
they set the rituals for a multitude as they have done since the times of
Ouranos. They assume their own negation: for they argue with themselves in
Natural Law, Bureaucracy, in Dogmatic Materialism, in Reified Words, in
Mummified Heroes, in Times and Worlds without End. They let themselves be
molded into One and the One obliges his necessities by becoming Many.
Beyond all else, they stand at ease waiting for Armageddon and the Day of
Judgment. Then they will don their armor and gather their hosts.

Although they have retired it still takes rare courage to contemplate all
of their continuing manifestations and to resist the invention of new
negations. There is yet nowhere else to go and few who would follow.

By skimming along on the thin ice of the cerebral cortex or by
mathematical astrophysics or metaphysics or another such exercise, the
gods can be sublimated. Dumb bestiality may be equally functional. We
think that of all ways of facing them, the best is to look at them
everywhere, contemplate their every manifestation, anticipate their
reappearance, but do no more. If there is any question of human madness,
it is erased when one pretends to be divine. Our human destiny is an open
question. We deny our humanity if we try to close it. We belittle
ourselves if we plead with the gods to answer the question at any cost.

Whenever gods and religious practices have been abandoned, put aside,
forgotten, changed consciously or unconsciously, those who made such
changes are saying to us their descendants, "Do not think that our
ancestors, or us, or even you, will have the answer. There will be New
Testaments without end." We, the present generation, are told that we are
not the first, nor the last, but a truth-seeking figure in the series of
forevers until the day when somehow, somewhere, we shall be perfect. At
which time, we might, if we dared, claim omniscience, omnipotence, and the
fullness of virtue.

In hastening to accuse traditional religion of claiming falsely absolute
truth and morality, we often fail to see in the seeming absoluteness its
inherent self-confessed contradiction. Just as psychiatry has proven that
excesses of anger, self-destructiveness and aggression have ordinarily
come out of self-doubt and self-hatred, so we can see in the madness and
excesses of historical religious behavior the same psychological sources
of self-doubt and self-hatred transformed into dogma, authority, bigotry,
punition and guilt in the name of absolute achievement and arrival at the
nirvana of perfection. Yet even while civilizations and peoples are being
destroyed in the name of absolute truth, newly arrived at, a class of
readers or priests of the absolute are contradicting the behavior in
gushes of explanations and interpretations of the ways of the gods. As the
Hindu Brahmin calculates, the warrior slays. As Anselm seeks proof, King
Arthur crusades.

The most important question of religion is not how to eradicate gods, but
to establish gods at one with humanity and the human soul. For there can
be no logical or moral objection to the concept of and belief in gods in
themselves; again the human being, insofar as he knows any happiness, has
known it in activities of a sublime sort that are inextricable from the
divine. A formula and model is required, which is physically possible, and
which will forego conflicts of the self, among humans, and between devils
and gods. Specifications are: a) sufficient relief from fearful stress to
permit the search for a new formula; b) a search for physico-chemical
change agents (whether mutational or continuously operative) that would
eliminate terroristic memories, with all that subtends from such in the
way of self destructiveness and other-destructiveness without damaging,
and optimally while promoting, the affectional and inventive facilities of
humans; c) and, while the search goes on, and anticipating that the search
may be unsuccessful, the invention of social strategies (therapies and
institutions) that will hold the conflicts in abeyance indefinitely.

Secularism is a negative counterattack against religion, justifiable as a
restraint against malpractices known to everyone. Generally, however,
humankind is not in a state to abandon religion and the gods. At best it
is capable of achieving a concerted view of an overall divinity and the
sacredness of existence. It can borrow from and encroach upon science.
Great good would ensue, provided that the concerted belief could work its
way into the aims and practices of myriad rituals of human lives.

Part Two

THEOTROPY

Whatever its failings, past and present, mankind continues to pursue
religion. Even when most intent upon relieving himself of its falsehoods,
constraints, and burdens, he exudes the divine and the supernatural, and
these coagulate into habits and practices definably religious.

There are three causes of this incessant and probably inevitable
theotropy. One lies in the delusional structure of the human mind, which
must exist in the supernatural no matter how it may transform its
perception into operations of abstractions and logic.

A second cause of religion rests with the potent limitations of mankind,
who has learned that much more than himself and his activities occupies
the universe, a something that may be unmeasurably greater in its goals
and influence.

The third cause of theotropy is the human's need to expand his sphere of
inquiry. One cannot rest where one is; one must forever seek to expand --
in effect, then, to divinize oneself. No ending in defeat is allowable, no
surrender to entropy. Theotropy, as much or more than entropy, is the rule
of the universe.

In this inescapable commitment to religion there is little which connects
to the problems of ordinary ethics. Goods and bads are the bickerings of
passengers on a train rushing through the night. And the consolations of
religion are the resolutions of these bickerings in all the compartments
of all the classes of all the cars. Religion here is peaceful
accommodation which rarely succeeds, and never fully succeeds.

The real religion, or call it theotropy, does less for one than one longs
for, but ever more for one and one's kind towards an indeterminate
destination. We do not know where we are going, but we are making better
speed.

CHAPTER NINE

SACRAL VS. SECULAR MAN

Any old religion is likely to have a complete life-program, guaranteed to
give satisfaction. It will include answers to all problems that arise,
with a counseling service from birth to death. This is no mean
achievement, but rather a work of unceasing genius characterizing all ages
and all cultures, and therefore thousands of designs and operative
systems. Our admiration of the astronomical universe pales in the light of
universal religiousness. Indeed, if one is hungry for proofs of the
existence of ultimate design and intelligent gods, here is fertile ground
to plow.

But why, out of all this experience has there not occurred one religion of
all times and places for all people such that a model human being would
lead a happy life? Why should not one formula have been discovered? Why
all the changes, conflicts, misery? In replacing the instinctive existence
of other creatures, why could not man rapidly invent just that proper set
of behaviors that would satisfy the respective and combined needs of his
human mechanisms and culminate in expressions of satisfactory existence?
Is there some practical impossibility, the fault of the external world? Or
is there some inherent contradiction of the mechanisms of human nature?

Let us set up a model of religious citizen (not a leader) and inquire
whether he should be happy, and, if not, why not. We call him "sacral
man," not because he is sacred, but because he believes a great many
phenomena and actions are sacred. He sacralizes.

A thorough moral defense of religion from the standpoint of its expression
through sacral man has not appealed to modern writers. Such old and
religiously circumscribed works as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress will hardly
do for these days, when the field instruments of sociology, biology,
psychology, economics and political science need to be orchestrated for
the purpose. Available are negative critiques of ritual and assaults upon
the supernatural. But where are the moral scientific (as opposed to merely
sociological) studies of the Baptist and the Secularist living on the same
street, multiplied a thousandfold to cover the world scene?

The ideal sacral person is born of religious parents, is baptized at an
early age, and attends schools whose curriculum and teachers are of same
belief. He or she hears of the gods, and experiences religious rituals, at
an early age, so that by the time of receiving catechism he is already
identified with supernatural beings and is pleased to learn that they have
played the most important role in all major and many minor events of the
history of his culture. Well before receiving formal religious
instruction, he has been rewarded and punished in the name of the gods,
and (he is convinced) by them directly. He knows this latter to be true,
because he has had indirect and accidental rewards and punishments at the
hands of what "must have been god." He has a fairly concrete impression of
at least one god, the Great God, anthropomorphic but dressed in ritual
clothing. He knows of many instances in which God has intervened in the
current lives of persons dear or near to him, and to many others that have
been the objects of his affection or the attention of his closely
identified mentors.

Following upon years of catechism, he can explain events by himself to the
satisfaction of members of his religion, and possesses a general history
of his group and of mankind from their earliest creation by his gods. He
can sacralize readily, that is, impute sacred meaning to any event,
natural or human, consistent with his religion. His religious mentors have
long since informed him of the political climate of his larger culture
respecting his religion, so that he can know what to expect from strangers
in and outside of his culture.

He knows how to invoke the gods by prayers and rites, even only by
mentation and, perhaps with a poor sense of statistics, believes his score
of successes far outnumbers his score of failures. He enjoys a logic that
employs heavily the formula, "This follows That because God willed it;"
"God must have willed This" (where `This' is an event with significance
and within the expected scope of God's actions -- love--death, etc., or so
unusual as to be the work of God); "This other cannot be, because God
would not will it."

He questions authority, since he is early forewarned of its religious
untrustworthiness. He pursues a line of secular work regularly and
responsibly, as an offshoot of religious ritual behavior. He understands
readily the news of the larger world, for there is a general correlation
between his political and religious friends and enemies. By virtue of his
early training in displacement and projection, he can readily conceive of
the larger society, even the whole world's people, within the sphere of
and dependent upon his gods. His sources of mundane authority, if not
religious, partake of the respect, authenticity, and reliability granted
religious authority. Births, marriages, accidents, careers, illnesses, and
deaths of all with whom he identifies -- who are part of him -- are
handled by old, well-known procedures. He is probably better able to
confront a personal disaster by appropriate sacred explanations, instead
of trying to cope with it independently as for instance, does the
character Charlotte, in Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer, who,
highly secularized but also fearful of self-examination, slips into
catatonic denial and mourning when it develops that her daughter was
pursuing another life, an alter ego, of political criminality. For sacral
man, ways and limits of mourning are well-set. Reactions and decisions are
pre-fabricated.

He can feel secure that all happens as part of a sacred history, elevated
to celestial levels of meaning, and contemplates and suffers his own death
in the same frame of mind. Since he identifies with gods, his time scales
for personal achievement and for the expected future history of the world,
including even rewards and punishments for actors on the present scene,
are celestial as well as according to the secular calendar. He is
confident of indirect and unknown measures being taken on his behalf by
supernatural agencies.

From early childhood, he has been god-fearing. By satisfying the gods, he
is exempted from much fear of men and accidents: "If I please God, God
will take care of me;" "When God calls, I am ready to go." He realizes
very early in life that he has problems of self-control; he projects the
unruly selves onto the deities, and thus can "bargain with them at arm's
length. Self-hate becomes devil-hate. When his psychic system becomes
well established, he acquires self-confidence.

He has several persisting problems. Some are due to his inherent structure
as a human being. Others are owing to his uniqueness when confronted by
what must, after all, be a general formula of his religion for handling
all humans. There occur also conflictful features of his larger culture,
and accidents and natural disasters. Thus his religion, so holy to him,
may be disliked by other groups with whom he must deal. He (and his
group) may have such consistently bad luck with nature that active
punitive measures are continually taken -- prayers, sacrifices, guilt,
fasting and abstentions. Aggressive behavior against outsiders is
sometimes called for by prophecy and divination: "God needs help in
punishing his enemies."

Furthermore, he may be genetically a "difficult character" for his
religious institutions, a "nervous type" uncontrollably impatient with
ritual, a person whose parents were a little deviant and unwittingly made
him more deviant from the religious norms of belief and behavior.
Guilt-feelings, self destructiveness, suspiciousness, extravagant
behavior (aggressiveness, asceticism, etc.) may result.

Finally his modes of logic may interfere with what he wants to do with
himself and the world. If the gods manage so much, he is left to cope with
little, and may see little need for pragmatic learning. He may, by
continuous resort to his religious logic, become stupid and retarded in
contributing to and gaining from the larger culture, where different
logics are called for, such as "This cannot occur without That" or "To
obtain, That, do This and no more." He may suffer from a great many
floating opinions, unanchored to mundane cause and effect, good for
ritual, useless for practical life, whether dealing with people or tools.

Regarding these issues as a whole, one large risk seems to confront model
religious citizens. The near impossibility of a general religious system
being all things to all people all the time causes universal individual
problems within the religion. It also causes divisions into priesthood and
parishioners, mystics and ritualists, managers and managed, and so on,
which aggravate the insecurities of all affected by the divisions, that
is, of all believers. Ritual resembles instinctive behavior and may cover
most aspects of life except revelation. No religion exists without a place
for mystic revelation. Yet revelation is the opposite of ritual. Somehow
every church must give birth to and nurture this hero (or assassin).

In addition, every religion exists within at least a partially secularized
society; even in the most simple tribal society, where all seems to be
definitively sacralized, there is an every day need to confront and
exploit nature, to use tools variously, to deal with outsiders. Conditions
change; religion is conditioned; religions change. Every ritual change is
a slap in the face of the religion, and face-saving tactics are numerous.

I am not taking present Western European society as typical of religious
settings, for this would be too easy. Change and secularization are
rampant. I am trying here, as elsewhere in this study, to employ the most
conservative type of analysis, and to avoid taking advantage of the many
loop-holes of speculation and illustrations that religious history and
philosophy ordinarily profit from.

I am asking consideration of relatively changeless culture, while
asserting that there is never a state of changelessness. And so, within
and outside the model citizen, change is happening and causes him lifetime
anxieties which the religion cannot possibly control by scripture or
rites.

A calculus of felicity is not difficult to imagine. The greater the
stresses within the church and in the relations (direct and indirectly
effective) between the church and the environment, the greater become the
anxieties and uncontrollable outbursts of our model citizen; the greater
then the changes within his groups as well.

In none of this discussion have we spoken of the moral values of the
activity, except we have presumed a kind of dolce vita religiosa for the
citizen. We have not asked how many orphans has he sheltered, how many
cannibal feasts has he enjoyed, or how productive has he been, nor have we
made any quantitative gauges of his feelings of nearness to god.

It seems that we must always come up to the point where we are saying
"What his religion happens to say is good, is in fact good." whereas we
know "in our hearts and minds" that this cannot be. There has to be more
than this to justify a religion on moral grounds. Is there some
metaphysical morality that can weed out bad from good religions, bad from
good citizens?

Or, perhaps, a model of secular man can reveal, by way of contrast, a
morality overshadowing religious morality. Let us see. As with sacral man,
we shall be taking an optimistic view of his development; the model is
optimistically biased. Here now the person we have in mind begins life as
the child of parents and in a group who disbelieve in the supernatural and
practice no rites in the name of gods or spirits. They point out to the
infant actions and persons whose effects are good or bad. The child is
taught that nothing exists unless it can be experienced by him self and
proven to his authorities, for he has these, too, in his parents and
attendants. He is trained to reason pragmatically rather than to practice
religious rituals or seek revelations.

He is ritualized, but in the name of necessary training to achieve good or
logically necessary effects. By reward and punishment he is taught to seek
or avoid objects, persons and activities that he is likely to encounter.
He is discharged from training when his own sense of right and wrong
appears to rule him adequately.

He learns that his society is benign in its intentions toward him, behaves
justly toward him and others, and protects him from himself, potential
assailants, and foreign enemies. If he participates voluntarily in his
own training, he will acquire skills that the economic system and the
governments will welcome and pay him to use.

Ritualized or routine training is justified in terms of its consequences.
As the British Statesman Gladstone put it (1876) in the years when the
concept was becoming current, "The Secularist... does not of necessity
assert anything but the positive and exclusive claims of the purposes, the
enjoyments, and the needs, presented to us in the world of sight and
experience."

There is only body, not soul (except metaphorically), and no afterlife to
look forward to or worry about. He may enjoy fictional stories about the
supernatural; he may pretend "for fun" that any phenomenon is unreal. He
observes a number of secular holidays arising out of political, social,
and heroic events.

His respect for scientific method (empiricism, facts, logic, experiment,
control of the environment) is high; he claims to believe only in its
application and findings, whether in the human or the natural realm. He
expects a continuous upgrading of his life, partly because of a general
upsurge in health and living standards. His feelings are not rigid nor
profound. He expects every person to do his duty, and does not accept
authority without explanation in material, empirical, and logical terms.
He seeks generally to belong to groups whose leaders are elective.

What will be our felicity calculus for such a model citizen? He may be on
the whole as "happy" as the religious citizen. The word "happy" would mean
a usual mild euphoria, which, we must admit, may come genetically, or as a
result of brute affection generously granted the infant being. Still, this
affection may be tendered by his identification with "Infant Jesus" in
certain cultures, which would therefore allow an intrusion of religion
even into the recesses of infancy.

What he loses of the security in the perceived protection of the gods, he
makes up for by an increase of security owing to the perceived way in
which changing explanations go along with changing events. His defenses
stop at the grave, but his hopes of increased beneficial effects of
science for himself and his human identifiees are greater.

He has fewer judges of his actions, and perceives fewer entities to
please. He will, however, be more frequently and poignantly disappointed
with humans, because their conduct is not mediated through his gods, and
strikes him directly and rudely. His only hope is other humans. This
increases his load of fear and anxiety, and probably this will be heavier
than the fear-load of religious man.

His temperament may also be more mercurial. On one hand, his life offers
less inspiration and may be insipid, while on the other hand he may strain
for sensory stimuli and orgiastic behavior. He is not likely to be less
aggressive or less vicious than religious man.

His morality is no more explainable than that of religious man. He simply
holds it on natural grounds: "That is the way people behave when they are
not driven by superstition or authority."

The secularization of modern times may well have had its likenesses at
certain times and among certain groups of the Golden Age of Saturn, the
Confucian period of China, the Middle Bronze Age in the Near East, the
Classical age of Greece, the pagan Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and
other eras. The clash between the religious and the secular is prominently
displayed. We have an idea that a large section of the elite, at least, in
these eras was a disbeliever, a shopper for ideas, luxuriating in freedoms
of choice among supernatural views and between cultism and materialism.

Here may be the difference -- freedom of choice against a bound-up
cosmos, not secularism versus supernaturalism or religion or sacralism. We
cannot be certain at all that the secular man has ever been really
secular, rather than merely a disintegrated sacred man.

The modern secular man was emerging in the Renaissance. Machiavelli was
living at the same time as Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491--1556), founder
of the Jesuit order. Loyola, unlike the author of the Prince, who moved
fully and confidently into the modern disintegrated secular society, was
seized by the need to keep the total image of Jesus under control and in
mind, and to capture and reintegrate any escaping impressions and
thoughts. Roland Barthes has grasped the essence of Loyola's mission and
procedures, as spelled out in Loyola's book of Spiritual Exercises.

 "The obsessional character of the Exercises blazes forth in the
accounting passion transmitted to the exercitant: as soon as an object,
intellectual or imaginary, appears, it is broken up, divided, numbered.
The accountancy is obsessional not only because it is infinite, but above
all because it engenders its own errors... [Every failure induces,
requires, more accounting.] Everything is immediately divided,
sub--divided, classified, numbered off in annotations, meditations, weeks,
points, exercises, mysteries, etc. [That is,] The Exercises can be
conceived as a desperate struggle against the dispersal of images which
psychologically, they say, marks mental experience and over which -- every
religion agrees -- only an extremely rigorous method can triumph."

The whole aim and process is a totalitarian domination of the mind for the
purpose of putting oneself into a position to ask God questions and to
receive passively the answers. All vagaries were returned to the Source.
There is no denying the social impact of the Jesuit method and practice.
Allowing that traditional Catholicism continued inertially, Jesuitry
become a great active sword that held much of secularism at bay while
causing it to involute.

Evidence abounds that secular man is actually a form of sacral man with
Jesuitical control. What is sacred possesses for its experiencer an aura
of the holy, of awe, of fear, of divine arbitrariness, of supernatural
animation. Sacral man in his extreme expression sees the cosmos and all
its details as sacred; there are few of such men, of course. The extremely
secular man sees everything as void of the supernatural and fully
accessible to the senses; there are very few of such men, too.

Let us provide some categories of behavior that might be regarded as
sacred or at least non-sensible, to which most so called secular men
adhere. For one thing, they believe in many myths, myths of their descent
and families, of their country, of the history of their locale, of wars
and voyages. More, and now we make a few specific allusions applying to
some, by way of illustration, they hold myths about GM, GE, IBM, their
President and political leaders, Albert Einstein, Hollywood, the Mafia,
the flag ("Old Glory"), Harvard University, the "Spirit of Saint Louis,"
the Philadelphia Eagles Football Team, Bellevue Hospital, the
"Monopolies," "Justice," "free will," "reason," "truth," "nature," snakes,
elephants, diets, and so on and on.

What do we mean by associating such people first with myth, then with the
supernatural, hence with the sacred? The myth has in common with the
sacred a non-empirical aura of "emotion" or feeling attaching itself to a
non-existent or otherwise psychologically incomplete perception such
that, whatever it is, it would not recognizably exist unless it were
mythified. Interna tional Business Machines (IBM) does not exist as
entity, but only as hundreds of millions of mental and physical operations
of people, partly related to machines. But "it" is "mighty," "global,"
"venerable," "rich," "progressive," "losing money this year," "in need of
revitalization," and so on.  One is "loyal" to it, "depends" upon it,
"accepts its policies," "questions it sincerity," "sues it," tries to
"break it up," "ignores its complaints" and so on. Lawyers hop around on
"its giant body like fleas on an elephant," "defending it," "justifying
it," and of course "living off of it."

A great many people derive a feeling of the supernatural and sacred form
when functioning in the corporate ambiance. The Chief Executive of the
great Schlumberger multinational enterprise said recently that a
corporation nowadays must learn from the Japanese that "we have the
responsibility that religion used to have."

Are these behaviors and beliefs any less religious, say, than the behavior
of believers in a volcano religion? The typical secularist worships a
dozen such volcanoes; he is polytheistic; he believes in the supernatural
and practices rites in regard to it. I do not argue here the consequences:
this mythicized aggregate produces millions of hard objects for people;
what does the religious aggregate produce but "useless objects" such as
church buildings and a superabundant "software?"

We cannot maintain that secular man is less superstitious than sacral man.
Does he more often believe "13 is an unlucky number" or carry a rabbit's
foot for luck? Encyclopedias of false beliefs and superstitions are
available, but they do not speak to this issue. Superstition is
sacralization gone wild, uncontrolled by formal religious authority or
science. There is very little difference, too, between superstition and
the "false cause" of an anxiety; worrying over the number 13 is not much
different in cause and effect than worrying that the airplane in which one
is sitting will plunge to earth. Secular man has a plethora of both types
of illnesses.

Inseparable from myth in practice are symbols and fictions. Language is
but the greatest set of all fictions. That it is magical is provable in
the behavior of humans in regard to it from their beginnings up to the
present. Words lead a life of their own, in the world of words, distinct
in part from the objects to which they ordinarily refer. Modern
secularists use words freely; a candy is "divine;" every accident is a
"catastrophe." No matter; that the world turns with an energy of 1037 ergs
of energy does not deny to a leaf wafting down from a tree its own erg.
What we have in secularism is a disintegration of the sacred cosmos into
infinite particularistic ergs of the supernatural, but at the same time a
denial of the cosmic supernatural.

Words merge into symbols, which may be words, pictures, displays, but
also contain the impact of sets of words, without integration with the
grammar of the language. A symbol contains a stimulus to arrive at an
attitude or predisposition of mind or behavior. The symbol of the cross
has been found throughout the world from the time of the earliest gods up
to the present, denoting the chief god or a reference and extension of the
god. Wherever a cross occurs, the supernatural does as well; in the
ancient world, stones of Hermes were put up at crossroads. Many symbols
are likewise ancient. Some of them, like the cross, find their way into
the secular crests of noble families, secular institutions, the trademarks
of modern corporations, and the escutcheons of government agencies.

Such modern references are very weak, it is said; this is true, and art
designers and public relations experts will invent trademarks and other
symbols for a price, using scientific techniques for determining how
readily the public will recognize and accept the symbol. Still,
unauthorized use of the trade-mark can incite a law-suit for millions of
dollars; something sacred must be conveyed. It contains more than a single
erg of the supernatural.

So it is with fictions, which are of several kinds, including the words,
myths and symbols referred to already. We need only to mention that others
remain, and also contain qualities of the supernatural, and they are
continuously and necessarily employed by the secular mind. The "average"
is one of the most useful concepts of science, but it does not exist. Very
often sought, like the Golden Fleece, once found, it leads to marvelous
gains. That "everyone knows the law" is a fiction treated as fact in a
court of law; "ignorance of the law is no excuse for an offense."

Science, law, literature, drama, and music constitute a veritable
fictional world that no amount of secularism can eradicate. Secular man
can only claim that these are all piecemeal tools, that he "uses" them,
that they do not make him a believer in the supernatural, and that he can
understand me when I tell him that these are unreal. But this must be a
very special secular man, not an ordinary one, for the ordinary one does
not see the dizzying use of hundreds of tools; he is used by them,
attaches all kinds of fleeting supernatural associations to them, and does
not understand well at all when I speak of them as unreal.

So the ideal, extreme, purely secular man will try to squeeze out of life
all that is fictional, we suppose, if it ever ended in anything but the
most mad hermeticism, with various rituals for exorcising fictions, in a
direct confrontation of the real. Pure secularism would be a life of
instinctive stimulus-response: wordless, thoughtless, myopic, and
solitary. Wrung out of existence would be the arts, politics, law, the
market-place, love, human relations, and science itself, including both
the conception of all these and all of their ritual accompaniments.

Since he must himself employ the supernatural and its rituals, secular
man, we see, does not so much want to destroy religion as he does to
particularize it, to make it pantheistic and kaleidoscopic. He wants to
keep all his options. He wants full freedom to pick up and lay down any
iota of the supernatural or any practice connected with it. He is like the
sophisticated Roman of 2000 years ago who also wanted to pick up and lay
down any god or rite as he pleased. He does not wish to be part of an all
embracing and integrated cosmic religious system, not even to be reminded
that everything in the world and in culture is tied to everything else,
even secularly, if not sacrally.

Religion as such threatens his options. He wants to freely disperse his
affects and attentions. He wants to be free to change them. He admires the
composer who builds idiosyncratic tonal works or the sculptor whose
"Composition in plastic, number 18" pretends to communicate with nothing
or nobody. Just so, he wants individually to compose and recompose the
vignettes of his life.

There is accordingly a strong trend toward the disintegration of morality.
Morality, too, is piecemeal in secularism. Each item is judged right or
wrong by itself. We note this in pragmatism where the consequences of an
act determine its morality. We note it in American law where social
consequences tend to be the measure of a crime and its punition. We note
it in the press, where instantaneity and shocks push aside moral
priorities. We note it in democratic politics, where the politicians must,
and willingly do, fix the plight of whoever is complaining most, generally
ignoring the "good of the whole," scales of values, or long-term
considerations: "The wheel that squeaks gets the grease."

Still, the supernatural of everyday life in modern society is not enough
religion for a great many secularists and they solicit new religions,
inventing them, so they think, actually "reinventing the wheel" time and
time again. These are by no means to be dismissed; they are heroic
endeavors to join science and traditional religion, to worship the Divine
and the Good without reference to the succession of gods, to build
peaceful humanistic communities, to make contact with presumably
intelligent beings in outer space, to achieve sacred communities with new
rituals that dignify rather than abase their members, and to build a
satisfying non-materialistic life around ideals. To ridicule them is by
implication to ridicule ourselves. (To ridicule ourselves, on the other
hand, is not far from our minds, as we mistake one turn of the road after
another; we feel always on the brink of absurdity, that the whole
enterprise of penetrating and ordering religion is surreal.)

We hear of physical therapy communities, where diet, exercise, and love
build new souls, and of group therapy communities where, in one case, one
learns to love oneself and, in another case, to give up selfish love of
oneself to love others. We learn of astrological networks of believers who
adjust their lives to the elaborated meaning of planetary motions and
conjunctions.

There are communities and networks of haute couture, work, skills,
fraternity, "rock and roll," sexual practices, diet, outer space
communications, sports, and many other special areas that go far beyond
occasional meetings and informational exchanges into the dense
supernatural and ritual affairs of religious cults. They are voluntary.
Participation may be brief and intense; it is for that period sacred,
supernatural and ritualistic.

We begin to see an overall pattern of the people of a secular society;
they live amidst many intense but sporadic religious episodes, where their
minds are fully occupied in recapitulating birth, baptism, initiation,
marriage, priesthood and death in brief compass, and in between these
episodes, they float and paddle in a swirling world of secular symbols,
legends, myths, and fictions. Are they happy? Have they found Truth and
Morality? Once again, I would warn against a hasty denial. What is
"happy"? Who is happy in this world? "Happy" may be a little thing, quite
evasive, quite accidental and lucky, though subjectively grand in its
effects.

As for "moral", that, too, may be the accident of a soul that is bumped
and tossed about like flotsam, until finally jettisoned onto the shores of
goodness.

CHAPTER TEN

ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL

After a brief military campaign in the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands in
1982, memorial services for the dead of Great Britain and Argentina were
held at the Cathedral of Canterbury, England. To some of the British, the
idea of memorializing the Argentine dead was already irksome. Then going
beyond ceremony, the Archbishop in his sermon deplored warfare, asserting
that it proved the failure of a foreign policy. Whereupon he was verbally
chastised by Prime Minister Thatcher and like-minded representatives of
English jingoism for not having made it clear to the assembly that the
British were righteous and victorious in the eyes of The God of the
Established Church of England. Reasonably the one party might complain, of
what use is the State Church if it does not support the State's wars? Just
as reasonably, the Archbishop might say: Of what use is a religion if it
cannot teach peace to politicians?

The peacemakers often go unblessed by the religions, too. Mirza Ahmad
Sohrab, in his grand tome, The Bible of Mankind, compares the great world
religions to the strings of a single harp each of which gives forth its
own dominant note, while the harmonious blending of all produces a
symphony of music. The dominant note of Hinduism is the divine presence
pervading nature; of Buddhism, remuneration; of Zoroastrianism, purity; of
Confucianism, filial piety; of Taoism, the path to reason; of Judaism,
righteousness; of Christianity, love; of Islam, submission, and of the
Bahai Cause, universality, "In their efforts to admit and confess all
humanistic doctrines of religions, the Bahai have been frequently
persecuted by god fearing believers, and, even while the British were
wrestling with Christian "love," the Bahai were being dispossessed and
killed, allegedly for religious and statal treason, by Iranian Muslim
practicing "submission" to Allah.

Secularists frequently pronounce religious slogans for lack of a
substantial ethics of their own. Moral issues often intimidate
secularists, too. There is a sacredness about them, a confusion, a threat,
a secret, a god buried somewhere among them, a priest ready to pull one in
like a fish if one takes the smallest bait.

There used to be a major area of study called "the moral sciences." It is
defunct. In turn, every field of the natural sciences, social sciences and
humanities has tried to extricate itself from moral responsibility and
qualify for the name of science. Even practical schools of business,
medicine, dentistry, law, agricul ture, engineering, architecture,
nursing, social welfare, etc., claim to provide an objective education;
they have achieved the logically impossible feat of inculcating in their
students an abundance of the best ways of doing things, while pretending
not to consider good from bad, right from wrong.

We know this to be nonsense. All applied science most exhibit preferences
for lines of conduct. Scientific method is itself a moral system. And just
think of the vast proportion of alumni of schools who confess, with a
quaver in their voices, to all that they know and owe to their alma mater.
Somebody is teaching somebody something in the way of morals! What is
happening?

Is this hypocrisy? Are the schools and students, the society and its
people, claiming one thing and practicing another? Yes. They are using a
technique that places upon an unreachable, untouchable level certain
problems such as god, religion, and the supernatural, along with the
associated problem of the ultimate sources of morality and their
justification; they take up all other problems as only of instrumental
importance, as problems of means, not ends, as problems whose solutions
can be taught to burghers, brigands, and beggars alike.

Whereupon a society becomes secular, segmentalized and instrumental (hence
exploitative) in its behavior as well as its morals. From many a segment
are cast many grappling hooks for the larger morality, some of which catch
hold and from here and there spring the many varieties of religious
practices characteristic of the secularized society.

Where there is not a grappling for religion there is often a contradictory
pair of behaviors: the one a specialized nose-to-the-ground empiricism,
the other a hopelessly dispersed attention. The former was discussed in
the last chapter as an aspect of secularism and occurs again for treatment
in the next; the latter requires a few more words here. Religion generally
focuses attention onto a few, high-priority objects of value; secularism
dissipates attention.

Attention is itself a value imposed on whatever is attended to. It is a
preference for its object, selected out of all potential substitutes as
objects of attention. Attention is instinctively determined in non-human
creatures and modified by parental and group training in many species; the
ambiant force impinging on the creature also helps to determine the
objects of its attention. As with other creatures, man's attention in part
is a valuing of the object, elementary, without training, without
justification.

Very few persons will even admit that their valuational life is already
half described when their attention spectrum is drawn up. But so it is,
pathetic as it may be.

They would like to believe that attention is a real, natural, automatic
experience, about which they promptly cogitate. This is Cartesian
rationalism, for does he not offer as a first principle of his Discourse
on Method, cogito ergo sum, "I sense that I perceive, therefore I am,"
and, further, "I perceive because I want, and therefore am."

So, straightaway with birth, we fix the infant, if he had a mind to
wander, upon the right, proper, goods things -- the nipple, the nurse, the
movements of the nurse, her voice, his bowels moving, his eyes lightening,
his muscles flexing, all following after the not so good things -- his
wonderment at himself, a loss of his boundaries, a panicky feeling of loss
of his warm pool, stunned dissolution exposed into infinite space.

Suppose his family to be church-goers. He is habituated to church as soon
as he can be counted upon to be quiet most of the time there. Time passes,
and one day, when he hears, "We are getting ready for church," he displays
a mind of his own. "Why?" "Because..." "Because of what?" "Because it's
Sunday." "Why do we go to church on Sunday?" "To worship God." And so on.
It is almost entirely a morality of means, that carries him from one step
to the next, not "really explaining."

Sometimes this begins, or he is catechized, even if he asks no questions.
"Why should I worship God?" "God gives us our blessings in life." "Like
ice-cream?" "Yes." And like your mother, and father, and bed to sleep in,
and food to eat, to train him properly, the trainer is usually clever
enough to number only things which the trainee likes. But there is small
pay-off for the trainer unless he slips into the list of blessings things
that he, the trainer likes. So they go to church to assure the blessings
that each wants. They already have different religions, in a sense.

Still later on, the child has a habit of church-going, as a result of
which, his authorities are happy to observe, he feels better with himself,
when he attends, and guilty if he misses church. He knows people there,
and may even enjoy an occasional service. Unfortunately for his educators,
he now changes, we presume. He is bored and fidgety in church; people
scowl at him. He does not get the blessings he especially wants. He is
drawn to television, and wants to play baseball with the kids who do not
go to church. Here are better rewards in his mind; though he has no doubt
of God, God's command to "Worship Me in My House," does not get to him
forcefully enough. He begins an argument with his educators that will go
on for years.

What can be said of morality in this simple story? There is a great deal
of moral training and moral response. The church and its religion are part
of, and will always be part of, the child's life. Unless he undergoes
heavy secularization he will posses hundreds of ethical views that are
connected directly and indirectly with his religion. Almost none of them
has come about through autonomous action, reasonable analysis, a survey of
cases. The morals collect upon him like fuzz upon a rubbed glass rod.

I am saying merely what dozens of writers have said before me. With regard
to practically all those who have practiced religion throughout history
and today, the whole of religion may be regarded as a generally effective
machine to structure a collection of behaviors and bring about their
enforcement. The key to the ramshackle edifice is the reduction of cosmic,
existential self-fear.

For all that religion has dominated the human world from its beginnings,
its ethical results have been paltry. The one thing that is supposed to
justify religion is precisely the thing that religion does worst, making
the human a satisfactory ethical creature.

But it must be said that religion has forever assumed the most difficult
of all tasks: supplying human existence with an objective morality. The
problem is multiplex: how to deal with one self, one's inner relations;
how to deal with others; how to treat with the animate and inanimate world
of nature. In the end, one is supposed to be able to say "ought"
confidently, to live according to the same "ought," and to be happy. In
all of this, one's morality ought to be consonant with the real world and
its operating principles, science, that is. Hence, morality is the
governance of behavior by rules for preferring and achieving certain human
and natural relations and states of being.

Unfortunately the simplest, most general rules crack under the stress of
psychology and anthropology. "Don't drive while drunk" is a reasonable
rule. It should readily illustrate what Emmanuel Kant meant when he
propounded his famous dictum: "Act only on that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Yet Kant's rule, though it might work to his personal satisfaction, might
bring about continual disasters if it were allowed to justify others, such
as many suicidal and dying persons who would be pleased to have the whole
world die with them. Even the drunk may a) deny that he cannot drive
safely, b) suggest that everyone should enjoy a drunken drive from time to
time, or c) suggest that drunken driving is a good way to play the
necessary game of half-wishing self-destruction. If he does not express
such ideas, it may be because he realizes that the police make no
distinction between common drunks and drunk philosophers. But now we speak
of authority, not Kantian rationalism.

If we ask what functions are performed by an ethical judgment, we get a
more lively sense of this feeling. Feeling ethical, one praises or
reprimands, one rewards and punishes another. This sometimes changes the
behavior of the targets of such feelings in the direction desired by the
moralist. More broadly, then, one exhibits a preference in order to arouse
enthusiasm or indignation, to rally support. One raises an ethical
feeling in order to determine a policy, and to get on with affairs in an
orderly organized way. None of this would be done without our or someone's
expression of value.

Subjectively, too, the very power to make an ethical judgment is a
satisfaction in itself, which often is sufficient unto itself, regardless
of consequences. To express one's feelings is in fact synonymous with
giving vent to ethical judgments.

Alongside all of these functions is the one which religions stress but
which very few people feel regularly, that is, to carry out the will of
the gods or of the supernatural or fate or nature, because an ordinary
resort to this function floods the sluiceways of personal and collective
action; it is usually blocked very early in its manifestation. However, it
can be the most powerful of all functions of ethical judgments, as we see
in the Crusades, the Islamic conquests, or nowadays the rule over Iran by
Khomeini.

We can agree. These are the functions of words. Man is irretrievably
consigned to a life crowded with them. Morals are now a heap of functions
as well as forces.

Thousands of unsuccessful moral philosophers attest to the frustrations
abounding in the pursuit of morals. Voyaging to the Moon is less difficult
than the problems of morally justifying the effort involved in the
accomplishment. Nonetheless, all humans behave morally and always have. By
moral behavior we mean acting one way rather than another because, among
other reasons, one feels that it is right and good, and that not acting
that way would be wrong and bad. This "feeling" is a "real" thing,
physiologically compelling, with physical disturbance and mental states
called frustration, indignation, anger, humiliation, and anxiety if the
moral act is not performed and euphoria, satisfaction, and physical and
mental relaxation if it is performed.

The easiest way to "solve" the moral question is to deny it, that is, to
assert that people feel moral or immoral, right or wrong, in consequence
of a heap of experience, commands, forces, and natural traits. There would
be found in this heap no specific independent moral quality. Morality then
is no more than what is in the definition above, "among other reasons."

The only fault that I can find with this idea is that I do not like the
way people behave, and I feel that I am not alone in this regard, so I
wish to change people. But how do I extricate a moral principle from the
heap? Why should anyone else care what I like or what I do not like,
unless I had power to force compliance with my morals and they would do
well to obey my rules, or else -- "lest you die ..." as Yahweh might say.

[snip]

If one reads James Joyce's Ulysses, a fictional masterpiece on a day in
the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, Ireland, taking up some hundreds of
pages of print, we realize that we are probably greatly underestimating
the profusion of ethical choices in a 24 hour period.

Yet I have no idea of the range, average, or typical kinds of moral
actions in a day's time. People are called by those who know them
"conscientious," "unconcerned," "busy--body," etc., words that must refer
to the extent and types of their moral behavior, but the appropriate
sample survey with what happens in moral discourse of the self with itself
and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed
by philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Bloom, the
character, had, I guess, an unusually active mind and more conflicts to
resolve by the nature of his background, romantic wife, advertising work,
avidity for many things in life, and continuous movement about the city.

Still, we have enough of exemplary material and a frame of reference to
allow suggesting several points about moral mentation and action. The
average life presents a great abundance of moral choices. The form of
mentation employed before, after, and in the course of acting morally is
largely absurd. What happens in moral discourse of the self with itself
and others has very little resemblance to the kinds of problems analyzed
by philosophers and imagined by most preachers and teachers. Only a small
portion of it is related to science or theory except indirectly. Only a
tiny percentage of a modernized population spends much moral energy on the
divine, or on methodical calculation (unless it is one's paid job to do
so).

In Civilization and Its Discontents Sigmund Freud points out the commonly
known problem of ethics:

"that ill-luck -- that is, external frustration -- so greatly enhances the
power of the conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a
man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things;
but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his
sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences
on himself and punishes himself with penances. Whole peoples have behaved
in this way, and still do."

He calls this an "original infantile state of conscience."

"fate is regarded as a substitute for the parental agency. If a man is
unfortunate, it means that he is no longer loved by this highest power;
and, threatened by such a loss of love, he once more bows to the parental
representative in his super-ego -- a representation whom, in his days
of good fortune, he was ready to neglect."

Fate is looked upon as an expression of Divine Will. Fatalism is very
strong in early religions and ethics. Why? The authorities and experts
say: because primitive man was at the mercy of savage natural forces.
Still, if man were to be of the same ideological cast today, he would also
be fatalistic because obviously, when one think of it, very little real
control has been exercised over the immense and infinite area of
difficulties besetting us. Rather, the change of attitude has come about
as a result of changed ideology, weltanschauung, and this has changed
because of a fairly long calm condition of the Earth and the skies, and
the development of a progressive, free-will, uniformitarian
(self-contradictory) philosophy. Perhaps the distinction between
traditional sacral and modern secular man is that the former has not
forgotten his primeval scenarios, whereas the latter has suppressed them
very deeply and become overtly pragmatic.

John C. Caldwell wrote a memorandum, not formally published, on the
Sahelian Drought of the 1970's. We take leave to quote him lengthily:

Fatalism

	"Fatalism is an unsuitable term because it can be used in two
ways: to mean the rational acceptance by those living in a traditional
society that they have little control over the forces affecting their
lives; and to mean such a reluctance to attempt any control that they are
more battered by such forces than need be the case.

	"The acceptance of the blows of fate is often so great in
traditional society that it is difficult to measure the personal impact of
disaster or even to discuss it properly. Often technical aiders give up
the attempt and go to talk to other technical aiders who seem to speak the
same language, and thereby sustain the conventional wisdom and often lose
all chance of adding to worthwhile knowledge about the situation.
Sometimes they wonder if they have been entirely misled about the reality
of the position. In one of the few honest reports ever written on this
question, a transport expert working intimately with the truck drivers
bringing food relief in the recent Sahelian drought and having substantial
contact with the rural population reported that at first none of the local
population seemed ever to have heard of the drought; later he concluded
that they felt it deeply and were taking rational steps to minimize the
hurt in ways they had known all their lives... In Yelwa, northwest
Nigeria, it was reported that, "The Emir of Yauri and the Divisional
Officer, head of the Local Administration, held that drought did not occur
in Yelwa and that no problem with shortage of rains was extant". Even the
farmers talked of locusts, weeds and lack of good lands as much as
drought.

	"There are many reasons for this kind of reaction. One is that the
matter is irrelevant to the outsiders, whose lives are demonstrably not
affected by the climatic conditions. Another is a belief, held also by the
outsiders, that nothing can be done to alter the weather. Actually this
view is usually more rational still -- a feeling that the bad years are as
much part of the totality of what must be experienced as the good years
and that the lot of man is to bend with each wind. Such attitudes are
embedded deep in the culture; they find religious expression and are
reinforced by religion. In much of the savannah and desert of Africa,
people take drought to be a necessary divine warning that religious and
moral standards are slipping and that a revival is due. Drought provides
assurance that Providence is paying attention and is still concerned. It
indicates a need for religious leaders to intercede with God. If the
drought is long and severe, resort will also be made to age-old methods,
long predating Islam, for encouraging rain... From the Western Shael to
Somalia drought and religious observations are deeply linked.. In profane
literature and oral tradition references, the need for water [is] equally
pervasive. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the common man
is somewhat apprehensive about recalling the last drought or predicting
the next one. The Yelwa survey reported that, although there was clear
agreement about the nature and seriousness of drought, there was complete
disagreement in the farmers' responses as to when the last one occurred
and three-quarters did not wish to encourage bad luck (or to trespass into
the domain of Allah) by suggesting that one would ever again occur...

	"Not only is the origin of drought either divine or in any case
not to be influenced by Man, but so is death -- a proposition that is
still true over most of the Shael most of the time. Western doctors
working in the drought refugee camps were disturbed when the mothers of
dying children seemed to be more concerned about obtaining cloth to serve
as shrouds for their dead or dying babies than they appeared to be about
the fact of death itself. Their reaction were partly explained by the fact
that the babies had symptoms which have always presaged death in the
savannah. Part, too, was the religious conviction that the babies were
being called away and had been destined at this time to leave the world
(the Fulani express it as the child wanting to go.) These are not
societies in which determined efforts are likely to be made to counter the
condition of an apparently dying child or indeed to prevent the births of
children. Urbanization and other types of economic modernization
ultimately lower child mortality both by providing greater health services
and by convincing people that one can and should intercede with the forces
that determine children's sickness and death.

We see how sacral man confronts secular problems and converts them into
forms amenable to sacred solutions.

The thousands of cultures existing in historical time and space have given
us a fair sample of the ideal and practical ethical capabilities of
religion. The experience on the whole has been unimpressive to one looking
for a happy human way of life. The more one trusts to religion, it seems,
the less good one can obtain from science and politics. On the other hand,
science in itself (that is, science which is entirely positive and
empirical) is quite helpless to address the moral perplexities of man.

Politics, moreover, has, if anything, a poorer record than religion,
speaking now of politics as a secular approach to human issues; for
politics tends by itself to depend upon sheer physical force to order a
population, and systematic violence is hardly an improvement upon whatever
chicanery and delusions historical religions employ to rule a people.
Would one have preferred to be governed by the barons or by the monks of
the European Middle Ages, by the warlords or by the Shinto and Buddhist
priests of Old China, by the shaman or by the priest, by Aaron or by
Joshua? And, today in America, if the lawyers, lobbyists, and military
contractors were replaced in the ruling circles and representative
assemblies of the country by ministers, priests, and the religiously
devout, would the country be better governed, its people more peaceable,
mentally healthy, and prosperous? Would one prefer to be governed by the
Shah of Iran or the Ayatollah Khomeini?

The questions are difficult, enormously complicated, and perhaps biased.
Still they are worth considering if only as a means of suggesting that
ethical progress in a society is not to be identified with its
secularization. The key to good governance is an ethical system beyond
facile contrivance. Neither religion nor secularism, as such, promises
success.

Even though it may be true that our morals come in a tangled
concatenation, the human could scarcely accept the fact. One whose
overriding aim is self-control and control over the world will refuse to
recognize in a garbage pile his towering morality. This in itself would
seem to prove him a moral failure -- shifty, gutless, inconsistent,
contradictory (all that he really is, someone might comment). He feels
that there must be an absolute, pure source of right conduct somewhere,
and is all to ready to find and proclaim one, even an impostor.

Yet occasionally the human becomes ashamed of living a lie and hates
himself and hates his religion and gods for having created his dependency
upon delusions. He admires the "honesty" of the bear, the trout, the dog;
they are not of two minds and forked tongue. Why cannot his morality be so
straightforward?

Blame part of it upon his obsession with history, his compulsion to repeat
his worst experiences. He demands that his morality today be that of five
thousand years ago. He demands that it be of the highest order: We know
what that means; it must come from Heaven. Further he demands that all
people share in an ecumenical morality. The logical and sociological
impossibility of both demands will not deter him. He is implacable. He
will not pluck his morals from a garbage heap.

What can the scientist counsel? Try as they might, the anatomist and
physiologist cannot separate a pig and a man far enough for comfort. The
biologist, try as he may, cannot worship an arrangement derangeable by an
unseen particle, and a lucky hit out of hundreds of millions of
spermatozoa. Try if he would, the anthropologist could not work up an
agitation over adulterous intercourse and let the commandment be written
down by the hand of a god. Nor can the geologist see in an awful blasted
out crater more than a crashing meteoroid. Nor the astronomer see more
than a vast number of worlds in just that, a vast number of worlds: it
seems that the gods, too, have a compulsion to repeat. No, the scientists
cannot appease their consciences and man's sacrality with any consistency.

Besides providing people with morality, it is said, religion puts them
directly in touch with the supernatural realm. For the mass of people this
is untrue, just as it is that their religion gives them some special
ethical competence. A few practitioners must enjoy the facilities for
communion with the spiritual universe which churches and temples provide.
The mass media (motion pictures especially) and drugs, as T. Leary has
eloquently argued along with others, and, too, many gurus, seances, and
non-church rites provide this type of communion.

The supernatural is hard to distinguish from political illusions and
fictions. To the practitioners of scientific method, a devotee of
astrology and a political fascist share several features. Both analyze the
present state of world and personal affairs, and gain confidence and make
predictions on the basis of their beliefs. Knowing that a person is an
astrologist or, on the other hand, a fascist, enables the social
psychologist to assert and predict with high probability that each will
possess certain attitudes. The fascist believes in his leader as the
possessor of semi-divine qualities, a superman. He has a warped conception
of history and the future (according to our scientists). The astrologist
believes his astrologer has access to supernatural knowledge; he, too, has
a warped conception of the path of history and the future. Both types are
paranoiac in believing that a great deal of what is really happening in
the world is concealed by the establishment or conspiratorial powers.

The far departure from reality in both cases may have little to do with
their success in life. General knowledge and matter-of-factness are only
loosely connected with achievement in society. The belief of both the
astrologist and the fascist in the supernatural lends each a confidence
denied to less convinced persons; self-confidence is in many life
situations more of an asset than knowledge of the situation. Whereas the
ordinary human is only schizotypical, these two tend more towards the
schizophrenic.

We seem to be at an impasse, owing to my downgrading of the creative moral
and spiritual functions of historical religion. Supernaturalism appears to
be all manner of anti-scientific folly. Morality exists concerning
countless particulars in human activities, even while neither religion nor
secularism can justify its source, hence their application.

We see no easy solution, perhaps none at all. Later on, we may offer some
grounds to justify a "relatively absolute" morality, meaning by this
verbal barbarism some unchanging moral propositions that are themselves
changing. If one might conceive of a religion that is an integrated whole,
accommodates change easily, and that does not fundamentally and
continuously violate the controls and benefits supplied by science, then
this religion may not only be superior but also popular.

Does this mean that morality is human and mundane, part of an endless
process going on in millions of transactions every day everywhere? Yes.
Does it mean that the supernatural, the divine, the gods are not the
source of morality, that ethics exists without religion? Yes. Does it mean
that mankind is morally sui generis and autonomous? Yes.

Does it mean that humans are "immoral" and "wicked," with no means of
setting ethical standards? No. Does it mean that the supernatural, all
that is divine and sacred, has no effect upon ethical behavior? No.

The supernatural, as non-knowledge, is knowledge of a sort. Those who
transact or seek to transact with the supernatural in order to think upon
the divine, engage in an ideational relation with the divine, and are
affected by the knowledge which we possess of the divine. They will behave
differently than those who deny the supernatural and avoid it.

Religion, to put it in commonplace language, can make people better. It
should be the "right" kind of religion, and, of course, this would be the
form we are here advocating: self-aware, open, relativistic,
non-historical, connected with the sciences of natural and
socio-psychological processes, non-anthropomorphic morphologically,
anthropomorphic structurally. Let us see what science is doing that is
religiously relevant and can be adapted to religion.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS IN SCIENCE

Out of religion came politics and then science, each reacting upon the
others while going its own way. Science is a set of interests that is
religiously, socio-politically, and autonomously determined. Science
struggles to conform to a scientific method in whatever it does. The
struggle lends it its distinction, providing it with its social character.
Without the method, it is useless to speak of science. The method is
applied to whatsoever extension of the senses is of interest and controls
such extension; both operations sometimes fail but also often succeed in
our day.

A scientific procedure typically puts forth a hypothesis about what is
measurably expected to occur under certain conditions, and, by finding or
producing the conditions, finds or produces the event. Wherever conditions
permit, these are produced under controls; wherever they occur naturally,
they are overseen as strictly as possible. No place is allowed in theory
for supernatural conditions or supernatural effects, that is, for the
intervention so factors that are undefinable in material terms, or of an
external ungovernable will.

As Alexander Hamilton quipped, when Benjamin Franklin suggested prayer at
an impasse while composing the American Constitution in 1787, we should
not call upon the help of a foreign power. Hamilton, intending for
politics what Franklin had already practiced in electrical experiments,
had in mind a republic whose behavior might be predictable when certain
regular operating conditions were established by its structure.

The incident reminds us that science includes social as well as natural
science. Humans are a material factor in the one, if not in the other;
they are a contaminating factor in both. The human factor has so
continually disturbed the scientific method in its application to natural
phenomena that, in a sense, all science becomes social science, especially
as the material conditions of study become more difficult and less
amenable to continuous ordinary sense observation. We cannot go here into
the progressive discoveries of the intervention of anthropo-sociology
and especially psychology in the workings of natural science, citing the
works of P.W. Bridgman and others, but we can, without fear of rebuttal,
warn of the inevitable effects upon experimenters and researchers of their
psychological as well as physical presence amidst the supposedly
materially and logically observer -- proof conditions of scientific work.

Already, then we have to be on the alert, in all that passes as science --
applying--scientific--method, so as to detect the interest that inspires
the work and to discern the sometimes exceedingly subtle intervention of
the mind in the process of discovery, proof, and disproof. The "interest"
in a scientific task may range from the most banal, obvious, and limited
(e.g. to polish better a lens so as to see stars more clearly; to adjust
the angle of a spade to bite the ground with less energy input) to the
general and ideological, that is, unconscious (e.g. to validate evolution
by setting up hypotheses implying or excluding neo-darwinian evolution; to
calculate pre-historical sky charts by retrocalculating or presumptively
modifying present motions of the Earth and Solar system).

The aggregation of "outside" interests creates a continual uneasiness in
scientific work; like barnacles on a fine yacht, it keeps science from
being "clean;" but the barnacles are part of life at sea: no barnacles, no
sailing. We may sympathize with scientists who call up their psychic
mechanisms of unconscious denial by indignation at the idea that they may
be skirting the supernatural, or, worse, serving the supernatural, or by
backing up into ever narrow slips of material phenomena where it is hoped
that none can say that anything but sense data are implicated in their
work. The search for a body of pure science, however, like the search for
the Golden Fleece, eventuates in taking aboard a witch with the
long-sought prize, and Jason and his Argonauts must move on evermore in
unresting adventure.

The main theories of astronomy are as remote from experience as to be
spooky. Astronomers walk on a tightrope between science and religion,
depending upon a few principles that are empirically formulated to keep
the field aloft as a science. The most that astronomers can say
empirically is that much of the universe, including fortunately most of
the solar system, exhibits some large uniformities of behavior. As soon as
they retroject or project by thousands of years they become vulnerable,
that is, unbelievable.

The theories include largely a set of Newtonian laws that are fading fast
and may soon be abrogated, and which serve to fire projectiles from the
Earth in the direction of objects in space, such that, by deft ad hoc
maneuvering, arrive on target. Otherwise, they boast La Place's
mathematical explanations, which La Place himself declared to be dependent
upon uniformitarian premises. Then there occur various ways of measuring
brilliance, heat, distance, chemistry, speed, and chronology of heavenly
bodies, which are hopeful speculations, thanklessly spared from all but an
iota of factual proof, leaning upon one another for support but also
begging each other's question.

So great, however is faith in the one "law of falling bodies" that all
else passes as science simply because, as I said, the proof of science is
the scientific method, and all of astronomy, by this time, has become
couched in scientific form. That some of the more famous astronomers and
related scientists of these decades -- Urey, Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, Crick,
T. Gold, and Sagan, the name only several -- have toyed with bizarre
theories impermissible to laymen, acknowledges the essential fragility and
defensive posture of the field.

Nowadays an astronomer, provided that he has an appropriate university
degree, can profess the Doppler Effect, Bode's Law, intelligence in other
worlds, the "Big Bang", the La Place theorems, empty space, straight
lines, exact solar time and motions, and a dozen other mostly conventional
concepts. Whatever the mix, it is apparently unsystematic, unreliable, ad
hoc, and temporary. If scientists lay claim to authority on grounds that
such a mix is true and fully representative of reality, they can deny a
"union card" to whoever disturbs the mix. If, however, they place claims
of authority in the procedures of scientific method, then they must give a
respectful hearing to any educated person who seeks to establish an
identity for Plato's "divine animal" in the universe or to prove
empirically any number of such hypotheses.

The same kind of reasoning can be directed at biology and geology. Basic
conventional theories in both of these areas of study are weak and
straining at the point of collapse into disintegration, if not
supernaturalism. No more than physics can define energy other than by
fiction, operations and hypothesis, can biology define life. Fringe life
forms are several, with subatomic behavior, crystals, and viruses
providing initial confusion, and sending practitioners to more comfortable
empirical fields to work. Ethology is rampant in the fields distinguishing
among animals. Evolutionary theory is a shambles; "natural selection" is
invoked as often as God in the Bible, but it is an embarrassment to do so.

The Earth Sciences, like the other fields, are making many advances to
which the name "revolutionary" is increasingly applied with some pride.
Yet two of their greatest operational concepts -- that of time and that of
uniformitarian change -- are in peril. They invest much hope in
radiochronometry to preserve long time spans and therefore smooth out
curves of change, but, as I have explained elsewhere, radiochronometry is
based upon radioactivity which is affected by the kind of history that it
claims to prove; that is, catastrophe destroys time even while time
pretends to disprove catastrophe.

Psychology and anthropology include so many variations of methodology that
discerning the supernatural in them is not difficult; only the naive can
persistently believe that variant methods are independent of moral
perspectives, simply grasping the struggling corpus by a toe instead of
its nose. Every psychological or anthropological "school" is a
supernatural sect, whether it seeks to confront the supernatural or turn
its back to it.

But, although moral and supernatural, science in itself is not capable of
justifying human action; it cannot even justify its own. The myth that it
can, which was exposed as soon as science was mature enough to bear the
truth, lives on like any other supernatural belief, lending motivation,
inflaming passions, claiming moral credits, inspiring lives, and narrowing
thought and options. Probably, too, many scientific secularists labor in
the hope that something marvelous and morally convincing will grow out of
their work, as penicillin emerged serendipitously from a mold.

Willy-nilly all sciences, in their healthy vigor, are wrestling with the
supernatural and contributing to its expansion thereby. In this sense, all
sciences are addressing the foundations of religion and theology. The more
scientific work that is performed, the more areas of uncontrollability
and contradiction come upon the stage. Science itself is the biggest
factory of the supernatural. It tears holes in the fabrics extending
reality. It works all the while surrounded by amateurs of the supernatural
and theologians, pelted by derision. Perhaps one might forecast the most
esteemed and influential religion of the future by locating the
contemporary cult that is closest to the anomalies and radical new
interests of science.

Theology can be a science, whether it be formulated as pure or as applied
science. As the latter, it can be called religious science, or, simply,
religion, just as certain departments of political science in American
universities call themselves departments of politics (New York University)
or departments of government (Harvard University), both of these terms
meaning applied political science. A proposition (hypothesis) in theology
might then read: "All cultures denominate historical gods."

We suppose that this proposition, empirically tested, may eventuate with
exceptions, such as the Buddhists or the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics and possibly several other totalitarian socialist regimes.
Then, if we wish, we may restate the proposition, as some have, to include
"pseudo--gods," saying that "a god includes a figure with 3,4. .n
attributes of which at least `x' have to be present to permit the
designation `god' to be used." Hence certain cultures have figures such as
Lenin or Mao Tse Tung who possess at least `x' attributes, while others
have celestial figures that border upon gods such as Region `A' in China
where "Heaven" (Ti'en) is accorded at least `x' traits of a god, and still
others elevate masters and gurus to the stature of Mohamet.

We perceive that the pure proposition is heading in a certain direction
and that by the manipulation of the definition of the term "god," certain
areas of empirical research are opened up, and, furthermore, that some
hidden intent may even be present, such as to demonstrate the
ineradicability of the worship of gods.

A related proposition in applied theology or religion can continue to
illustrate the nature of theology and at the same time show how applied
propositions formulate matters often more transparently, from the
viewpoint of ideological research. Thus, one says: "To disestablish gods
of traits `a....n' including `g' and `h' it is necessary to establish a
totalitarian regime with semidivine figures of traits `a...n' less `g' and
`h'."

So elementary an introduction will hardly persuade anyone of the
profoundity and possibilities of theology as a science. The reader may be
justifiably impatient to hear what theology can do with propositions of
the supernatural. He may be wanting to know whether the supernatural
exists, for example, and how the science of theology proves this.

One ought not be evasive; nevertheless, it must be pointed out, in
anticipation of the answer to this question, that no science pretends to
answer impossible questions, even though these may be scientifically
formulated and studied. Medicine has few researchers (perhaps
one-ten-thousandth of its energies?) given over to the long-term
prolongation of human life, although this may be a strong interest of the
public. Nor are many astrophysicists preoccupied with voyages of a
duration greater than a few seconds of a light-year. Nor are many
political scientists or psychologists devoted to the attainment of
utopias. That is, one can conceive of a flourishing science of theology
that concerns itself hardly at all with proving hypotheses on the
existence of the supernatural (and, indeed, may flourish for that very
reason, just as chemistry flourished only after it stopped seeking for an
Elixir of Life and to transmute lead into gold).

So warned, we can put forward a proposition that deals with the central
interest that many people have in religion. One may hypothesize thus: "The
spiritual, defined as any event contradicting existing laws of science
relating to materiality, and probably nonreproducible by known scientific
procedures does (or does not) exist." I see no objection to arguing that
this statement is scientific. For instance, let us suppose that a person
claims to achieve a certain vision, that no one else can see. ("No one"
here means nobody in a large random sample of a population to which the
visionary belongs.)

Suppose an adept in drug-use demonstrates that `X' percent of the
population, to whom a certain drug is administered, claim the same vision
as `A.' The vision is therefore proven to be possible, although not proven
to deal with real objects. A scientific explanation of `A' is not
forthcoming, even though the state of `A' is reproducible. Theology takes
in consequence the position that the vision itself is actual, that `A' and
possibly some other rare persons are capable of it, and that many others
can attain it upon taking the certain drug. Obviously we are not faced
with a powerful proof of the existence of the supernatural.

But suppose that `A' reports that this vision is of a vaguely defined
human form who tells him "You shall see my power at Bunting Green Airport
in 48 hours." Two days later a plane crashes at said airport. This has
happened while a quarter of the large sample has been taking the drug and
many of these had images predicting dire events at the same airport or
some airport at roughly the same time. It would not require many cases of
this sort to prove the validity of this type of supernaturalism (the type
is very commonly asserted in legends, mythology, and religious documents,
as, e.g., when Yahweh tells Moses to fetch the Elders on the Holy Mountain
to be near The Lord and they come and do see the Lord. (Exodus 24))

However, if one were a foundation grants officer he might give money to
the "control group drug study" as described, but not in any expectation of
a resulting byproduct such as the air crash prediction. For he would be
warned by practically every alert and informed person that cases such as
this occur only insofar as visionary figures make predictions and that the
predicted events practically never occur. If you cannot expect definite
and defensible results from it, you should not grant funds to a project.
Never mind the appeal that to prove god at work once in a million projects
is enough.

Suppose yet another type of proposal comes before the foundation. This
asserts that, "Totemism in religion functions to repress human creativity,
while anthropomorphism in religion increases it." The applicant
conjectures simply that if people imitate an animal, even in imaginary
behaviors, they will not become very clever, whereas if they imitate an
equally fictional superman, they will become more clever. "Imitation" is,
of course, defined and measured operationally as part of religious
totemism and anthropomorphism, as are the concepts "totemism,"  
"anthropomorphism," and "creativity."

Whatever the results of such an inquiry, which is highly relevant both to
anthropology, where pre-existing theories of the origins of totemism
amount to over forty, and to theology, where, whether or not one believes
in the well-nigh universal anthropomorphism, it is useful to know how it
functions in the social structure, they are relevant to main lines of
investigation in these fields and a priori must be useful.

Our imagined foundation is not likely to look so kindly, however, upon
another proposal which crosses its threshold proposing to show that A)
Moses' monotheism is anti-democratic and B) leads to politically harmful
ideas of the supernatural among persons steeped in its learning. If
government-financed and American, the foundation might decide that support
for the program might be liable to court action on grounds that it
violated the constitutional guarantee against abridgment of the freedom of
religion, even though the argument might be advanced that the Constitution
has the right to discover and protect itself against potential enemies.

A private scientific foundation would probably decide that the study would
bring in no valid or useful results. The probable pro-Moses trustees would
also determine that such a study is not scientific, even if the word
"harmful" were replaced by several categories of consequences, empirically
verifiable and undeniably relevant, such as "proneness to belief in
charismatic authority," "totalitarian," "highly ethnocentric," and "highly
aggressive and non-conciliatory."

Perhaps the term "anti-democratic" might escape similar close scrutiny,
although quite vague and usually meaningless as employed; here again, the
proponents of the research would no doubt advance empirical indicators,
such as scoring high in attitude test of tolerance, respect for
discussion, consultation with others, compromise in decision-making,
belief that opposing views may be right, and relative immunity from
paranoia and hallucinations.

In sum, expertly espoused, the project could rebut all attacks against its
scientificity, and certainly would transport scientific method into the
core materials of theology. But it would be unlikely to win support.
Generally speaking, scientific investigations have scarcely been employed
in the field of theology proper. To the degree that theology in a given
setting could be studied scientifically, it is deprived of the means, the
intervening variable being indifference. This can be promptly and cheaply
demonstrated by examining the articles in standard encyclopedias having to
do with the field and those who have worked in it. What is to be observed,
creeping into the area from its fringes, are studies in anthropology,
ethnology, sociology, political sociology, and psychology, few of which
ever gain entry except through works such as Mircea Eliade's in the
history of religion or works carrying a favorable attitude (from the
standpoint of the market in ideas) such as Henri Bergson's and Teilhard de
Chardin's or Hans Kung's.

A group of scholars working in the area with an approach termed "creation
science" have developed their own audience and market. Their efforts to
correlate natural history with sacred scripture qualify for the field of
theology, too, and there is nothing un-scientific about quoting words
attributed to Elohim or anyone else as a hypothesis for testing human or
natural history. One would not refuse as the hypothesis for the study of,
say, American politics (1965-80), or of history generally, a quotation
attributed to an historian, Harold Acton, "All power tends to corrupt;
absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." One would however have to
assure himself of the usual criteria: that "power," "absolute" and
"corrupt" are operationally defined, and empirical indicators or measures
provided for them.

When certain scholars determine to test the veracity of the Bible by
quoting therefrom "God said to Noah... I will bring down a flood of waters
upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from
under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die," and plan to
adduce evidence from natural history of such a deluge, they are certainly
proposing an ambitious project. And to qualify as scientists, they must
clarify precisely, hypothetically, the extent of the destruction that is
mentioned and its main instrument, a watery deluge, then validate by
geological and ethnological evidence the occurrence of this particular
flood (as distinct from a series of floods, etc.) And they would have to
eschew any direct test of whether in fact the conversation took place
between Elohim and Noah, because it is unverifiable. Most scientists would
be logically compelled to accept a properly drafted study proposal of this
type as belonging to the realm of scientific work.

Some scholars, gripped in the avoidance mechanism previously alluded to,
would deny the relevance of any study whatsoever that would tend to
confirm a scriptural statement. When one examines an encyclopedia such as
the Britannica which assigns millions of words to theological matters and
many more millions to geology and ancient history, with only a dozen
paragraphs treating the deluge issue, whether as an issue or as a
disputable event, and when one considers that the deluge problem has
agitated all generations of man everywhere since the beginning of history
and before, one is inclined to ask, at least in this instance: "Who is the
more biased against science: the creation scientists accepting scientific
terms, or the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica avoiding the subject
unconsciously?"

Waiving the question, whose intent is obviously polemical, one may note
once again how important is the matter of "interests" and the motives for
such interests in science. The choice of subjects for hypothesis and study
is obviously crucial in human culture and welfare, and yet has little to
do with scientific method but much to do with the meaningfulness of
science. And what is "meaning"? And who shall determine it?

"Meaning" is certainly among the most profound questions of philosophy and
theology. "Why do we exist?" "What is our destiny?" If scientists choose
to interest themselves, or are forced to occupy themselves with research
on the advertising of commodities and with the perfection of weapons of
destruction, to the extent say of ten thousand times the efforts put into
the most meaningful questions of human existence, then they can hardly
complain that the profound questions are overvalued.

One is led, therefore, to suggest that the supernatural is a proper and
major concern for scientists, even if successes in the field come hard and
require that they conduct humbling investigations of themselves. Perhaps
a tithe of ten percent of one's scientific energies and resources to
theology is in order, and a similar tithe to the basic needs of humanity
in regard to a basic minimum material subsistence, a basic possibility of
gaining life experience through free movement and education, and a
basically equal access to disinterested justice in all situations of
conflicts of desire or interest. For, in this latter regard, scientific
effort is also hugely biased against giving itself over to just those
problems that render mankind incapable of an adequate material substratum
of meaningfulness.

It is from the basic desire for new experience that the interest in the
supernatural emerges. To stunt it, by allowing it a meaningless diet
according to the scientific method, is a form of deliberate, if
unconscious, deprivation, just as much as to stunt it by forcing it into
obsessive narrow ritual which has nothing to do with scientific method.

Under such circumstances, it becomes ironical indeed to speak of
"meaningless" propositions, as many modern logical positivist philosophers
call considerations of the supernatural, for it is precisely against their
"meaningless" reductionism that religious man is rebelling. "Words" are
important in thought, but to carve them down into nothingness except as
they have rigid and narrow denotations is but an unconscious method of
assuring that the thought that occurs is to be equally rigid and narrow.

The kind of person who is then to be fashioned out of the raw material of
homo sapiens schizotypus comes to depend upon only very limited mechanisms
of fear-control, to wit, obsessed and catatonic behavior according to
scientific rules, with a limited capacity for displacement of the selves
of a person, a limited ability to identify the selves with the larger
human and natural world, a severely suppressed ambivalence turning back
upon the self, and a general lack of animation of the psyche. Surely this
is not the intent of science, which only hopes to use words instrumentally
and to solve otherwise impossible problems by a sure-fire method; but it
does tend to be the effect of science when science exceeds its logical
limits, demands to be "pure," and goes so far as to restrict its own
method to areas guaranteed not to possess deep human meaning.

We can take up two attitudes in the face of the threat posed by many
scientists to human development. One is that scientists are bound to fail
in this method of coping with man's essential madness. "Just be patient;
the movement will collapse from its inherent weaknesses," and indeed
scientists do feel an overpowering weakness, and ensuing exasperation,
when human cultures fail to embrace their interests and techniques or,
worse, fashion crazy worlds of science fiction to dwell in while waiting
for science to solve all problems without the aid of politics or religion.

A second attitude, much to be preferred, is to encourage science in every
way possible to examine itself and proceed to the examination of human
nature, upon whose basic mechanisms science, politics, and religion must
ultimately depend. What must this human being be fed to keep him creative
and within bounds? The answer may be scientific theology. Bring together
all that science is producing, half-consciously, in the way of theological
findings and blend them into an integrated metaphysics, the whole of which
addresses, not "mythical" or "rational" man, but the operative homo
sapiens schizotypus.

I have examined human mental structure and operations in other works, so
am permitted to relate here only the central relation of religion and
science, and of this most clues are already familiar to the reader.
Science emerges from the limited but most significant ability of the human
mind to capture pragmatically, that is, to control, the connections
between the person and an immense world of identifications and
displacements. From his very beginnings, mankind has identified and sought
to control the heavens and the gods, the mountains and oceans, the plants
and animals. No other being on Earth is so ambitious; all others are
confined to such rational activity as instinct requires for the purpose of
survival and propagation.

The human mind, disordered by genesis and at birth, has the immense
problem of extending pseudo-instinctive (that is, voluntary) controls over
connections with existence that have very little to do with survival and
propagation. The human, for instance, will sacrifice (both in the
functional and symbolic senses) everything -- food, family, sex, lesser
powers, safety -- in his efforts to command the skies.

Furthermore, besides the skies, there is many another realm of being that
he is compelled by his mind to deal with, an infinite set of realms it
seems, even though his mind, we must remember, is assisted by only
moderately competent sensory organs, so that he is encumbered in his
ingesting, questing, and adjusting.

So the need to order one's head requires that the cosmos be set in order,
and it is natural for one to apply the pragmatic (scientific) techniques
that substitute for instinct in the obtaining of both very close
necessities and the most faraway necessities, and hence the elaboration of
science out of immediate pragmatism occurs on both the intimate material
level and the cosmic level.

Science is a human activity and therefore can be characterized as such, no
less than religion is a human activity. It has a history, a sociology, a
sub-culture, a psychology. It exhibits struggle, cooperation, ambition,
failure, success, inducements -- payoffs and penalties, a total range of
material subjects to study, just as religion is subject of study, by the
scientific method. It has religious and political aspects. It deals in
authority, fictions, myths, claims, anomalies, rituals, and hypotheses,
all of which are perilously reminiscent of religion and the supernatural.
And, of course, to distinguish it especially from all other social
activities, it is obsessed with the secular ritual of scientific method,
and tends to extend the practice to all spheres of life.

The basic rite of scientific method is similar everywhere. But there come
into being elaborations, embellishments, and variations of the basic
rite. Some scientists like to think of the changes in naming,
conceptualization, procedures, research interests, and so on as "progress"
or at least "different ways of looking at the same thing." Other
scientists know that they are in the grip of fashion and fads, whether in
astronomy or geology, psychology or sociology. Magic, cultism, and other
overtones, usually sounded and noticed in religious practice, can be heard
in any science.

Every science must have a supernatural auxiliary. I would call it a
suprascience, if such a term would not offend. I mean that the science
itself consists of a stripped-down method and its findings, and that there
must form around it not only a halo or encrustation of fictions,
hypotheses, and non-rically derived speculations, but also an attitudinal
complex, rather like a system of illusions and delusions, or like a ruling
formula (a term which Gaetano Mosca applied to the field of political
science).

This auxiliary suprascience functions as a propaganda machine to make the
science appear to its practitioners and public as continuously worthwhile,
to tie it non-empirically into various problem areas of life, to act as a
lightning rod (I will not argue whether lightning rods really are
effective against lightning) to dissipate attacks gathering against the
field, to give the field a history (much of it pseudo-history) and a
future (much of the genre of science fiction).

As political science is impossible to consider without its ruling formulas
(elites, democracy, kingship, laissez-faire, militarism, etc.), so
astronomy cannot exist unaccompanied by schools of astrology, or geology
without forms of uniformitarianism, or economics without models of
"economic man," or literary analysis without fads and fashions, or
medicine without magic and homeopathy, or chemistry without suprasciences,
one or more for each of its numerous subdivisions such as diets alongside
food chemistry, drug cultures alongside drugs, aesthetics alongside
plastics, and so on.

There is no fakery here; there is strict necessity; man lives in the skies
as well as in his hovel; culture marches along all paths and all paths are
psychically connected, even when, especially in a scientific and pragmatic
age, they may be, by an effort of will, separated for specialized
solutions.

Under these circumstances, man lives throughout the cosmos, effectively.
He lives pragmatically in the cosmos that he can experience and command
through sensory manipulation. He lives mentally (and, by ritual,
pragmatically) in the cosmos that is beyond experiencing but which he can
imagine and bring into order. We may fancy that Jesus of Nazareth would
speak this parable:

	"A woman of the mountains saved her money to buy a rain cloak, for
she was often wetted by the rains there, and when she had sufficient she
ventured to Jerusalem to buy a cloak. But the cloak was so beautiful, that
she would not wear it, so as to preserve it, and all her clothing became
wet and damaged. Now I say unto you, wear your beautiful cloak of religion
and all of your other clothing will be saved, and your Father in Heaven
will replace your rain cloak with the raiment of angels.

Reason, many theologians and secularists pray, will serve religion, and
show a person what is good and bad in religion. So, if there is bad
religion, it is because men do not use their reason to find the good, or
they exercise their free will to choose to do bad with religion.

Rationalism is thus used in two ways to damage religion. First, it becomes
secular and refutes most or all religious pretension, as with Voltaire and
Marx. Second, and more important here because it is a lesser known
argument, rationalism erodes religion because it claims that mankind,
possessed of the gift of telling what is "true" religion from what is
"false" religion, only needs to be educated to distinguish "truth" in
order to pursue true religion.

Thus the problems of religion can be said to be solved by the independent
pursuit of the principles of reason with regard to supernatural beings and
rituals. In this second situation, the rationalist theologians, counting
here Saint Thomas Aquinas insofar as he is Aristotelian and rationalistic,
lend themselves to the continuation of evil in the name of religion; for
evil becomes the result of ignorance and neglect of reason.

Reason, as conceived in traditional and conventional philosophy and
theology, presumes "free will." Free will is considered as the endowment
of human nature with the capacity to choose one out of two or more
alternative options as the basis for action upon an issue. Thus, employing
reason, a choice of good over evil is imposed by free will, and an
opposite decision becomes a free choice of evil. It is this "free will"
which has been used in many cultures to explain the harsh effects of
religion. Man is wicked and is therefore punished by his gods; by no means
can the wickedness be blamed on the gods.

This argument would appear to constitute an imposing defense of
traditional religion and may even explain why all other life activities
are dealt with by the principles of rationalism and free will (rather than
the other way around). If so, it is one more important indication of the
extent to which the religious sphere permeates and dominates the structure
and operations of the other seemingly separated spheres of life.

Actually, the belief in free will can be viewed as a primary obstacle to
the improvement of religion. Not only does it make of man in his own eyes
a wicked sinner, much more fearful of the gods, the authorities, and the
people around him than he would otherwise be, hence aggravating his
natural paranoia, ambivalence, and hostility to others. But it also makes
it impossible for man to govern himself; for he believes that he has
within him, quite divorced from the really essential set of mechanisms
according to which he behaves, the ability at any time to change himself
from good to bad and from bad to good.

Furthermore, the "bad" and "good" are themselves applied in the religious
sphere often quite apart from any connections which they might have with
the other spheres of life. "Free will," and rationalism as well, are
fantastically individualistic fictions. They permit the dissociation of an
individual decision from all that in fact determines, and should
determine, the decision. Neither a balky donkey nor the gods themselves
can prevent man's exercising his will upon them to turn along his way.

By contrast, the theory of homo schizo holds that man derives his religion
from the same set of mechanisms whence he derives all his religion, from
the same set of mechanisms whence he derives all his other interests and
activities. One cannot allow the concepts of free will and rationalism to
enter.

All of human behavior considered as a mind transacting within himself and
throughout the medium of his culture is of one piece, holistic.

Free will is no longer, if it ever was, a useful idea. The known and
experienced deviations or range of choice available to us is large enough,
whether determined or free, to allow for extremely diverse decisions.

Now see what this theory of homo schizo does to the status of the
supernatural and of religion. It elevates their status, rather than
depressing it. But, more than that, it makes sacred and religious man
impregnable to separatistic assaults upon his religion. For he can say and
he can prove, or others can do this for him, that even if his religious
aspects are suppressed, he will be different only in those particulars
where a transference occurs, from the prohibited areas of religion, to the
permitted secular areas.

Religious man can further declare that the elimination of religion does
not eliminate evil, but merely introduces more evil to other quarters of
human behavior. And he can heap up evidence showing that secularized
societies and secularized man have shown no noticeable improvement in
conduct denominated as good.

Until we decide who we are and what we want to be, we are at fault in what
we are and want to do. Unless we shut the doors against all unwanted
conduct from all spheres of life, shutting the door against religion in
the hope of stopping all unwanted conduct is futile; it will enter by the
other doors. As well as saying that religion cannot be suppressed, and as
well as stating that much of religion behavior is true both in itself and
in reconciliation with science, we are now prepared to say that the
suppression of religion will not consign evil beyond man's ken. For that
great task, a reconstruction of human nature is required.

Such a reconstruction may well be impossible. We do not know enough yet to
define the terms of reform. What we can do at this stage of our study is
to argue for the incorporation into religion of our findings, both to
prepare the ground for the possible coming reconstruction and to maintain
the best possible, the least damaging, of religious as well as of all
other systems.

The problem of absolute morality -- of the standards of good conduct and
the means to practice it -- must go unsolved here. Absolute morality may
be forever beyond human abilities to demonstrate. Short of this, we resort
to what many philosophers before us have advocated, a natural law of human
behavior: How people have always behaved and seem compelled to behave is
restructured so that the consequences which people seem always to have
wanted -- even when acting in contradiction -- will ensue.

Since we do not appeal to gods, reason, or secular authorities, nor to
charism, faith, and revelation, it would appear best to label our natural
law as hypothetical, tentative, and only so good as its consequences are
acceptable to most people, whether educated or not, in all cultures. This
might be called a natural moral consensus.

To summarize from suggestions offered in various passages of our work, we
perceive four essential and general human demands: for freedom from fear,
for material subsistence, for new experiences, and for a disinterested
arbitration of human conflicts. Fearlessness; subsistence; experiencing;
and justice: these words may be used also.

All of these require controls over the self (selves), others, and nature.
Control requires skills (considering even brute force as a kind of skill
at leverage, if nothing else), and mankind is obsessively driven to
elaborate his internal and external control system to a stage where he has
obtained what he can regard as minimal and sufficient guarantees of his
several needs.

The overall problem of a culture is, unconsciously or consciously, to
provide a network of practices that will supply its people with excellent
chances of obtaining these guarantees. And so we proceed to human
relations, technology, politics, religion -- family government, world
government, cosmic government -- and science, which acts to supply better
ways for cultures to fulfill these needs.

(end)