The Antichristian Phenomenon
The True Nature of Religion: The Search for Self-Empowerment
Posted by: LeaT in Philosophy, Religion, tags: übermensch, empowerment, humanist, nihilism, ReligionI had a lecture the other week when one of my teachers came to talk about his fieldwork he conducted on West Java, studying the (religious) meaning of fasting. Java’s biggest religion is Islam, so thus, one would conclude that the ritual of fasting bears great importance in the daily lives of the Java people. Once my teacher started to investigate what fasting truly is however, it turned out that fasting wasn’t just a religious rite practiced during certain holidays such as Ramadan, but students said to him that they would fast a couple of days before an important exam, or that if they were going to an interview for a job they really wanted, they would fast before as well. Obviously, fasting isn’t just a religious expression, although religious leaders put great emphasis that fasting should only be performed. Then what is fasting? Fasting is in its simplest form an expression to control the body, that is, what goes and and what comes out. In anthropology we may call these things substances. Food may be considered a specific form of substance, and by fasting, a person can control what form of food they eat and don’t. It thus requires some kind of self-control of the body. But why the importance to control the physical body? I didn’t think much more about it then, until I read some posts here on the Anti-Christian Phenomenon Website, and I realized that this is a very common reoccuring theme in most world religions. Judaism may advocate for ascetism, and so do more extreme variants of Hinduism. In Christianity the step is taken even further and there is a whole system built around the idea of sin, which basically is a guideline of what is accepted behavior in how to control the mind and body. One explanation can be that if one is able to control one’s body, then one is also able to control the mind, and the logical conclusion would be that one will naturally lead a more healthy and happy life when being able to muster this kind of self-control.
The idea is far from new, and we may even find notions of this in other philosophical systems that may seem completely unrelated to religion at all. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke about his concept of the übermensch, the super human, and that we can only become truly free and be able to take control of our own lives once we discard such notions as religion. In the humanist movement a less metaphorical term is used, and it is simply just called empowerment. Once again, by discarding such things as religion can we become truly free and take control of our own lives. In the Enlightenment movement one could only become truly free by accepting rationality and common sense. Through logic and reason alone are we capable of realizing our own individual freedom. In Taoism, we can only become truly free by understanding our own importance in a holistic system, and realizing that it is not about I, the subject, but about we, as a single entity. The system in Taosim in how we can achieve true balance with the world is also very intricate, and advocate strong ideas of how to act and behave in different situations.
Maybe it is easier to understand why some people may turn to religion in the light of being an excuse to find self-empowerment which they alone failed in achieving without an intricate system such as religion with clear rules to follow in how such empowerment can be reached. I will not try to go into and debate as to why self-empowerment may be so intrinsically important to human beings, and why we ultimately still like to believe in the idea of our own prsonal freedom and power to achieve things we want to achieve, nor is it in the scope or interest of this website, but if religion offers a possibility to reach such self-empowerment, then it has surely succeeded. With that said, obviously religion is not for everybody, as shown with my examples of philosophical movements and ideas that are unrelated to religion and at times even strongly opposed such a notion, so maybe ultimately the reason why some people may seem to change religious affiliations as if they were changing clothes may lie in that the system they just joined simply wasn’t the way for them to achieve this empowerment within, may it be for philosophical or other reasons. For example, I really don’t find the notion attractive of living an ascetic life or fast once a year for a month, but if making a claim that my non-religious stance has helped to make me feel that I am in control of my own life, I will answer honestly that yes, I do believe so. I am not going to deny that religion ultimately is a powerful tool when it comes to finding self-empowerment, if it wasn’t, I am sure a lot less would be religious than what we are currently seeing today, the problem is of course all the other ideas that religion imposes that I cannot as easily accept as something intrinsically good, and if religion truly is representing a system for self-empowerment, maybe it would be time to develop something new that does not include ideas of human rights 2000 years ago.
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October 18th, 2009 at 11:35 am - Edit
TypoMan here, pointing out your typo’s:
Also, please don’t take this the wrong way. This is intended to be helpfull.
1) “although religious leaders put great emphasis that fasting should only be performed.” -> Should only be performed… what?
2) “what goes and and what comes out.” -> Probably “what goes in and what comes out.”
3) “Once again, by discarding such things as religion” -> “Once again, only by discarding such things as religion”
4) “why some people may turn to religion in the light of being an excuse” -> “why some people may turn to religion in the light of having an excuse”
5) “our own prsonal freedom” -> “our own personal freedom
October 18th, 2009 at 1:37 pm - Edit
Hello TypoMan.
"Also, please don't take this the wrong way. This is intended to be helpfull." –> Helpful has only one l in it.
Other than typos, do you have anything worthwhile to comment on?
October 18th, 2009 at 9:34 pm - Edit
Nevermind that the plural of typo is typos is without an apostrophe
Obviously what I wrote is too hard for him to comprehend, so it's easier for him to attack my grammatical and/or structural errors. On the other hand, only making 5 or so errors I suppose should be flattering, considering that English is not my mothertongue and I didn't even bother to check the text before I published it, and the article itself must contain at least 500 or so words. Haha, after finishing my home exam which was whorish when it came to how many words your answers should contain, I just had to check the actual length, and whole article is actually just a bit above 900, meaning that my error rate is just a bit over 5%. *flex*
December 31st, 2009 at 7:51 pm - Edit
To start with I don't really give a flying fuck about typo's. I may have said this before, but we all make mistakes. The message comes across quite clear though. People fast because they think that they are dogs. It is healthy for a dog to be starved one day out of seven. It's something about how when they were once in the wild, before they became domesticated, that they are used to starvation, and it's just how their metabolism works. It makes a dog healthier. Now that being said, people are not dogs. People just have to watch what they eat. If you eat to much you become a fat fucker; if you don't eat enough, you become anorexic. We just need to watch our energy input, and our lifestyle. I think that through science we have worked this out, although, it's really not that fucking hard to work out… you don't need to be a biological engineer to work that out.
But religion always likes to put it's ugly head in… between logic and reason. They wish to tell us when we can eat, and when we can't. I'll just say, use your own fucking brain, are you able to think? Are you able to reason? Can you tell when you are hungry? Can you tell if someone is trying to control you?
Do not believe the bullshit.
Eat to live
January 2nd, 2010 at 12:22 pm - Edit
Well, I think you contradicted my own conclusion pretty much, but I am not going to go into that now, only the part about dogs. Dogs don't starve naturally, in fact, any dog owner will know that dogs will tend to eat basically anything which can be considered edible and then some. If the food is tasty enough, they will eat until they throw up, then eat some more and their puke, and if they cannot absolutely manage to eat more, they will try to hide it somewhere by digging it into the ground to save it when they become hungry again. The only reason why a dog may refuse to eat is because the food isn't tasty enough, which is the case with humans too. But they will eat, just like we will, once they become hungry enough. I think your reasoning around dogs is contradictional to what we know about dogs and evolution in general. Before dogs became domestic animals, it was natural to starve because food wasn't as abundant as before. But this didn't mean that starvation as a behavior got carried over once they became tame, in fact, it's quite the opposite. It's the idea to eat as much as possible because you don't know when you might starve again that was, and this is true for humans too, and this is the reason why we see a wave of obesity spreading in the Western world.
January 5th, 2010 at 1:58 pm - Edit
I was told that by a vetrinarian actually, and even though the dog may think that it's throat has been cut, it is actually healthier for them; however … People just need to learn to adjust their energy intake, according to their lifestyle. And onto your point about obesity; would an obese person survive longer in a survival situation than someone that has very little body fat, and is generally fit by nature? I personally think the answer is no. So being obese doesn't really coincide with one of the basic laws of nature. The survival instinct. We know as a civilization that we have abundant food reserves, we know that we have stocks, and those stocks should be rationed proportionately according to the amount of energy we expend. And that is where self control comes in. A dog probably does not understand this self control, because they do not know we have this stock; so it is up to us as humans to ration it for them. Now as a human being we should be able to fathom this, and regulate our own intake. We don't need a church or an institution to tell us when we should eat or when we should not, we should know better than a dog.