Friday, August 8, 2008

The Function of Religion

Recently I came across an article on a Christian blog critical of Pentecostal Christian churches that makes for interesting reading. While I am no fan of the Pentecostal movement and agree with some of the author's criticisms, what stood out for me was this:

Secondly, Pentecostals really have no love for doctrine. I will admit that the church I grew up in, as a whole denomination, had a firm handle on doctrine. However, my local church was obsessed with the extreme elements of Pentecostalism, like slaying in the Spirit, excessive use of tongues, “deliverances” and stuff like that. I can recite whole sermons where Baptists, Presbyterians, John Piper, John MacArthur and anyone who actually “taught more than actually do something”. And it is not isolated. My father visited hundreds of Pentecostal churches where doctrine is disparaged, nicknamed “religion” and ignored in favour of “experience”.

Essentially, the author contends that a serious problem in Pentecostal Christianity is the possibility of experience trumping doctrine.

But shouldn't it?

The function of a religion is not to lay down a bunch of rules for people to follow in a group. That's the job of society and culture. The function of a religion is not to impart intellectual truths. That's the job of science and philosophy. So what does religion actually do?

The function of a religion is to produce spiritual experiences.

I'm not going to go so far as to defend some of the ridiculous practices found in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. "Speaking in tongues" as practiced in those churches is nonsense and many "faith healers" are total fakes. Here's a hint - in order to heal somebody using a spiritual practice you need to be able to actually direct spiritual energy, not just say "Lord, heal this person in Jesus' name!" and then hit them on the forehead.

On the other hand, the "conversion" or "born again" experience described by a lot of Christians sounds like a genuine spiritual awakening of some sort, which was described as metanoia in the Gospels. One of the things that the Gnostic Christians got right was that metanoia is the key function of the Christian religious system, just like enlightenment is the key function of Buddhism. Furthermore, there is a lot of evidence in neuroscience suggesting that at least at the physical level they are essentially the same experiences.

In Christian doctrine, metanoia (Greek) is translated into paenitentia (Latin) and from there into repentence (English). But the word metanoia literally means a change in one's consciousness or state of mind (meta = change, noia from nous = mind), not some sort of "atonement" as the Latin and English connotations suggest. When Gnosticism was wiped out by the institutional Christian church the real meaning of metanoia was obscured.

For example, I'm of the opinion that that the idea of original sin comes not from the Gospels or even the Bible, but from confusion arising from metanoia's translation into paenitentia. Notably, Saint Augustine spoke Latin, and there is no concept of original sin in Judaism. The idea didn't appear anywhere until the Gospels were translated into Latin.

If doctrine is supposed to trump experience, the doctrine had better be unassailable and frankly the above example strikes me as a rather amateurish mistake by a poor translator - or perhaps one with a specific agenda. It's very useful for an intercessionary organization to convince its followers that they are somehow flawed and desperately need the organization's help to "repent."

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9 comments:

David said...

Just curious - what is your opinion on speaking in tongues and other pentecostal experiences? Do you think there is anything magickal to their worship services?

Unknown said...

Considering that the Pentecostal idea of speaking in tongues is basically glossolalia, I would not say there is anything particularly magical about it. It could be mystical in the sense that it can produce an altered state of consciousness, but that's about it. In the Book of Acts, "speaking in tongues" is explicitly described as being able to speak in coherent language that was alleged to be understood by people who spoke languages unknown to the Apostles. That is NOT how Christian do speaking in tongues today. What is being spoken sounds pretty much random from everything I've seen.

Now that being said, even though I am skeptical about the magical efficacy of that particular practice, Pentecostals DO raise a lot of energy at their services that can be channeled into more practical things like healing. Sometimes they get real psychic insights and so forth. I have never seen an example of someone actually speaking a real language that they don't know when speaking in tongues, but I'm not willing to rule it out as impossible. Maybe a few Pentecostals can get it to work. It just doesn't appear to for most people in any practical way.

The main problem with the Pentecostal system is inefficiency. They do have a way to tap into what we occultists might call magical powers. But their working hypothesis is that God does all the actual work, which means that they don't see things like regular daily practice, however they might define that, or any technical optimization of what they are doing, as relevant to their results. But magick is a technology, which means they're mistaken about that - and that mistake has a lot of implications throughout how their system works.

I do appreciate that Pentecostals take the miraculous side of Christianity seriously and they really do try to channel spiritual power to improve their lives. That's the same thing we magicians are working on.

Scott Stenwick said...

That was me, by the way. For some reason my browser decided to post it as Unknown.

Alex Scaraoschi said...

That while speaking in tongues seems like alot of gibberish to me. At least from what I've seen so far on many Pentecostal programs. And I don't want to go any further than this because I would end up making fun of them, and that's not fair. The Angelic language sounds weird, but at least someone hearing it can discerne an actual laguage being spoken instead of some weird, seemingly made-up stuff into which some Hebrew godnames are being inserted at random, even in a slight dodgy form.

Scott Stenwick said...

Sure, and I would actually be very impressed if someone was able to analyze a bunch of snippets of "tongues" and show that it was a real language with consistent structure and grammar. I'm pretty sure that's never going to happen because I don't think it is, but I'm always willing to entertain the possibility that I could be wrong.

David said...

Interesting thanks. Thank you both for the insight.

Alex Scaraoschi said...

Oh, and one more thing: I've seen different people "speaking in tongues" in those Pentecostal programs. I found several things curious besides what I've mentioned before:

1. Mostly the pastors speak in tongues.

2. Each of them seemed like they were saying something very similar to the others, in terms of sounds and intonation, and even longer phrases seemed to contain the same sequences of sounds all of them were pretty much using. Now, I'm not a linguist, but it seemed to me as something they had memorized before. Even the people from the crowd who apparently were having an instant spiritual uplift and were starting to speak in tongues were using pretty much the same sounds. Makes one think these things had been staged.

At one point I wanted to burst into a local Pentecostal gathering while speaking the First Enohian Call and notice their reactions just for fun, but it seemed like a waste of time.

Scott Stenwick said...

What I find a little odd about these things being staged is that as far as anyone can tell, none of it translates to any real language. What would be the point of memorizing nonsense sounds? I can see where it could be worthwhile to do that if it was in some ancient language that the parishioner in question "couldn't possibly know." Then it would appear impressive. But I don't think that's ever happened.

I think the similarity in sounds is basically from people imitating the sounds the pastors are using. I do know somebody who grew up in one of those churches and there was a point where they were trying to get everyone to speak in tongues, with a lot of social pressure. She thought it was complete nonsense and wasn't getting anything, so finally she just said something kind of like what the pastor said to get them to leave her alone.

Alex Scaraoschi said...

Oh, I see. Wow! That's... ok.