Okay ... I am ... still unsure what to make of it all. This is one of those things where I'm going to have to read the book, and spend some time thinking about it, and then shrug it off only to finally figure out something relevant months later when talking about something seemingly irrelevant.
Confused? Don't worry.
Wisconsin Public Radio produces To the Best of Our Knowledge, a weekly program that covers diverse topics. A recent broadcast, for instance, covered in its first hour Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and jazz. The second hour was a replay of a January program about animals, including Dave Foreman (Wilderness Society, EarthFirst!, and now the Rewilding Institute) on species reintroduction; Sy Montgomery (The Good Good Pig) about her pet pig Christopher Hogwood; Patricia McConnell (For the Love of a Dog and Calling All Pets) on teaching/training dogs; and lastly, most curiously and confusingly, Barbara J. King (Evolving God) discusses the rudimentary qualities of religion as seen in great apes.
That's right. Religion and apes. Take a moment, if you need, before going on.
To quote program host Jim Fleming:
I will state here a very important distinction: At no point does King assert that great apes have religion.
The episode link is an audio file (RealMedia); the segment starts right around 40:55.
To reiterate: Nobody is saying apes have religion. Not even, in this context, Goodall. Much of the rest of the program discussion considers aspects of those four behaviors. In discussing empathy, King recalls the 1996 incident at Brookfield Zoo when a female gorilla protected and in essence rescued an injured human child who fell into the habitat. At approximately 45.58, King offers an example from the wild:
The thing is that it's a lot to take at once. By the time you get to the bit about the bonobo and the squirrel, you will find yourself truly in surreal territory.
Don't worry, though. Steve Paulson makes the pertinent point:
If people are willing to give King some credibility here, most will see their definitions of religion begin to crumble. (Well, if they weren't already captivated by the idea of primates and the roots of religious behavior.) And those familiar with Armstrong's work will better understand the influence it can have over anthropology, psychology, and religion itself. There are dimensions of ourselves, as individuals, awaiting discovery if only we stop leaving it to the religionists to define religion and faith. Many who are atheistic or anti-religious would reconsider those positions if they were not obliged by custom or principle to define God and religion so narrowly as the faithful insist, in large part because if there is one thing an atheist can believe in, it is the personal experience. Even if all else is illusory, there is still something of a self to perceive and respond to the illusion. It would be better, I think, for people to have the chance to understand that religion relates to something we as humans do naturally, and when we look at religion in our communities today, we are seeing the most superficial strata, the accretions beneath which the roots of our religious functions are sublimated. The nonreligious need to know that what they are seeing is a circumstantial result; we humans may have bungled our religious functions, but there are reasons for that bungling. As with anything, there is no all-knowing, malevolent party aiming to distort everything. There is no Central Chauvinist Agency gathered in a back room somewhere conspiring about how to turn every moment into an opportunity to oppress women. There is no Devil hiding in Hell deciding how to make our faith in a benevolent God work against us at every turn. And though it is more likely, there is no capitalist conspiracy aiming to reduce humanity to servants of the self-proclaimed superhuman. Rather, what happens today is at least in part shaped by what has come before. Humans are finite, imperfect organisms. When the American slave owners said that it would be cruel to teach the slaves to read, or when the men believed it would be cruel to ask women to vote in elections, they actually believed it. Even though we might justly theorize that such perverse beliefs arise from whatever subconscious chambers in which we've sealed away our senses of guilt and shame, the result is a compelling belief. They did not sit back and chuckle to themselves about having stolen another day from their victims.
And so it is with religious behavior. Nature is not extraneous; we sense and respond to religious ideas for a reason, and it would be better to consider what that reason is than blindly stumbling and shouting about what God wants.
Okay, enough. I've transcribed enough of the segment; the point being that this is one of those things that you come across and suddenly find your presuppositions scattered across the floor like shards of a broken coffee cup. And, in true form, you'll just about think you've got the mess cleaned up when you manage to slice open your toe on one a tiny piece you hadn't noticed until it was too late.
For instance, I always reach back to the "fire god". Early gods rose inspired by awe and wrought in ignorance. Place the stones in a circle, contain the fire; this seems a practical thing to the modern human, but our prehistoric relationship to fire was one of intuition and discovery. Our mastery of fire is so important to our species that we write myths about it. That the transformation of something so awesome as fire into something an organism could contain, manipulate, and engage, should impress its way into human legend should not be surprising. We still attempt to do and achieve things that are beyond our expression; we're just better at pretending around our ignorance.
Barbara King, however, is reaching well beyond the fire gods. I am awestruck by the potential implications of such theories.
And, of course, my esteem for primates is in the process of raising itself; I don't know how that's going to turn out.
But take some time with this. I'll be searching out the book, and if all goes well, be able to give some thoughts on the subject at some point in the near future. This is one of those really cool things, though, that has the potential to radically alter the terms and boundaries of theological and religious discussion. I feel lucky, at least, to have the chance to think about these things. It's been thousands of years, and now that it's here, relatively few of us will get the chance, and even fewer will take it up.
Really ... this is so cool ....
____________________
Notes:
Confused? Don't worry.
Wisconsin Public Radio produces To the Best of Our Knowledge, a weekly program that covers diverse topics. A recent broadcast, for instance, covered in its first hour Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and jazz. The second hour was a replay of a January program about animals, including Dave Foreman (Wilderness Society, EarthFirst!, and now the Rewilding Institute) on species reintroduction; Sy Montgomery (The Good Good Pig) about her pet pig Christopher Hogwood; Patricia McConnell (For the Love of a Dog and Calling All Pets) on teaching/training dogs; and lastly, most curiously and confusingly, Barbara J. King (Evolving God) discusses the rudimentary qualities of religion as seen in great apes.
That's right. Religion and apes. Take a moment, if you need, before going on.
To quote program host Jim Fleming:
I will state here a very important distinction: At no point does King assert that great apes have religion.
The episode link is an audio file (RealMedia); the segment starts right around 40:55.
To reiterate: Nobody is saying apes have religion. Not even, in this context, Goodall. Much of the rest of the program discussion considers aspects of those four behaviors. In discussing empathy, King recalls the 1996 incident at Brookfield Zoo when a female gorilla protected and in essence rescued an injured human child who fell into the habitat. At approximately 45.58, King offers an example from the wild:
The thing is that it's a lot to take at once. By the time you get to the bit about the bonobo and the squirrel, you will find yourself truly in surreal territory.
Don't worry, though. Steve Paulson makes the pertinent point:
If people are willing to give King some credibility here, most will see their definitions of religion begin to crumble. (Well, if they weren't already captivated by the idea of primates and the roots of religious behavior.) And those familiar with Armstrong's work will better understand the influence it can have over anthropology, psychology, and religion itself. There are dimensions of ourselves, as individuals, awaiting discovery if only we stop leaving it to the religionists to define religion and faith. Many who are atheistic or anti-religious would reconsider those positions if they were not obliged by custom or principle to define God and religion so narrowly as the faithful insist, in large part because if there is one thing an atheist can believe in, it is the personal experience. Even if all else is illusory, there is still something of a self to perceive and respond to the illusion. It would be better, I think, for people to have the chance to understand that religion relates to something we as humans do naturally, and when we look at religion in our communities today, we are seeing the most superficial strata, the accretions beneath which the roots of our religious functions are sublimated. The nonreligious need to know that what they are seeing is a circumstantial result; we humans may have bungled our religious functions, but there are reasons for that bungling. As with anything, there is no all-knowing, malevolent party aiming to distort everything. There is no Central Chauvinist Agency gathered in a back room somewhere conspiring about how to turn every moment into an opportunity to oppress women. There is no Devil hiding in Hell deciding how to make our faith in a benevolent God work against us at every turn. And though it is more likely, there is no capitalist conspiracy aiming to reduce humanity to servants of the self-proclaimed superhuman. Rather, what happens today is at least in part shaped by what has come before. Humans are finite, imperfect organisms. When the American slave owners said that it would be cruel to teach the slaves to read, or when the men believed it would be cruel to ask women to vote in elections, they actually believed it. Even though we might justly theorize that such perverse beliefs arise from whatever subconscious chambers in which we've sealed away our senses of guilt and shame, the result is a compelling belief. They did not sit back and chuckle to themselves about having stolen another day from their victims.
And so it is with religious behavior. Nature is not extraneous; we sense and respond to religious ideas for a reason, and it would be better to consider what that reason is than blindly stumbling and shouting about what God wants.
Okay, enough. I've transcribed enough of the segment; the point being that this is one of those things that you come across and suddenly find your presuppositions scattered across the floor like shards of a broken coffee cup. And, in true form, you'll just about think you've got the mess cleaned up when you manage to slice open your toe on one a tiny piece you hadn't noticed until it was too late.
For instance, I always reach back to the "fire god". Early gods rose inspired by awe and wrought in ignorance. Place the stones in a circle, contain the fire; this seems a practical thing to the modern human, but our prehistoric relationship to fire was one of intuition and discovery. Our mastery of fire is so important to our species that we write myths about it. That the transformation of something so awesome as fire into something an organism could contain, manipulate, and engage, should impress its way into human legend should not be surprising. We still attempt to do and achieve things that are beyond our expression; we're just better at pretending around our ignorance.
Barbara King, however, is reaching well beyond the fire gods. I am awestruck by the potential implications of such theories.
And, of course, my esteem for primates is in the process of raising itself; I don't know how that's going to turn out.
But take some time with this. I'll be searching out the book, and if all goes well, be able to give some thoughts on the subject at some point in the near future. This is one of those really cool things, though, that has the potential to radically alter the terms and boundaries of theological and religious discussion. I feel lucky, at least, to have the chance to think about these things. It's been thousands of years, and now that it's here, relatively few of us will get the chance, and even fewer will take it up.
Really ... this is so cool ....
____________________
Notes:
Wisconsin Public Radio. "Animal Crossings". To the Best of Our Knowledge. January 21, 2007. See http://www.wpr.org/book/070121a.html
• Wisconsin Public Radio: http://www.wpr.org
• To the Best of Our Knowledge: http://ttbook.org
• Audio link (RealMedia): http://broadcast.uwex.edu:8080/ramgen/wpr/bok/bok070909b.rm
• To the Best of Our Knowledge: http://ttbook.org
• Audio link (RealMedia): http://broadcast.uwex.edu:8080/ramgen/wpr/bok/bok070909b.rm
Last edited:
