| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"words of truth" |
| Date: |
18 Sep 2005 03:49:03 PM |
| Object: |
Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
June 15, 2004
by Sara Miller
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_12_121/ai_n6173770
SOME IDEAS ARE so potent as to be world-changing. For Rodney Stark,
Christianity encompasses just such a set of ideas. In his view,
Christian beliefs and images of God shaped the course of Western
civilization. And not only that; they changed it for the better.
Stark is a leading sociologist of religion who draws on a formidable
body of empirical research to explain how religious beliefs spread and
why religious groups flourish or fail. While some thinkers regard
belief in the supernatural as incidental to the practice of religion,
Stark finds it essential.
He is also convinced that a prejudice against religious belief has
distorted modern scholarship and continues to infect academic opinion.
He has challenged most of the prominent modern theories of religion,
including Marxism (religion is a mask for class consciousness),
functionalism (religion serves as a moral restraint or social glue) and
psychological reductionism (religion is a form of infantile wish
fulfillment).
Stark also dissents from the views of two giants of sociology: Max
Weber, who regarded religious consciousness as nonrational, and Emile
Durkheim, who contended that ritual, not belief, is the core of
religion and that society itself, not God or the gods, is the real
object of worship.
Stark offers an alternative theory. His main propositions: religion is
a reasonable human activity; beliefs about the supernatural are
religions' central and most consequential aspect; beliefs are spread
not by cultural flat or coercion, but through networks of family and
friends; religious practices and institutions may rise and fall, but
the human demand for religion will not wither away.
Looking to broaden the application of his sociological tools, Stark,
who recently joined the faculty at Baylor University, has in the past
decade turned his attention to history. This work has led to another of
his contentions: the most powerful and progressive religions idea is
monotheism.
In his two most recent historical analyses, One True God (2001) and For
the Glory of God (2003), Stark argues that monotheistic belief not only
shaped Western history but ,also cultivated and in some cases gave
birth to values that changed the world for the better. In the
forthcoming Victories of Reason he will go even further, contending
that the most significant advances in knowledge, liberty, human rights
and material well-being--what we like to call progress--stem not from
Greece or the Enlightenment or modernity but from Christianity itself.
"There comes a time when you have to choose sides," lie observes.
"Either you think Western civilization is a good thing and that
Christianity has been a major piece of it, or you don't. I do believe,
in Western civilization, I make no bones about that. The politically
correct doesn't cut it for me."
Much of the debate over Stark's work has focused on his application of
"rational choice theory" to religion. Originally derived from
economics, rational choice theory is now used across the social
sciences to explain human behavior as a self-interested, choice-making
affair. Applied to religion, the theory holds that humans will choose
and pursue spiritual goods in the same way they pursue material
ones--according to their interests and by calculation. When choosing
religious affiliation and level of commitment, people will weigh
rewards against costs and they will try to get the most for their
investment. Religion, by this reckoning, is an exchange of goods with
God or the gods.
Rational choice is a presupposition of another sociological model
embraced by Stark: the "theory of religious economies," which posits
that churches and other religious groups operate in a market in which
they must compete for adherents. The more open the market, the stronger
the competition will be.
Critics of these approaches worry that the language of "cost" and
"risk," and file model of churches as religions "firms" competing for
market "share" and of believers as "investors" whose religious
preferences and affiliations are likened to "portfolios," reduce
religion to yet another marketable product and turn believers into
consumers. Proponents, on the other hand, point out that Jesus himself
spoke repeatedly of loss and gain, of pearls and treasures, of hoarding
farmers and investing stewards. He was, after all, a man of promises,
and he made offers.
"The songs we sang when I was growing up," Stark points out, "almost
all told about a religious reward--what a friend we have in Jesus, all
our sins and griefs to bear; we're not alone; there is salvation out
there."
That economic terms apply to religious behavior indicates a larger
truth for Stark: both economic and religious choices are governed by
reason. "To the extent that I'm a rational choice person, with a small
R and a small C, all I'm saying is that religious commitments are not
discreditable acts. They're sensible, sane, often very well-thought-out
kinds of behaviors.
"Of course, we make lots of mistakes and we have lots of impulses, but
people are as sensible about their religion as they are about
everything else--no more sensible perhaps, but surely no less. What
I've fought my whole life is the 'irrational choice theory'--that
people are religious because they don't know any better or they can't
help themselves. In any other area of social science, scholars
recognize that people are choosing and thinking, but many scholars
don't like religion, and so people aren't 'allowed to choose that."
BOSTON UNIVERSITY sociologist Nancy Ammerman is sympathetic to Stark's
point that religion is rational, but has reservations about focusing on
exchange and reward. "The notion that religion is fundamentally about
getting doesn't ultimately ring true to me," said Ammerman. "It seems
to me religious life is about a relationship between human beings and a
divinity, and relationships have other dimensions besides exchange.
They're about persons, emotions, shared experiences--a whole range of
things that aren't captured inside an explanatory scheme that says what
we're about is 'I'm after things I can't otherwise get and that you can
give me.'"
Ammerman also finds rational choice theory vulnerable in its emphasis
on the individual. "It's a particularly modern notion that I'm going to
look at my world and assess 'all the options and figure out what's best
for me. Too much of life was routine and delimited in earlier times,
and there wasn't enough of a range of possibilities to make such
choices. It's not that individuality or choice never existed before,
but that these are rather dramatically accentuated in the modern
situation."
Stark does not deny that the world limits choices, but he insists that
options almost always exist: "Even in a society with only one religion,
most people choose not to be very religious. In other words, if you
can't choose denomination, you can choose [level of] intensity.
Anthropologists will tell you that in the smallest tribes there are
atheists. Mid lots of Amish kids leave, after all. So there are choices
out there, and in the end we have to decide."
While Stark's early sociological research showed that people come to
new religions and new churches through the testimony and influence of
others, he maintains that the message is as important as the messenger.
In fact, the stronger the message, the more zealous that messenger is
likely to be--and the more effective. This, he argues, accounts for the
success of strict or conservative churches in a so-called secular age.
"Strong churches are strong in the first instance because of doctrine,"
he says. "It's their conception of God--is it vivid or is it
vague?--that determines the power of churches. One of the things that
I've found ironic about most of the declining denominations--and
they're mostly the liberal ones with the fairly vague theology--is that
there must be millions of people out there for whom those are the
compatible religious ideas. But the difference between them and those
growing Baptist churches is that the Baptists go out and scare up some
members and the liberals don't--and I think the reasons are doctrinal.
There isn't enough there to fire them up to go out and call on their
neighbors. You can look at the Episcopalians and the United Church of
Christ and find some congregations that are doing very well, but they
tend to be more conservative theologically."
For Ammerman, the notion that strong beliefs determine the success of
churches suggests "a very Protestant and for that matter a very
conservative Protestant way of understanding the strength of religion.
Within Catholicism or Judaism you can be a very strong, practicing
religious person without necessarily knowing what the beliefs are
supposed to be or believing very strongly. The point is that you're
orienting your whole life around a set of practices that puts you into
a kind of relationship with the sacred, with God. It's not about having
strong beliefs about salvation or about the Bible or about the
afterlife; it's about how you practice a set of rituals or how you live
your life, as in the case of orthodox Judaism, that orients you toward
God. A lot of people argue that you can be a very" good Jew and not
believe in God!"
Stark maintains that strong belief is precisely why traditional
Catholicism and orthodox Judaism are experiencing a revival. "If you
don't think there's a higher power to appeal to," he observes, "prayer
is nonsense. Rituals are powerful because they have meaning, and it
seems to me this meaning is the ball game. What does the Bible say?
That he who believes is baptized. So there's pretty good company out
there arguing that the core of Christianity is a set of beliefs."
IF STRONG IMAGES of God impassion evangelizers and attract converts
today, Stark reasons, such images should also explain the historical
appeal of monotheistic faiths. In fact, he is convinced it is the
content of monotheistic belief that there is one true, ubiquitous,
compassionate, just, all-powerful God--that has given the three great
monotheistic faiths a decided advantage.
"The one true God has enormously attractive features compared to a
whole rabble of little gods," he says. "First of all, those little gods
can't do much for you. Second, you're not at all sure they would.
That's why it seems to me historically that the great monotheisms have
always overwhelmed the polytheisms. And at the philosophical level it
makes better sense. The God of Christianity or Judaism was a much more
credible kind of presentation to Romans than was that whole pantheon."
A large part of that credibility is based on trust: God cares. "The
monotheistic gods offer an enormous amount of concern for us," Stark
explains. "And to the extent they're concerned about us, there are
certain protections that we call morality that those kinds of gods
really get behind. They say, "I can see you anywhere, and I care, and I
punish.' One of the great things that distinguishes the monotheisms is
the assumption that God really does care and consequently imposes a
moral standard."
In his first historical work, The Rise of Christianity (1997), Stark
revealed how faith in a compassionate God revitalized Western culture.
Because Christians believed in a loving God who in turn enjoined them
to love one another, and because this love was not restricted to family
or even tribe, Christians cared for one another in ways that were
unusual in the pagan and Jewish worlds. By sharing things in common,
nursing the sick and protecting women and children, Christians made the
promises of God effective and thus attractive. Converts, Stark argues,
"rationally chose" Christianity because it offered the best life--and
die most humanity--they could get.
But conversion alone did not account for the growth of the early
church. It grew for internal reasons, which Stark proposes were also a
fruit of faith; respect for women and unborn life led to increased
fertility, care of the sick to decreased mortality. If Christianity had
not offered a credible, compassionate God, it not only wouldn't have
flourished, it might not have survived at all.
The monotheistic God possesses another, equally powerful advantage:
rationality. For Christians, the fact that God's ways are rational
means that they can be understood, gradually and in part, by human
reason.
In For the Glory of God, Stark makes a case for the progressive and
rational nature of Christian belief by exposing a number of falsehoods
and antireligious myths that have enjoyed a long run in the popular
imagination and the academic world. These myths include the notion that
fanatical inquisitors were responsible for the execution of millions of
alleged witches; that benighted medieval churchmen suppressed
scientific knowledge; and that plantation economics, not Christian
moral fervor, brought an end to slavery. All these notions, Stark
insists, are untrue.
Stark dismisses claims by popular writers that religious zealots
executed "millions" of witches. His sources put the death toll closer
to 60,000. The historical record yields other statistical surprises as
well. Between 1540 and 1700, for example, the Spanish Inquisition
reviewed 44,701 charges of heresy, blasphemy, sexual offenses,
superstition and witchcraft. Only 826 of these resulted in executions.
"I was astonished when I began reading on the Inquisition and
realizing, my God, these people hardly ever executed anybody! I was led
to believe they executed tens of thousands and that it wasn't a good
Saturday afternoon unless they burned 480 people. They probably burned
480 people in Spain all told. The idea that the real purpose of the
Inquisition was to welcome people back into the church properly just
escapes everybody."
Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell of the University of California at
Santa Barbara believes Stark has correctly identified misconceptions
about witch hunts, including claims about the death toll. That kind of
exaggeration, says Russell, "distorts not only the facts but the entire
perception of the role of" the church and the role of Christianity and
the nature of society. It's like believing that people in the Middle
Ages thought the earth was flat. It gives us another dub with which to
beat those ignorant people back then, who were of course mainly
Christians."
Russell also confirms Stark's finding that the Inquisition acted as a
brake on the public craze rather than as fuel. "In fact," Russell
notes, "both the Inquisition and the Parlement or supreme court of
France, where you have some strong central authority, were very
effective in restraining the convictions for witchcraft--most of which
come out of isolated areas of weak governance. When those cases are
appealed up to responsible bodies of lawyers, judges and
administrators, a vast number and even a sizable majority of them are
thrown out, because these authorities are trained to examine evidence
and to evaluate it. So just because Mrs. Smith says that Mrs. Brown is
a witch isn't enough."
"The better educated people wanted some strenuous proof," says Stark,
"and that was the attitude of the Spanish Inquisition: 'I believe in
witches, but I've never met one! I've looked at 1,800 people, not a
witch among them, and I've rebaptized all of them.'"
THE APPEAL TO reason also dominated Christian learning. Science, Stark
points out, did not emerge in opposition to Christianity but within it:
the first universities were established by the church, and early
science was conducted almost exclusively by people in holy orders.
Stark's roster of the most eminent 16th- and 17th-century scientists
reveals that a majority were personally devout and many were themselves
church officials. What is significant for Stark is that the first
scientists were not only religiously affiliated but religiously
inspired. 8eience was a calling to discover God's plan in the
arrangement of nature, or, as Stark puts it, to "know God's handiwork."
Such knowledge was considered attainable, he says, because monotheisms
are motivated by what God has revealed and promised; they are thus
future-oriented. Polytheisms, essence religions and mystery cults, on
the other hand, invoke unalterable forces and eternal returns; they
attribute events to inevitability, inscrutability and whim. Real
science--meaning a system of generalized, testable principles--emerged
only where belief in a rational creator and an orderly creation
prevailed.
"The ultimate basis for a scientific society requires that you make the
assumption that God created something," Stark explains, "and in the
major monotheisms the sky, is a lot higher. Gods aren't in every tree
and rock. Stars don't move because God has sent angels to push them. I
do think the philosopher was fight who said you've got to believe that
God is a mystery, that can be solved--that the universe runs on the
basis of rules that, once established, need no supervision."
Even today, Stark says, the alleged incompatibility of science and
faith is not supported by the facts. Recent surveys show that more than
half of "hard" scientists such as physicists and chemists report a
belief in God. A similar profile emerges in the life, sciences. And if
hard science is not antagonistic to religion, neither is strong
religion inimical to science, insists Stark. "The most ardent
evangelical Christians assume that the truth exists. And they don't
just mean that Cod is there but that the world is there."
As for secular scientists, Stark surmises that they "now take as a
given aim very frequently don't know the origin of the kinds of
principles that people like Newton and Copernicus and others took from
Christian theology. But once those principles--that the universe is
lawful and predictable and knowable--are out and accepted, people can
affirm them directly and don't necessarily need to see the foundational
statements that got us there."
Jeffrey Burton Russell points out that among historians of science
"there's a strong debate going on between those who understand that the
development of science is basically a Western European phenomenon, and
that this is because of its Christian or Judeo-Christian roots, and
those who maintain that religion blocked the progress of science until
the 18th and 19th centuries, and that [science has] to struggle against
religion. Scholars feel very, very strongly about these things."
STRONG FEELINGS also attend the scholarly debate over the role of
Christianity in the abolition of slavery. Historians agree that
abolition was born in religions circles. What they don't agree on is
the extent--if any--to which religious beliefs informed the increment
and guaranteed its eventual success. Stark argues that only adherents
of monotheism, with their faith in God's universal justice, compassion
and uncompromising moral code, were in a position to deduce that
slavery was sinful and thereby propel the liberation of slaves.
Christians reasoned their way from believing in divine righteousness to
seeing the immorality of human bondage to advocating total, outright
abolition. That it took 1,800 years reflects, for Stark, both the
progressive nature of theology and the fact that slavery virtually
disappeared from Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire. It
was not until the age of exploration that the issue arose again for
Christians.
One of the misconceptions about New World slavery that Stark is eager
to correct is the role of the Catholic Church and Catholic teaching. It
was not, he argues, that the Catholic Church did not condemn slavery,
as many believe; it was that no one listened. In the 15th and 16th
centuries, not one but five popes issued bulls condemning in no
uncertain terms the enslavement of Indians, and eventually Africans, in
the New World. Two more weighed in during the 19th century. Yet New
World colonies, Stark explains, were controlled by crowns, not
churches. Thus while Jesuits fought for the rights of slaves and
defended converted native communities, Spanish and Portuguese
authorities supported slavery wholeheartedly--and armies are stronger
than friars.
Stark also finds that slave "codes" adopted in Catholic French and
Spanish colonies allowed slaves a greater measure of dignity and even
freedom than codes installed by the Protestant British and Dutch.
Historians know that slaves living under Catholic-influenced codes were
baptized and permitted to marry. In some places slaves could even own
property and purchase their own freedom.
To these facts Stark adds an overlooked piece of data: the U.S. census
of 18:30 shows that the percentage of free blacks was significantly
higher in Catholic New Orleans (41.7 percent of the total black
population) than in other southern cities (6.4 percent in Charleston,
South Carolina; 1.2 percent in Natchez, Mississippi). In Louisiana as a
whole, Stark notes, "thirteen times as many slaves were freed as next
door in Mississippi.
"Now if some policies that apply to slaves make it easy to become free
and other policies make it almost impossible, that is a real
demonstration that ideas, and in this case religious ideas, matter. The
fact that the Church of England declared that the slaves were not
baptizable humans and that the Catholic Church baptized them made a
huge difference in the lives of the people we're talking about."
The story of abolition is a complicated one, as Stark's investigation
attests. Historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College points out that "what
makes Christian support of abolitionism tricky [to analyze] is that
there were also substantial Christian voices and movements oriented in
two other directions: one actually in support of slavery and the other
against abolition. Some Christians felt that abolitionists were social
and theological radicals--and in fact, some of them were--and so they
opposed abolitionism. The main stance of the Catholic Church, for
example, was not so much pro-slavery as anti-abolitionism, because the
church associated abolitionism with extreme individualism."
Yet Noll does credit the early antislavery views of Dominican
missionary Bartolome de Las Casas, and he notes the importance of Pope
Paul III's pronouncement condemning the treatment of natives as if they
were animals. "That's not abolitionism," observes Noll, "but it is a
statement about human nature and human worth. The really critical mass
of antislave activity, however, came in Britain, with the whole circle
of mostly Anglican evangelical philanthropists. For the British, it was
the actual experience of slavery in some of its most brutal forms in
the West Indies that precipitated thinking hard about slavery, which
then precipitated biblical and theological arguments against it, which
then led to political action."
Stark allows that the British abolition movement succeeded
sooner--thanks to strong parliamentary action and Britain's vigorous
interdiction of slave vessels. But in British colonies, too, he
maintains, it was not secular Enlightenment notions or economic shifts
or naval superiority that brought an end to slavery. It was devout
Christian advocacy.
IN THE FORTHCOMING Victories of Beason, Stark will attribute to
Christian rationality and advocacy nothing less than the emergence of
capitalism (pioneered by medieval monks, not industrious Protestants)
and the foundational principles of equality and individual liberty that
informed that most conspicuous Western achievement of all: modern
republican democracy. While this last argument has a distinguished
pedigree, Stark puts the case in boldest terms: "All that 18th-eentury
philosophizing on things like individualism and liberty was coming
straight out of 1,800 years of Christianity."
"Nobody asks where we got our notion that people ought to have some
kind of moral equality," he observes. "But it seems to me the origins
of these notions are in the New Testament. Jesus was constantly
breaking the rules about whom you associated with. The fundamental
Western assumption is that we're all equal in the eyes of God and that
that matters above and beyond everything else. You've got Paul saying
this repeatedly and Jesus demonstrating it and theologians
progressively stressing it."
For Stark, refusing to acknowledge the influence of Christianity on
Western civilization suggests an advanced stage of wrong-headedness:
"What I find so astonishing is that the people who are willing to blame
Christianity for having 'destroyed' civilization for 2,000 years are
unwilling to see that it had any effects on another level. If we think
that there is such a thing as Western civilization, that it is one of a
kind and changed the world in very good ways as well as perhaps in bad
ones, to fail to see that the central institution throughout most of
this period is the church, is ignorant."
The walls of prejudice have weakened over recent years, Stark reports,
as religious believers have entered the social sciences. Yet the
secular curriculum has not begun in tremble, let alone crumble. Jeffrey
Burton Russell suggests that a full recovery of Christianity's
contributions to Western civilization is far from imminent: "I think
it'll take a generation or two, probably two or three, even to get back
to some kind of a balance."
The value of Christianity to Western culture is no point of contention
at Baylor. After a 30-year teaching career at the University of
Washington, Stark recently became Baylor's first University Professor
of the Social Sciences. As such, his role will be to attract talented
Christian scholars in the field, enhancing the school's academic
profile in accordance with its renewed religious mission. The goal, as
Stark sees it, is "to give Baylor the resources it needs to participate
in the national cultural wars." He adds: "There's no reason that a good
Christian university can't be a good university."
Of his own religious beliefs, Stark is reticent to speak at length, in
part, he says, because they are in some ways fairly new. He had
considered himself a cultural Christian but not a professing one. That
has changed. "At Baylor they do require a profession of faith, and I
made one in good conscience. I could not have made such a profession
years ago. I've never been an atheist, but I had difficulty with much
of the paganism of the New Testament. But I worked through it,
realizing that God speaks to people in terms they can understand and
that this is what the pagan world could understand at that time.
"Calvin had a wonderful line about revelation being the ultimate
condescension, that we are incapable of understanding God in his
reality and so he has to condescend to us, to speak to us within our
limits. That doesn't mean it isn't true, only that this was the form
the message had to take. And when you recognize, as Angustine did, that
theology is progressive, the paganism becomes an irrelevance."
What remains deeply relevant, in Stark's eyes, is the potency of
religious ideas, of individual faith in those ideas, and of one person
telling another the good news. That an intimate acquaintance with God
and a handful of New Testament notions could have seeded the
civilization we call Western--rational, bountiful, progressive and
free--surpasses the concept of relevance altogether. The irony is that
while Christianity inspired a moral fervor for things unseen but
possible, its achievements are now so embedded in the culture as to be
practically invisible.
"In our time," Stark reflects, "people can be doing Christian things
mid not even know it." One thing we do know is that Jesus instructed
his followers to become leaven in the world. As Stark sees it, that is
precisely what they did--and history proves it.
Sara Miller is a freelance writer in Chicago.
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| User: "Llanzlan Klazmon" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 09:26:17 PM |
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"words of truth" <wordsoftruth21@lycos.com> wrote in
news:1127076543.167115.46890@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
So which of the Christian gods do you believe in? Father, Ghost, Son,
Satan, Mary, Michael, Gabriel etc.
Klazmon.
<SNIP>
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| User: "Denis Loubet" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 05:22:13 PM |
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"words of truth" <wordsoftruth21@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1127076543.167115.46890@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
(snip)
He is also convinced that a prejudice against religious belief has
distorted modern scholarship and continues to infect academic opinion.
(snip)
Nooo! Really? It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that you fuckers
burned people at the stake not so long ago?
Or does it have more to do with the fact that Christianity is trying to
destroy science.
--
Denis Loubet
dloubet@io.com
http://www.io.com/~dloubet
http://www.ashenempires.com
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| User: "Libertarius" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
19 Sep 2005 04:21:25 PM |
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===>Because it is impossible to offer any EVIDENCE
or PROOF of any "God". Therefore, the only way it makes
"sense" to the the credulous is by accepting it
ON "FAITH". -- L.
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| User: "Vivapadrepios personal Cthulhu" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 04:49:45 PM |
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Cometh the hour, cometh "words of truth" <wordsoftruth21@lycos.com>
who, with imperceptibly subtle footwork in alt.atheism, gave us this:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
June 15, 2004
by Sara Miller
Turds, why are you telling us this in alt.atheism? Is it because you
hate us so much it gives you some sort of sense of satisfaction to
flaunt your ignorance and stupidity in front of us like some grotesque
cross between a court jester and a serial killer?
------------------------------------------------
"The real dichotomy in today's world is between reason and religion.
The future of civilisation rests upon how many people realise that and do something about it."
D Silverman FLAHN, SMLAHN
AA #2208
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| User: "Josef Balluch" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 06:58:31 PM |
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In a message sent 'round the world, words of truth poured fuel on the
fire with the following:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
June 15, 2004
by Sara Miller
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_12_121/ai_n6173770
....
Applied to religion, the theory holds that humans will choose
and pursue spiritual goods in the same way they pursue material
ones--according to their interests and by calculation. When choosing
religious affiliation and level of commitment, people will weigh
rewards against costs and they will try to get the most for their
investment. Religion, by this reckoning, is an exchange of goods with
God or the gods.
Rational choice is a presupposition of another sociological model
embraced by Stark: the "theory of religious economies," which posits
that churches and other religious groups operate in a market in which
they must compete for adherents. The more open the market, the stronger
the competition will be.
< chuckle! >
Capitalism meets Theism.
....
Between 1540 and 1700, for example, the Spanish Inquisition
reviewed 44,701 charges of heresy, blasphemy, sexual offenses,
superstition and witchcraft. Only 826 of these resulted in executions.
"I was astonished when I began reading on the Inquisition and
realizing, my God, these people hardly ever executed anybody!
Which completely misses the point. How does a religion of "love" justify
the execution of ANYONE?
And since Stark sees religion as an "open market", where "... people
will weigh rewards against costs and they will try to get the most for
their investment", then on what basis can people be faulted for their
choices?
....
THE APPEAL TO reason also dominated Christian learning. Science, Stark
points out, did not emerge in opposition to Christianity but within it:
the first universities were established by the church, and early
science was conducted almost exclusively by people in holy orders.
Yawwwwn.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca5/ancientgreecescience/
http://www.aldokkan.com/science/science.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-08/03/content_3302258.htm
....
STRONG FEELINGS also attend the scholarly debate over the role of
Christianity in the abolition of slavery. Historians agree that
abolition was born in religions circles. What they don't agree on is
the extent--if any--to which religious beliefs informed the increment
and guaranteed its eventual success.
There are more slaves today than at the height of the Atlantic slave
trade.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0901/p16s01-wogi.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/08/women.trafficking/
http://www.fatdawg.com/slavery2.html
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2004/julio/vier30/31esclav.html
....
One of the misconceptions about New World slavery that Stark is eager
to correct is the role of the Catholic Church and Catholic teaching. It
was not, he argues, that the Catholic Church did not condemn slavery,
as many believe; it was that no one listened.
So much for the moral authority of the Church.
....
Regards,
Josef
Religion is the highest vanity.
-- Friedrich Hebbel
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| User: "John Jenkins" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 05:57:19 PM |
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On 18 Sep 2005 13:49:03 -0700, "words of truth"
<wordsoftruth21@lycos.com> wrote:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
June 15, 2004
by Sara Miller
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_12_121/ai_n6173770
"There comes a time when you have to choose sides," lie observes.
"Either you think Western civilization is a good thing and that
Christianity has been a major piece of it, or you don't. I do believe,
in Western civilization, I make no bones about that. The politically
correct doesn't cut it for me."
The perfect example why faith in god does not make sense: islam! Just
another example of cultic poison in peoples minds.
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| User: "Uncle Vic" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 05:53:46 PM |
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Once upon a time in alt.atheism, dear sweet words of truth (wordsoftruth21
@lycos.com) made the light shine upon us with this:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christianity is polytheism. And it sure as hell doesn't stand up to
rationality.
--
Uncle Vic
aa#2011
Supervisor, EAC Department of little adhesive-backed "L" shaped
chrome-plastic doo-dads to add feet to Jesus fish department
http://home.comcast.net/~vickman/
Plonked by Raytard
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| User: "Colin Day" |
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| Title: Re: Rational Choice: Why Faith In God Makes Sense |
18 Sep 2005 10:22:46 PM |
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words of truth wrote:
Rational choice: why monotheism makes sense
Christian Century
June 15, 2004
by Sara Miller
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_12_121/ai_n6173770
SOME IDEAS ARE so potent as to be world-changing. For Rodney Stark,
Christianity encompasses just such a set of ideas. In his view,
Christian beliefs and images of God shaped the course of Western
civilization. And not only that; they changed it for the better.
Stark is a leading sociologist of religion who draws on a formidable
body of empirical research to explain how religious beliefs spread and
why religious groups flourish or fail. While some thinkers regard
belief in the supernatural as incidental to the practice of religion,
Stark finds it essential.
He is also convinced that a prejudice against religious belief has
distorted modern scholarship and continues to infect academic opinion.
He has challenged most of the prominent modern theories of religion,
including Marxism (religion is a mask for class consciousness),
functionalism (religion serves as a moral restraint or social glue) and
psychological reductionism (religion is a form of infantile wish
fulfillment).
Stark also dissents from the views of two giants of sociology: Max
Weber, who regarded religious consciousness as nonrational, and Emile
Durkheim, who contended that ritual, not belief, is the core of
religion and that society itself, not God or the gods, is the real
object of worship.
Stark offers an alternative theory. His main propositions: religion is
a reasonable human activity; beliefs about the supernatural are
religions' central and most consequential aspect; beliefs are spread
not by cultural flat or coercion, but through networks of family and
friends; religious practices and institutions may rise and fall, but
the human demand for religion will not wither away.
Looking to broaden the application of his sociological tools, Stark,
who recently joined the faculty at Baylor University, has in the past
decade turned his attention to history. This work has led to another of
his contentions: the most powerful and progressive religions idea is
monotheism.
In his two most recent historical analyses, One True God (2001) and For
the Glory of God (2003), Stark argues that monotheistic belief not only
shaped Western history but ,also cultivated and in some cases gave
birth to values that changed the world for the better. In the
forthcoming Victories of Reason he will go even further, contending
that the most significant advances in knowledge, liberty, human rights
and material well-being--what we like to call progress--stem not from
Greece or the Enlightenment or modernity but from Christianity itself.
And the evidence for this is what?
"There comes a time when you have to choose sides," lie observes.
"Either you think Western civilization is a good thing and that
Christianity has been a major piece of it, or you don't. I do believe,
in Western civilization, I make no bones about that. The politically
correct doesn't cut it for me."
But how much of Western Civilization is Christian, and how much is secular?
Much of the debate over Stark's work has focused on his application of
"rational choice theory" to religion. Originally derived from
economics, rational choice theory is now used across the social
sciences to explain human behavior as a self-interested, choice-making
affair. Applied to religion, the theory holds that humans will choose
and pursue spiritual goods in the same way they pursue material
ones--according to their interests and by calculation. When choosing
religious affiliation and level of commitment, people will weigh
rewards against costs and they will try to get the most for their
investment. Religion, by this reckoning, is an exchange of goods with
God or the gods.
Pascal's Wager? But how does one make a rational choice involving the
supernatural? Also, how many people approach religion in this manner?
Does the average member of a church weigh such factors, or does he or
she simply adopt the religion of his or her parents? Is this how the
early Christian martyrs approached faith? Is this why Luther posted his
Ninety-Five Theses?
Rational choice is a presupposition of another sociological model
embraced by Stark: the "theory of religious economies," which posits
that churches and other religious groups operate in a market in which
they must compete for adherents. The more open the market, the stronger
the competition will be.
Critics of these approaches worry that the language of "cost" and
"risk," and file model of churches as religions "firms" competing for
market "share" and of believers as "investors" whose religious
preferences and affiliations are likened to "portfolios," reduce
religion to yet another marketable product and turn believers into
consumers. Proponents, on the other hand, point out that Jesus himself
spoke repeatedly of loss and gain, of pearls and treasures, of hoarding
farmers and investing stewards. He was, after all, a man of promises,
and he made offers.
"The songs we sang when I was growing up," Stark points out, "almost
all told about a religious reward--what a friend we have in Jesus, all
our sins and griefs to bear; we're not alone; there is salvation out
there."
That economic terms apply to religious behavior indicates a larger
truth for Stark: both economic and religious choices are governed by
reason. "To the extent that I'm a rational choice person, with a small
R and a small C, all I'm saying is that religious commitments are not
discreditable acts. They're sensible, sane, often very well-thought-out
kinds of behaviors.
"Of course, we make lots of mistakes and we have lots of impulses, but
people are as sensible about their religion as they are about
everything else--no more sensible perhaps, but surely no less. What
I've fought my whole life is the 'irrational choice theory'--that
people are religious because they don't know any better or they can't
help themselves. In any other area of social science, scholars
recognize that people are choosing and thinking, but many scholars
don't like religion, and so people aren't 'allowed to choose that."
What evidence does he have that people are sensible about their
religious choices? What evidence do they weigh?
Do Americans make rational choices about whay they eat? Do they make
rational choices about what they watch on TV?
BOSTON UNIVERSITY sociologist Nancy Ammerman is sympathetic to Stark's
point that religion is rational, but has reservations about focusing on
exchange and reward. "The notion that religion is fundamentally about
getting doesn't ultimately ring true to me," said Ammerman. "It seems
to me religious life is about a relationship between human beings and a
divinity, and relationships have other dimensions besides exchange.
They're about persons, emotions, shared experiences--a whole range of
things that aren't captured inside an explanatory scheme that says what
we're about is 'I'm after things I can't otherwise get and that you can
give me.'"
Ammerman also finds rational choice theory vulnerable in its emphasis
on the individual. "It's a particularly modern notion that I'm going to
look at my world and assess 'all the options and figure out what's best
for me. Too much of life was routine and delimited in earlier times,
and there wasn't enough of a range of possibilities to make such
choices. It's not that individuality or choice never existed before,
but that these are rather dramatically accentuated in the modern
situation."
Stark does not deny that the world limits choices, but he insists that
options almost always exist: "Even in a society with only one religion,
most people choose not to be very religious. In other words, if you
can't choose denomination, you can choose [level of] intensity.
Anthropologists will tell you that in the smallest tribes there are
atheists. Mid lots of Amish kids leave, after all. So there are choices
out there, and in the end we have to decide."
While Stark's early sociological research showed that people come to
new religions and new churches through the testimony and influence of
others, he maintains that the message is as important as the messenger.
In fact, the stronger the message, the more zealous that messenger is
likely to be--and the more effective. This, he argues, accounts for the
success of strict or conservative churches in a so-called secular age.
"Strong churches are strong in the first instance because of doctrine,"
he says. "It's their conception of God--is it vivid or is it
vague?--that determines the power of churches. One of the things that
I've found ironic about most of the declining denominations--and
they're mostly the liberal ones with the fairly vague theology--is that
there must be millions of people out there for whom those are the
compatible religious ideas. But the difference between them and those
growing Baptist churches is that the Baptists go out and scare up some
members and the liberals don't--and I think the reasons are doctrinal.
There isn't enough there to fire them up to go out and call on their
neighbors. You can look at the Episcopalians and the United Church of
Christ and find some congregations that are doing very well, but they
tend to be more conservative theologically."
For Ammerman, the notion that strong beliefs determine the success of
churches suggests "a very Protestant and for that matter a very
conservative Protestant way of understanding the strength of religion.
Within Catholicism or Judaism you can be a very strong, practicing
religious person without necessarily knowing what the beliefs are
supposed to be or believing very strongly. The point is that you're
orienting your whole life around a set of practices that puts you into
a kind of relationship with the sacred, with God. It's not about having
strong beliefs about salvation or about the Bible or about the
afterlife; it's about how you practice a set of rituals or how you live
your life, as in the case of orthodox Judaism, that orients you toward
God. A lot of people argue that you can be a very" good Jew and not
believe in God!"
Stark maintains that strong belief is precisely why traditional
Catholicism and orthodox Judaism are experiencing a revival. "If you
don't think there's a higher power to appeal to," he observes, "prayer
is nonsense. Rituals are powerful because they have meaning, and it
seems to me this meaning is the ball game. What does the Bible say?
That he who believes is baptized. So there's pretty good company out
there arguing that the core of Christianity is a set of beliefs."
And if you believe that there is a higher power to appeal to, is
IF STRONG IMAGES of God impassion evangelizers and attract converts
today, Stark reasons, such images should also explain the historical
appeal of monotheistic faiths. In fact, he is convinced it is the
content of monotheistic belief that there is one true, ubiquitous,
compassionate, just, all-powerful God--that has given the three great
monotheistic faiths a decided advantage.
Are we to evaluate belief systems on market share? What happened to truth?
"The one true God has enormously attractive features compared to a
whole rabble of little gods," he says. "First of all, those little gods
can't do much for you. Second, you're not at all sure they would.
That's why it seems to me historically that the great monotheisms have
always overwhelmed the polytheisms. And at the philosophical level it
makes better sense. The God of Christianity or Judaism was a much more
credible kind of presentation to Romans than was that whole pantheon."
A large part of that credibility is based on trust: God cares. "The
monotheistic gods offer an enormous amount of concern for us," Stark
explains. "And to the extent they're concerned about us, there are
certain protections that we call morality that those kinds of gods
really get behind. They say, "I can see you anywhere, and I care, and I
punish.' One of the great things that distinguishes the monotheisms is
the assumption that God really does care and consequently imposes a
moral standard."
In his first historical work, The Rise of Christianity (1997), Stark
revealed how faith in a compassionate God revitalized Western culture.
Because Christians believed in a loving God who in turn enjoined them
to love one another, and because this love was not restricted to family
or even tribe, Christians cared for one another in ways that were
unusual in the pagan and Jewish worlds. By sharing things in common,
nursing the sick and protecting women and children, Christians made the
promises of God effective and thus attractive. Converts, Stark argues,
"rationally chose" Christianity because it offered the best life--and
die most humanity--they could get.
The best life, by what standard?
But conversion alone did not account for the growth of the early
church. It grew for internal reasons, which Stark proposes were also a
fruit of faith; respect for women and unborn life led to increased
fertility, care of the sick to decreased mortality. If Christianity had
not offered a credible, compassionate God, it not only wouldn't have
flourished, it might not have survived at all.
And what was population growth around this time?
The monotheistic God possesses another, equally powerful advantage:
rationality. For Christians, the fact that God's ways are rational
means that they can be understood, gradually and in part, by human
reason.
I am fortunate that my Irony-o-meter was unplugged. No use blowing up
half a city.
In For the Glory of God, Stark makes a case for the progressive and
rational nature of Christian belief by exposing a number of falsehoods
and antireligious myths that have enjoyed a long run in the popular
imagination and the academic world. These myths include the notion that
fanatical inquisitors were responsible for the execution of millions of
alleged witches; that benighted medieval churchmen suppressed
scientific knowledge; and that plantation economics, not Christian
moral fervor, brought an end to slavery. All these notions, Stark
insists, are untrue.
Sherman wasn't particularly religious, nor was Grant. Oliver Howard was
religious, but he also let the religious Jackson outflank his corps at
Chancellorsville (OK, Hooker was in overall command).
<snip>
Colin Day aa #1500
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