On Religion

Have you seen “Conclave” yet? “Conclave is a 2024 mystery thriller film directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan, based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris. The film stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini. In the film, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes) organizes a papal conclave to elect the next pope and finds himself investigating secrets and scandals about each candidate.” Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence —- sort of the emcee of the gathering of the world’s cardinals —- makes an opening speech in which he observes —-if I may paraphrase —- that faith only has meaning if we have doubts.

I personally have no doubts about the existence of GOD. How else do you explain our universe? (And don’t tell me The Big Bang, unless you are prepared to explain where the material for the Bang, and thus the universe, originated, how it got there, and where it is going… questions I submit will never be adequately answered by any or all of our science.) However, it takes a giant leap of faith to get from there to the corollary conclusion that we humans are immortal. There is nothing I would like better to believe, having recently lost my wife, Joey Cain. I want to believe that she is waiting “up there” for me to join here. Try as I may, that’s a leap of faith across the River Styx that I have yet to accomplish.

The survival instinct is powerful indeed. And nowhere is it more dramatically manifested than in the persistence of organized religions. Despite being (quite literally) bedeviled for decades by sexual-assault scandals within the priesthood, the Roman Catholic Church’s resilience is undeniable. “Over the past century, the number of Catholics around the globe has more than tripled, from an estimated 291 million in 1910 to nearly 1.1 billion as of 2010, according to a comprehensive demographic study by the Pew Research Center.” Organized religion more broadly demonstrates comparable sustainability. Google AI Overview reports that 84% of all humans subscribe to one or another of the world’s organized religions.

Two views of the origin of organized religions come to my mind. The first is that they are GOD’s conduits to us. Their weird, but often-times lovely, tales present GOD in ways that are comprehensible to people. Thus did GOD choose to inspire the founders and leaders of the world’s great religions. The other is that religious founders and leaders simply exploit our primal urge toward immortality in order to consolidate their power and exploit us. Karl Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the people.” Don’t be jealous about what we at the top have. Don’t be sad about your own miserable lives. Do what we tell you to do, behave yourselves, and all the misery will be made up for in your next life. Take your pick.

Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence calls for the leap of faith. Many who attempt that leap fall short and suffer a crisis of faith. I personally witnessed the mass exodus of priests and nuns from the Church during the sixties and seventies. The priest who married Joey and me in 1970 was among them, leading our flower girl to inquire of us, “Are you guys still married?” And Church leaders are as eager as the rest of us for evidence of GOD’s presence in our lives. “The Church, particularly the Catholic Church, investigates claims of miracles through a rigorous process that involves gathering detailed documentation, medical examinations by expert panels, and thorough analysis to ensure there is no natural explanation, with the ultimate goal of confirming a miracle only if it can be attributed solely to divine intervention and not to any known scientific cause; this process often includes a ‘Miracle Commission’ made up of theologians and medical professionals appointed by the Vatican to review evidence.” (Google AI Overview again)

To me that sounds a lot like Sherlock Holmes’s technique: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Magic is all around us… sort of. Arthur C, Clarke (best remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey) observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s not to say it IS magic. But does that really matter, if we focus on the effect, rather than the cause? By the same logic, if we choose to take Cardinal Lawrence’s leap of faith, does it really matter whether there’s an afterlife or not? If there is, then we’ll have been vindicated in our commitment. If not, well, we’ll be dead and gone, making the matter moot. Either way, one having taken the leap will have enjoyed the comfort it provides while yet alive… regardless of whether religion is GOD’s way of opening a channel to humankind or a tool of the elite to acquire and retain their power.

You will respond that, if it’s the latter, then it’s keeping the world’s poor from bettering themselves in this life. My answer is that it’s a trade off, and who are you or I to say it isn’t a fair one. I certainly will take the Roman Church over Kim Jong Un’s North Korea every time. Eliminating organized religion is no solution to human inequality; for decades, here in the U.S. a relentless decline in religious affiliation has been occurring in tandem with a relentless widening of the wealth gap.

At the end of the day, as at the end of “Conclave,” I am left with the (reluctant) conclusion that on balance religion (probably) provides more comfort than coercion. Trouble is, like Leonard Cohen near his own death,

I've seen you change the water into wine
I've seen you change it back to water, too
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don't get high with you

But, hey, that’s just me.