The Tool of Religion.

Saw talk of the origin of Easter—pagan or not? While it may matter for historians, it doesn’t matter to most of us. Religion is mostly a tool. It’s a tool that should be improved to fit whatever needs the community has for it.

When I say it’s a tool, I mean it provides certain structures and outlets that tend to help a community thrive. If you lived in the ancient world without religion, you might starve in the long winter. But with religion, you might have to save food for a feast or as an offering to the source. In doing so, you would tend to plan and coordinate better with your neighbors and family, leading to being better prepared for the winter.

When I say it’s a tool, I mean that keeping track of the calendar was a burden for the ancient peoples. Having scholars who kept up with it so they could celebrate the right things at the right time meant all the rest of the calendar was also tracked. They could plant on time, harvest on time, all because they could worship on time.

The other scholarly efforts that get developed by a religious order serve to seed general scholarship. Oral traditions, copying texts, singing and ritual, architecture, and more have received boosts from efforts to improve religious practice. It provides something like a nucleation point.

When I say it’s a tool, I mean that certain people might not be satisfied with regular arguments, but if you tell them it’s because of God’s will, they will go along so as not to offend. That aspect of the tool has two edges. If the putative wisdom is specious, it can lead to things involving virgins and volcanoes. It can lead to ethnic cleansing. Atrocities.

If religions operate as described, we must admit that other organizations do the same. Governments, political parties, social movements, and any other communal practice can bring the same benefits and have the same drawbacks. Dysfunctional organizations harnessing racism or sexism on one side, with pro-social movements to grant civil rights or protect the environment on the other. But—of course—there can and are harmful factions of positive movements. There were militants during civil rights, there have been eco-terrorists.

The difference for the religious movement is that it is often primary, and claims and wants to be. Most other movements actively seek to loosely attach with religion, and do not make efforts to supplant it, as they see the religious practice as a powerful ally for a secular cause. It provides them a source of social connections and the basic moral foundation to argue for the changes they seek in society.

In the modern age, what do we ask of religion? What can it provide that we need, and what aspects of it ought to be diminished? If it is a tool for human development and maintenance, it deserves to be evaluated as a tool and modified as we see fit.

We have slowly done that, more in some religions than others. Respect for women, acceptance of science, among other movements have been crucial in modernizing religion. As we see our modern politics deficient, one hopes that religion can again become a force for change and good.