R352--PARAMETERS FOR OBJECTIVE STUDY OF RELIGION

The commonest and otherwise most notable failure in would-be scientific analyses of religion is confusing:

A religion without an ethic may be uncommon, though ethics without religion is common enough. What is SOTERIAL is on the boundary between the two: The Agent is God, but the effect being is on worshipers . . . or believers, singly or collectively. Most religions have some concept of being saved from something, but not all do. Instead of the defective definitions of "religion" in descriptions of it that avoid mentioning worship (except fans' worship of Elvis), I propose:

RELIGION is the WORSHIP of a Creator who may or may not control events in the created cosmos. The essence of worship is the return (sacrifice) of as perfect a part of creation as is available to the Creator as a recognition of the Creator's ownership of all that is . . . or of whatever portion of creation a particular Deity may have within his/her domain. Religions are often married to moral systems of human behavior . . . and even more often to the ability to help worshipers in various ways as the result of prayer or sacrifice. A naïve but common error is to confuse the human side of a religion (other than worship)─namely, prayer, morals, effects on society─with the CONCEPT or its DEFINITION.

On the human side of religion, there is also a frequent failure to distinguish different kinds of morality:

√ ontic or natural, i.e. what promotes nature* (jussum quia justum "commanded because right")

The distinction between WORSHIPERS and BELIEVERS may be important, despite overlappings. Eastern and Western Christianity differ paradigmatically on many ontic-deontic** distinctions. Note that, while the interpretative form of worship is verbal, there is a difference between ontic worship, in which a material piece of creation is offered to God (as in Christ's Crucifixion and in the divine Liturgy) to acknowledge :His ownership of all that is, and un-ontic or purely verbal praise.

This writer has yet to see an analysis that has not missed the boat on some of these points. The most elemental error is confusing religion with morality, not only personal and interpersonal behavior but also items of larger scope like war and peace. That most religions are married with a moral code of some sort does not make them "of the essence" of religion. To see religion as a helpful means toward peace and good behavior should be like seeing a bicycle as superior a train for traveling between cities, since a bicycle accident harms fewer natures than a train accident does. The essential or accidental biproducts of religion should not be confused with what it IS!

What is natural is more complex than some would have their readers believe. What promotes nature involves many problems, not least the fact that promoting one nature requires harming another. Moreover, natural is context-sensitive, reversing itself in some contexts. Nakedness (e.g. swimming au naturel) is hardly "natural" in a cold climate, in fighting an armed enemy, etc. . . . simply because it is harmful to one's nature. Conversely, a heavy fur coat is natural for a polar bear, but would not be for the average chihuahua; it promotes human nature in Alaska but hardly so in Tahiti, where it could possibly induce a heat-stroke.

A sophisticated approach to studying religious subjects avoids confusing the divine with the human, i.e. religion and worship with any moral-behavior approach that it may be married with. If one's object is to study the good and bad effects of religion on people, that should not be confused with a "study of religion," seeing that religion is not one's subject but other things affected by religion.

Salvation can be viewed as a deontic Crucifixion that satisfied justice or some other requirement; or it can be viewed as ontic (bodily) resurrection and the Divinization of 2 Peter 1:4, i.e. as partaking of the divine Nature. (This is not Deification, a metaphorical partaking of God's imparticipable Essence.) In the latter view of Salvation, the Crucifixion is soterial in a different way from the Western Christian view; for it treats the Sacrifice on the Life-Giving Cross as an act of Worship necessary for the Resurrection and for Divinization, an acknowledgement that only God is God, only God can raise a worshiper's body, and only with God's Nature can that Divinization that culminates Salvation take place.

I would argue that it is extremely naïve to fall into error of overlooking or ignoring these distinctions, especially if one claims to be doing a "scientific" analysis.

*Natural is a much misunderstood term; the worst error is to confuse NATURAL with NORMAL─the worst distortion of the concept─as well as with "not artificial," and the like.

**The term is from modal logic; it should not be combined with hyphenated de-ontic. What is deontic (moral, i.e. volitional-juridical) is of course usually un-ontic.