Methodological Atheism Research Articles

Response: Religion, reductionism, and psychoanalysis

I agree with Naomi 100% in her insistence that methodological atheism should characterize psychoanalysis. But I do not think that this methodological atheism necessarily entails an ontological atheism. A point which, as we all know, Freud himself made in The Future of An Illusion. Naomi is right to denote our differences as "theological"--that is, we differ over what can be called real. It is not over values. We are both concerned to oppose dehumanization. But we see the danger in different places. I am certainly aware that religion can be dehumanizing. But, perhaps because I was not raised in a religious environment, but rather one dominated by an ethos of rational efficiency, in my gut I am more sensitive to the dehumanizing effects of a reductive rationalism. The experience of religion, which opened up for me new vistas of human potential and awareness, was an experience of liberation from this mechanistic straightjacket, even though it made me increasingly marginal in a scientific culture. For many I know in the academic study of religion the opposite move, and one more readily sponsored by the culture, from religion to critical rationality has been an experience of liberation. Diane is quite right that I am still fighting this battle and that Freud functions as a stand-in for the reductive rationalism I am still opposing and that, as both Diane and Naomi point out, I distort the richness of Freud's work in the process, although I think my characterization of him is true to his main intention. In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, Kennedy said, "I don't recognize my own position when my opponent repeats it back to me." Naomi and I are not opponents, but even so I don't recognize my intent when she describes me as "privileging religion" or "giving it a unique place" in human experience, or treating it as "irreducible," and I'm not sure whose thought is shutting down here. Certainly I think few students in my classes in psychology and religion or patients who have discussed these things with me would say that I privilege religion. So I want to say something for the record

On Peter Berger's Definition of Religion

Peter L. Berger (Berger, 1974a) has proposed definitions and descriptions of religion. The purpose of his efforts is to place some boundaries around area of scientific study of religion. Berger is much concerned with such dichotomies as secular (the mundane, the ordinary safe of everyday life, and the ordinary, everyday 'life-world' ), and religious (ecstacies, the 'otherness' of religious experience, transcendental). He is worried that scientific study of religion must exhibit methodological atheism and would lead to secularization, which to him is a progressive loss of plausability to religious views of reality (p. 132), and to flattening out of' religious phenomenon and greyness of view of reality. Berger is wary of defining: many definitions of religion are really reductionist; others are really post hoc rationalizations; some are used ideologically. He stresses transcendence and transcendental in connection with religion, almost to point of making them sine qua non of religion. Elsewhere he (Berger, 1974b) states that religions are many sided and gigantic effort to come to terms with experience of transcendence, and that transcendence is human life experience of world of uncanny, of totally other, in which assumptions of life no longer hold. Berger's dichotomy of transcendence-religion and daily living is not universally shared. For example, in normative Judaism every act from moment of awakening in morning to that of going to sleep at night is an act of worship. And this holds true for some aspects of Islam and Hinduism. Jensen (Jensen 1951: 203) parallels this in his quotation from Kant that all duties are divine commands and awe is not special act of religion but rather religious temper in all our actions done in conformity with duty. However, it should be noted that Berger (Berger, 1974a: 132) feels uneasy about this dichotomy: at one point he says that ecstacies are domesticated by channelling them into socially acceptable and useful activity such as moral conduct. Berger, however, mentions mundane act of study as a preliminary to religious mysticism. Judaism, however, considers study as higher than prayers, etc., and, therefore, to devout Jew study is not trigger to religious experience; it is religious experience. Religion is better defined as system of practices and ideas, or perhaps better