What is Religion?  Definition on 
a Sliding Teeter Totter Scale 

by Karl W. Luckert, 
copyright 1991, 1999

Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective was a book published in 1991 by the State University of New York Press. It has since gone out of print. All the while, inquiries about its availability are on the increase. Inasmuch as no scholar likes to see his most significant piece of work die a premature or unnecessary death, I have begun to revise its five portions to be displayed as separate "booklets" (or "pages") on the Internet. I have no illusions that this fresh exposure will in some miraculous manner make the content much easier to read. But as it was, the original book had a serious flaw that hereby can be remedied. The 1991 edition roams enthusiastically across no less than five academic disciplines. Not all the readers have appreciated this scope and complexity—and among potential reviewers only a courageous few have accepted the challenge. Inasmuch as the Internet presents itself as a perfect medium for virtual illusions I shall pretend here, for a while, that the book's five sections are separate booklets that can stand by themselves. So, for the time being my 1991 publication has become again a manuscript in progress. This means, what you read here today may not be exactly what you will find here tomorrow. 

 

Reorientation in the Phenomenology of Religions

        The phenomenon generally referred to as religion has been defined by Western scholars over the years in many dozens of ways. Most of these definitions are still useful to all who take time to immerse themselves in the ontological contexts in which their originators conceived and formulated them. Different aims and methodologies among professionals require different emphases or foci. Different foci support different ontologies, and different ontologies invariably result in different working definitions.

        For instance, a historian, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, or theologian, each begins his or her train of specialized professional thought with a preferred ontological emphasis. Their respective methodologies are applied to help highlight the subject matter they are examining. Moreover, the decision to focus one's attention on specific types of data implies, by itself, the commitment of an academic discipline to a primary configuration of reality. For example, historians value events that have scored in their linear reckoning of time as their basic data and realities; philosophers evaluate axioms and propositions as fundamental; psychologists traditionally have focused on the "psyche" and have shifted, more recently, to more easily observable "behavior"; sociologists study societal units and their functioning; in a wider angle of view, anthropologists concern themselves with larger societal configurations or cultures; and finally, theologians begin their work with a focus on the nature of God or gods.

        The subject matter "religion," in the domains of all these specialized academic disciplines, has been examined by individual scholars with varying degrees of seriousness. But, inasmuch as religion seems peripheral to the ontological focus of such specialized academic disciplines, it easily disappears or is reduced to a mere aspect of other, more central realities. So for instance, viewed from the perspective of philosophy, various types of religious thought tend to be evaluated simply as irrationality. And frequently, in the psychological perspective, religion tends to be reduced to emotionality or to some type of abnormal behavior. For instance, in Freudian psychology a theistic religion may be seen as originating with the amplification or "projection" of the concrete model of a human father. Sociologists of the Dürkheimian persuasion regard gods and totems as "social representations"; that is, as projections or spiritualized expressions of concrete social togetherness. Marxists characterize religion by its role in the class struggle, as a means utilized by capitalists as an opium or tranquilizer in their exploitation of workers.

        On the other hand, theologians who are committed to the ontology of a specific theistic tradition will focus first on the reality of their recognized God or gods. They will proceed to measure the gods of other people by that standard. In this manner theologians, like other scholars who either explicitly or implicitly operate on the basis of a presupposed ontology, may explain the wider world of religion, likewise, as epi-phenomenon of their envisioned central reality configuration. Some theological systems have gone so far as to depreciate the category "religion" itself—for instance, the theology of Karl Barth or the so-called philosophies held forth by numerous Hindu gurus. The latter reserve the label religion to designate the weaknesses they find in other people's outlook and behavior. Meanwhile, Barthian theologians and Hindu gurus classify their own ever-so-religious postures as respectable "non-religious" ontologies or philosophies.

        Religion, defined to serve the needs of this discussion, and stated as briefly as possible, is the response of humankind to so-experienced or so-perceived greater-than-human configurations of reality. This definition is "relational" in that it focuses on the Homo sapiens-religiosus as he or she experiences and relates to the physical as well as socio-cultural environment. A religious person who becomes a historian's subject matter may or may not perceive the surrounding world in the same way as his or her academic observer. Nevertheless, religion always belongs to a person's own perception of the larger world, or ontology. That larger ontology helps categorize one human experience as aggressive, another experience as religious, and still another as egalitarian or social. A passive observer therefore can do no better than to note how another person's religious behavior varies from his or her ordinary egalitarian or societal behavior, or how it differs from aggressive behavior in that person's quest for survival.

        On the other hand, every person does encounter greater-than-human configurations of reality, religiously. By the very fact that a superior reality configuration is greater, it can never be fully comprehended or explained, neither by a subjective experiencer nor by an objective observer. Nevertheless, with the same humility that a person acknowledges, religiously, one's relational inferiority toward greater-than-human reality, a historian of religions may note instances of such humble behavior and expressions as religious data.

        Some historians of religions may object to this quantified delineation of the subject matter "religion." They may offer the fact that elves and dwarfs are less-than-human beings, and that meanwhile human responses toward them in ancient times have been classified as religious phenomena. A historian of religions must answer that, indeed, sincere responses to elves and dwarfs are still today religious behavior, as in the case of northern European peasants who, occasionally, still pray for blessings and protection from these unseens. Although, admittedly, the recipients of these prayers nowadays do seem less than human to worldwise historians, they definitely are deemed still greater by those who offer them prayers and gifts—at least for the duration of these ritual presentations.

        The duration of how long a person retains his or her religious posture is of no consequence for the basic perspective of this approach. Not even the mightiest among deities is responded to religiously by everyone, or all the time, as if he or she was unquestionably greater. This is to say, that a Homo religiosus in this world practices his or her religion neither one hundred percent nor all the time. Every living Homo religiosus is always more than that. He or she is a Homo ludens and, as such, a bundle of playfulness, oscillating between being a Homo sapiens aggressor and a Homo religiosus engaged in commonsense religious retreat. I am prepared to classify a human response to reality as "religious" whenever there are clear behavioral indications that the responding person, as far as he or she is concerned, acknowledges and defers to a greater reality.

        So for instance, it is possible to observe a person's religious responses even at the mild intensity level of "fascination." Expressions of fascination are religious, because during an initial encounter an object that fascinates, ontologically considered, ipso facto, is not a less-than-human "object." Its effects on the human experiencer are inflicted, at least momentarily, by what looms as being potentially greater. But being only a mild borderline religious response, a state of simple "fascination" is impermanent and may quickly be deflected in one of two opposite directions.

        An experience of "fascination" may be pushed, by the defensive ego of an experiencing individual, toward a desire for greater egalitarian "familiarity." It may be pushed beyond that point even toward a desire of gaining experimental control; that is, control over the reality that initially has stimulated fascination. This is the time-worn path over which myriads of predators' fascinations have deteriorated, with doing analysis, into curiosities and have thereby been reduced to the status of victims.

        But then in the other direction, whenever confronted by a tenaciously fascinating reality configuration, an experiencer's ego may as well retreat further. A retreating ego may allow itself to be transported into an even more intense mode of religious experience or retreat. Inasmuch as a gradation of intensity is involved, the entire range of ontology, experiences and responses from total "control" to total "surrender," can be plotted quantitatively along a graduated scale that indicates degrees of intensity.

The Teeter-Totter Scale

        Any subject matter, which human minds are capable to submit to academic scrutiny, must be capable of delimitation. Thus, "religion" as a subject matter of study must be identifiable not only in terms of its content but also in contrast to whatever is not religion. That is to say, such general designations of religion as a "life-style" or as a "way of life," although they may be broad enough to embrace all religious behavior, do not delimit it sufficiently. To conceptualize a contrast between what is and what is not religion, it is necessary to begin with the simplest and most concrete ontology imaginable: a threefold ranking of creatures or entities relative to one another and as belonging within the larger food chain or environmental process.

    All living beings on earth survive by feeding on lesser, conquerable things. For comfort they socialize with potential equals, to procreate offspring and provide nurture. And at some point in the larger hierarchy or "food chain"—by means of which organisms on earth are woven into a single fabric of life—everything and everyone eventually surrenders to greater realities.   Thus, a fully conscious creature not only moves about to survive between earth and sky, but also discovers itself as caught up in threefold proportional ontology. This ontology includes the entire known dimension of a creature's realm of experiences. Categories such as the greater Food Chain, Environment, or the Fabric of Life have all been recognized in recent anthropological literature, rather "religiously," as greater-than-human realities.

        Of course, in the case of a superior species whose members are capable of doing lots of mental reflection, the superiority that humankind recognizes in itself—implying containment of everything (else) within an objectified almighty Food Chain or Environment—does not necessarily also lead to a subjective religious reckoning with one's own finitude. Nevertheless, aggressive nonreligious "wrestling" with modern larger reality configurations tends to be at least as serious as, in earlier mythological contexts, human bouts with gods, angels, devils, demons, or dragons. Ontologically our scientific quests are no better grounded than were the struggles of our antecedents in earlier culture strata.

        The multitude of causes in nature that together determine our lives and eventually will do us in can be approached in opposing ways. They can be accepted religiously as divinities, and after analyzing these deities into smaller quanta, they can be ignored or hidden under heaps of abstract philosophical principles and symbols; that is, under the indigestible excrement after analytic aggression and digestion. If all of Nature together appears threatening and hostile, then a composite of many lesser natural forces, or even a chaotic array of such, may to a playful analytic mind seem less intimidating. The human penchant for analysis makes it possible to kill, dissect, digest, or disperse larger ontological threats. It also enables us to think and dispose of threatening entities in the abstract, as lesser epistemological "problems" rather than entities. This general need for physical as well as mental victory underlies all human endeavors, theologies, philosophies, and sciences alike.

        Systematic theologies accomplish such human victories with the abstract treatment of their respective God or gods. It is obvious that large gods are more fearsome than smaller ones. It is obvious, too, that gods of whatever size, who are systematically analyzed into sacred aspects or attributes become less frightening than those who still loom over humankind as virile and whole personages.

        Accordingly, our scale of experiential intensities is threefold. From left to right it plots human responses to so-perceived reality configurations of increasing size or greatness. And thereby it measures degrees of religiosity, or intensities of religious experience. Human behavior toward less-than-human realities not only is different from religious behavior, it differs also from behavior directed toward potential equals at the midpoint of the scale.

        Less-than-Human Realities—Lesser realities are perceived by analysis, are hypothetically re-evaluated and re-arranged; they can be manipulated, experimented with, conquered and controlled. The quest for food, aggression and progress, the sciences, technology and the arts, all score heavily as involvements in this dimension of so-conceived less-than-human realities.

        The first step in the scientific approach, analysis, initially breaks down targeted conceptual reality configurations into smaller, manageable portions. Only less-than-human realities subsequently can be rearranged, first hypothetically and then by experimentation, manipulation and control. When potential equals are targeted to become food or scientific subject matter, they will either put up a fight or submit only smaller or unessential portions of themselves for analysis or experimental modification. For example, I personally have never permitted a surgeon to operate beyond a clearly defined trouble spot, such as the vicinity of a hernia. What I have surrendered was never my complete self.

        Moreover, there is nothing particularly new or modern about our celebrated "scientific" experimental method. It is the same method by which all creatures with alimentary canals happen to survive. It is also the same method by which many an ancient greater-than-human or potentially equal configuration of reality—such as a formidable animal, a god, or a fellow humanoid—has been confronted, captured, killed, or eaten. All latter-day mental, physical, or chemical analyses have been anticipated as concrete prototypes at the animal level. They have been anticipated by the basic activities of claws, teeth, and digestive juices, as well as by the mental-analytic reflections that early hominids have applied during their still simple tasks of hunting, tool making, butchering, and eating. Latter-day scientific analysis by hominid hunters—the breakdown of reality configurations into lesser portions—represents essentially no more than an intellectual elaboration on such simple and primitive activities as tearing, biting, chewing, and digesting. All rational creatures in the animal kingdom are caught up in these same basic activities.

        It follows that an excessive glorification of analysis and teeth, even of advanced humanoid scientific "brain-tipped teeth," sooner or later will leave us marooned in a world littered by our own chewed-dry cut reduced to excrement. Termites that have reduced their woody residences to sawdust, by their natural method of physical analysis, are forced to move on. Where will humanoids with their mentally advanced termite skills hope to move? To some other planet? Or to some nirvana or heaven—after all! Or, perchance, to that other more progressive place of eternal purging and analysis by fire—after all that!

        Potential Equals—At the mid-point of the spectrum of experiences and responses—at familiarity—potential equals do share, provide nurture, communicate, or compete with one another. Social cooperation and humanistic learning together thrive best when focused on this balance point for potential equality. They thrive there in accordance with the Golden Rule.

        Inasmuch as one recognizes that a Homo sapiens and a Homo religiosus taken together add up to a Homo ludens, the metaphor of contemplating a teeter-totter plank seems somewhat appropriate. This metaphor even brings out the fact that all along the biological and social playground dynamic has enticed our minds to extract the subject matter "religion," as well as all commentary presented in this essay, from the plethora of ordinary life, space, and time.

        Encounters with potential equals, around the middle of the spectrum, can be studied as oscillations from that point toward either end of the scale. In the course of a day, between rising, eating, and falling asleep, and certainly during the course of a year, all living creatures on earth do oscillate from one extremity on this scale to the other. Inasmuch as hominids on that teeter-totter plank apply their intellect in their quest for nourishment and survival, analytically, they are indeed Homines sapientes. But they are also Homines religiosi when they move in the other direction and when they retreat from aggression, when they rest or allow themselves to fall asleep. In fact, they are involved around the middle and tending toward both sides of the spectrum, most of the time. Over the course of a lifetime, experiential positions are finalized and come to rest, willingly or unwillingly, at the extreme point of surrender at the right end of the spectrum. Willingly or unwillingly, every creature's existential teeter-totter balances the totality of aggressive behavior, religiously in the end, by virtue of that creature's inherent weakness, mortality and complete surrender.

        A measure of humane balance is necessary for coexistence even in science laboratories and in technological workshops. Experiences of "fascination," mild religious experiences, are cultivated there to entice newcomers into the cults of business, management, technology, scientific experimentation, as well as militarism. College students are enticed at the level of fascination to elect their major fields. However, such mild religious experiences are appreciated only up to a point. No sooner has an excess of fascination been sensed by masters who preside over modern organizations of science, industrial production, and conquest, than all available didactic know-how is being mobilized to bring a fascinating subject matter within range of "familiarity." Fascination is thus eclipsed, and the targeted familiarized subject matter is further reduced by systematic "analysis" to the status of an "object." Less-than-human objects can be subjected to hypothetical rearrangement, experimentation, and thereafter to full human control. A creature who intermittently has been a Homo religiosus on retreat becomes hungry again, namely, a full-fledged Homo sapiens-neccans (one who thinks analytically and kills). Of course, not only innocent inferior species are victimized and endangered by the wide swing of human pendulums and teeter-totters. The human species as a whole, with all its lofty visions of egalitarian coexistence and self-realization, has put itself in jeopardy by its collective imbalances as well.

        Greater-than-Human Realities—In turn, by so-conceived greater-than-human configurations of reality a human being is fascinated, awed, scared, experimented with or dealt with in some other fashion, tranquilized, and eventually done in. Moving toward the right along the experience-response spectrum, mild religious "fascination" registers more intensely when it is upgraded to a state of "awe." Enraptured in a state of awe the human being, as a Homo religiosus, rests poised at a temporary happy equilibrium. The human creature stands frozen, perhaps after the manner of the prophet Muhammad when he saw the angel Gabriel appear to him everywhere along the horizon. He could move "neither backward nor forward." In a similar manner, the three disciples of Jesus, who accompanied their master to his mountain of transfiguration, insisted on prolonging such a state of awe and happy equilibrium.

        Much of religious ceremonialism aims at achieving, and stabilizing, the level of temporarily feasible bliss, as close as possible to the point of "awe" on our scale. All the fine and not-so-fine arts of humankind, at various points in history, have attempted to concretize and stabilize some such fleeting whiffs, or sounds, or glimpses of paradise. The music of Bach, Händel, and Mozart among others, along with pipe organs in European cathedrals, orchestras, and large brass choirs, or painters like Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Dürer, have accomplished this feat to some degree for this writer. Awe may be conceptualized on our scale approximately at the midpoint along the dimension of possible religious experiences.

        Nevertheless, human attempts at structuring and fixing experiential modes of awe, inevitably, have compromised the religious pacifity and quality of these same experiences. Artistically mediated ecstasies compare to pure religious ones as canned edibles compare to fresh food. No denigration is here intended. Canned rations certainly are preferable for human nourishment to the alternative of starvation.

        Leaning then, from the point of "awe," still farther in the direction of passive experience, "fear and trembling" (a term borrowed from Kierkegaard) becomes the definitive mode. In religions where the ontological mysterium tremendum has been scaled down or avoided, as for instance in much of Buddhism, this point of fear and trembling might better be designated as a state of transitional "tranquility." Had this book been written primarily for Buddhist monks, the right half of our teeter-totter spectrum could have been marked off, as well, with the eight steps from the Buddha's Eightfold or Middle Path. For discourse with less devout philosophical schools, methods for "knowing oneself"—that is, ritualized introspection and self-criticism—may as well serve the purpose of selfless retreat, for balance and tranquility. All the while, even in the philosophical exercise of introspection the human self continues to be contrasted with some greater-than-human standard of truth.

        The endpoint to which all life on earth moves, in a variety of ever-changing combinations of aggressive and retreat responses, is ultimate surrender in death. In the course of every organism's life, death is prefigured by cycles of fatigue, a need for rest, or falling asleep. Ritualized and organized religious paths often do recommend to their followers "submission" or "surrender" as a fact already accomplished in its essentials during life, or else at least as something soon to be perfected. Nevertheless, all of humankind's organized religious paths in one form or other do differentiate certain "degrees" of surrender, or levels of seeing and knowing. They carefully distinguish between temporary and less intense surrenders—or states of awareness—on the one hand, and the intensity of surrendering one's ego unreservedly with the finality of death, on the other. So for instance, the baptism of Christians means initiation into preliminary dying and rising with Christ (Romans 6:3–4), whereas for Buddhists the nirvanic experience of moksha is the prefiguration of pari-nirvana (nirvana become permanent).

        Religious responses are gestures and patterns of retreat behavior—mental or physical—always evoked implicitly by the experienced presence of some greater-than-human realities. Such retreat behavior affects modes of conscious activity as well as mere tremors of emotion. It delimits the scope of perception as well as the range of subject matter deemed safe for objective thinking, for killing and eating, or for scientific manipulation. On the other hand, the acknowledged presence of greater realities enables an aggressor who finds himself "in over his head" to retreat honorably. This means one is able, religiously, to explain one's retreat behavior as something "reasonable." In communication with others, who also express their "will to live" by way of retreating, the desire to escape from greater-than-human dangers will always seem reasonable. Thus religious behavior, in this context, may be understood as the business of making honorable and rational retreats from greater-than-human odds.

        Therefore, ranging from "fascination," which is the mildest form of religious experience, to mystic "surrender" in death, which constitutes the most intense, the religious mode does prevail over half of the spectrum of possible human experiences, that is, over half of the available range of ontological involvements. The opposite half on that spectrum, from "analysis" to "control," is defined and dominated by attitudes of aggression.

        Social balance among potential equals, near the middle of the spectrum, may be allegorized as a bird in flight; aggressiveness is represented by one wing, and religious retreat by the other. During flight the two wings must balance each other's movements, and they must compensate for each other's adjustments during gliding.

        The fact that most so-conceived greater-than-human configurations of reality have been encountered, traditionally, as personal deities also is a quite rational happenstance. A Homo sapiens who defines his own existence in terms of intelligent personhood cannot help—upon prolonged reflection on the puzzle of his own finitude and upon being caught up in a biological food chain—but postulate the superiority of some external greater intelligence or personage. He recognizes personality status in anything that reveals itself effectively as greater—at least up to the level of, and a little beyond, his own ego and personality awareness. To deny one's own finitude in relation to the aforementioned threefold proportionality, that is, to deny the common-sense need of thriving near the middle of one's experiential spectrum— somewhere between the extreme points of "eating" and of "being devoured"—would be tantamount to insisting on lop-sided divine status for oneself.  A reflective mind cannot escape this query. If the ontological substratum that has given birth to me as self-reflective ego is not personal, if that ground of being is not personal, then what is this "I"? Then, what does it mean to be a person? And then, what is my human dignity?

     In my younger years I once built a sail-boat. During a stormy episode, crossing a lake in Kansas, I noticed myself talking to my own handiwork as if it were a person. While rationally and scientifically manipulating ropes and rudder, I was subconsciously imitating what all my ancestors must have done in similar situations. I uttered pious words of encouragement to the only tangible greater entity present that was able to keep me above water and in the realm of the living. My threshold of fascination had moved, if only temporarily, and once again in the course of human history a new greater-than-human manifestation of reality has begun introducing herself to a vulnerable mortal as a potential divine personage (or as an agent thereof). And so, while I attribute the religious discovery of personal attributes among so-encountered greater-than-human configurations of reality to keen human intelligence, I must also insist on the more general truth, that "reason" transcends the narrow limits of mere analytic reasoning.

        To confront less-than-human things analytically and to manipulate them scientifically can be deemed a reasonable undertaking, provided the things to be controlled are indeed less-than-human. Our short-term survival depends on the success of such "rational" pursuits. However, being confronted by greater-than-human beings, and responding with fascination, awe, fear, tranquility, or surrender, may be equally realistic and rational. For instance, running in fear from a dangerous predator may be the most rational thing a person can do under certain circumstances. And moreover, to surrender and face death with poetry on one's lips may be the most rational behavior under slightly more severe conditions. Religious behavior is irrational only when it is expressed in relation to less-than-human things or "idols," or toward equals.

        All the while, meeting potential equals and discovering ways to coexist with equals in accordance with the Golden Rule count among the most rational lessons a human mind can learn. Acts of idolizing fellow human beings, seen from the perspective of the Golden Rule, are religious irrationalities; and acts of manipulating fellow human beings, from that same vantage point, are aggressive or scientific irrationalities. Either extremity threatens balance and humane survival.

        Human rationality cannot be evaluated by either the presence or the absence of analytic hunger, greed, or cunning; nor can it be judged by the presence or absence of momentary happiness or lingering mystic bliss. The acid test for human intelligence, in the end, always will be the degree of realistic balance achieved within one's own threefold ontology, that is, in full awareness of all the so-experienced equal, lesser, and greater configurations of reality. In relation to that threefold ontology, every human life must continuously re-negotiate its existential balance and survival. Thus, a narrow analytic or scientific application of human reason, at the neglect of equals and greater reality configurations, will always boomerang in the end and result in foolish despair or self-destruction as soon as the larger context begins to overwhelm again.

Behaviorology of Religion

        The section which follows would some decades ago have been titled "Psychology of Religion." I will refrain from doing so because "psychology" as "study of the soul" has quietly evaporated from the academic landscape. With the increasing uncertainty about whether, scientifically speaking, there is such a thing as a soul, the discipline has for all practical purposes been turned into "behaviorology." The fate of this scientific discipline furnishes an excellent introductory lesson.

        The evaporation of the central idea, of a given science, naturally follows the internal logic of human finitude. Scientific "psychology," having increasingly been modeled in imitation of other experimental sciences, gradually began to notice that the "psyche" or "soul" that it had tried to study remained forever an arm's length beyond reach—until the core idea "soul" itself had to be suspended as being scientifically unsustainable. Two and a half millennia ago, the Buddha has come to a similar conclusion by reasoning along a religious track. Within the context of human evolution, "analysis" represents the mental equivalent, or an extension, of the ordinary butchering skills invented by our distant hunter ancestors. Your subject matter, the "soul" or life principle, seemed alive and real while you were still chasing it like an animal, but it looked like something else, or appeared dead, as soon as the knife of analysis had been used on it. The teeter-totter scale helps us see why the scientific method cannot enhance our understanding of equal or greater-than-human configurations of reality. The life principle "soul" happens to belong among those out-of-bounds realities. Scientifically we only can look at the "body" of behavioral "pieces" that remain after analysis. The soul itself has vanished during the process of being studied—that is, butchered. It has vanished precisely at the point at which the human mind blips out during an encounter with any so-experienced greater-than-human reality.   This fate is unavoidable. Inasmuch as our mind itself is contained, forever unexplained, within that "all-soul," no objective outside perspective of it, of being functional and alive inside, is possible. From the outside we see a "bag of dead skin"—a body of behavioral data—and as a result of hunting and butchering it, we no longer can get in touch with the vitality that surges within.

        Therefore, while acknowledging our existential and epistemological predicament as honestly as possible, there is no strong reason why I should not discuss what needs to be said under the revised heading of Behaviorology of Religion.

        Now that a teeter-totter scale for estimating degrees of religious intensity has been devised, how can the student of religions put it to use in behaviorology? How might it be applied to academic questions? Perhaps a researcher, out in the field and visiting people in the context of a foreign culture, will be the first to benefit from it. Until languages are learned, until interpreters and recording devices have done their work, a field researcher in religions can utilize time productively by reading the basic language of gestures and physical behavior. Interpreters and linguists may argue about the meaning of words, symbols, metaphors and syntax, but here, as elsewhere in human life, actions do often speak louder than words. Intelligent creatures that are able to communicate by way of language are, by that very ability, empowered to adjust and to lie as often as they see fit. Other behavior, aside from speech, must usually be observed and understood in order to distinguish existential spoken truths from convenient rationalizations or teasing.

        The first level of encounter with human behavior usually is visual, it involves the eyes. At the aggressive side of the scale, eyes are focused on some less-than-human and conquerable reality. As long as eyes focus there, they must sacrifice scope for obtaining sharpness. Eyelids are frozen at a half-open position so as to avoid blinking and evade the risk of missing some opportune moment of the subject's vulnerability. At the point of familiarity, along the teeter-totter scale, communication from one set of eyes to another is being relaxed. At the point of fascination, eyes begin to open wider. This happens to be the point at which people fall in love with something, or with someone—and people who are in love tend to open their eyes and souls to the point where they become vulnerable. At the point of awe, the midpoint along the religious dimension, eyes tend to become transfixed in anticipation of eventual surrender. At a point still closer to surrender, eyelids may no longer find it necessary to close defensively. A vision of "all light," that is, unmanageable light, may alternate with seeing "no light," that is, blindness. Such contrast in religious experience can be found by comparing the Apostle Paul's surrender and blindness, caused by light, on his way to Damascus, with Saint John of the Cross whose beatific vision seemed like a "dark night of the soul."

        A human mouth generally can communicate attitudes in situations where eye contact is impossible. Teeth tend to clench as they score along the Aggression side of the scale. The most primitive form of conquest and control, among all living creatures, is to kill and to eat. Thus, the clenching of teeth anticipates victory through biting even though the physical activity may meanwhile have been sublimated into a mental one. Beyond the point of familiarity, along the dimension of Retreat, lips may dare to kiss. In a state of fascination that prefigures a measure of surrender, kisses become more intimate. Lips meet lips, teeth approach teeth, and one tongue may play with the other while exploring all of the aforementioned. The encounter is fascinating and thrilling. Why? Because the most dangerous equipment on a human body, its teeth, are thereby held in check by trust, by affection, and by the implied promise of safe and blissful surrender—falling just short of being actually eaten. In a state of awe, the mouth tends to forget to close sometimes. Along its path to atonement, a mouth that has been committing the original sin of eating may attempt to enlist the grace of a deity. This is done by way of submitting a share offering or by speaking a prayer, to obtain the deity's blessings and permission. Permission to kill and eat may also be symbolized by rites of sacramental eating—by divinity sharing its own substance voluntarily. Or, eating may be legitimized by conforming to special dietary restrictions, or by way of observing holy periods of fasting. In some American Indian ceremonies (i.e. Navajo and Hopi), I have seen vomiting or "backward eating" being practiced as the proper mode expressing retreat behavior.

        Voice is expressed by the mouth. Near the point of control, along the teeter-totter scale, audible growling tends to imitate the snarls of aggressive predators—intense sounds rising to a sustained pitch. In a socialized form such growls are made audible as threats or forceful commands. Around the midpoint of familiarity, egalitarian conversation becomes the norm, bent on sharing. Spoken language, from left to right along the scale, tends to transform prose into poetry. At some point near the middle along the dimension of Retreat, structured poetry gives way to less structured song. There are still degrees of structure, of rhythm and pitch (thus measures of control), applied in a religious song. But then somewhere between awe and surrender, heightened feelings of exultation may collapse the speech of human finitude into nearly unstructured glossolalia. Also, voice may be negated by silent prayer or by a vow to practice virtual silence—in anticipation of eternal silence in surrender to the Only Power that here appears entitled to speech. Blissful surrender may sometimes emit a guttural groan that drops and fades in the direction of silence; it is the exact opposite of a predator's aggressive snarl at the opposite end of the existential scale.

        In a less spectacular manner, laughter or a smile may signify a measure of retreat behavior as well—either real or feigned retreat. The "smile" or grin of an ape places that animal at a point of "fear and trembling." By contrast, human smiles and laughter are intellectually more alive and are able to communicate attitudes over a wider range. Nevertheless, analytically active eyes and mouths, that ordinarily may be aggressive and tense, appear relaxed when laughter or smiles are added. Eyes and mouth are thereby surrounded by an array of relaxed muscles appearing harmless and silly. Of course, a human laugh or smile may be contrived and deceitfully applied along the scale's aggressive dimension. Around the middle of the scale, an apologetic smile, alternating with progressive/aggressive reasoning, may be a teacher's best tool for luring students into the comfort zone of familiarity, sharing, and learning.

        Prominent among bodily members, suitable for communication, score the human hands. When in the course of hominid evolution the hands were freed from serving the function of locomotion, they could be dedicated more devoutly to feed the mouth. The evolution of human hands, and of the human brain, was driven by hunger and the inadequacy of human teeth for the tasks of  imitating natural predators. A complex substitutional industry of weapons or "false teeth," or "brain-tipped teeth," was developed by humanoid hands to enhance themselves. In the course of this process of self-enhancement, a variety of aggressive manual skills have rendered the repertoire of hand gestures more complex. But still, basic aggression is expressed today by way of tightly clasping or holding on—even if the symbolic object happens to be air. At the point of moderation and familiarity, when two people meet they extend right hands for a mutual handshake. We surrender to each other our fighting arms to enter into a covenant that acknowledges, and balances, the fact of our co-existence.

        Religiously, hands are folded in prayer as if fettered and bound. A comparison with man's closest friend, the dog, is enlightening. The dog extends and uses its tail as a rudder when it pursues a potential victim. Therefore, when assuming an opposite "religious" posture, to signal retreat, the animal may draw its proud tail between its hind legs. Human runners utilize their hands and arms as "rudders" during the aggressive pursuit of their goals, and therefore religiously their hands may be folded to express prayerful retreat. To express the religious opposite of grasping, hands also may be displayed open and empty, to implore or to beg—a gesture that is used already by chimpanzees. Hands may be uplifted in praise and capitulation. The hand gesture of a yoga practitioner in Eastern religions, where thumb and middle finger touch gingerly, has traditionally signified an attitude of retreat—to negate what, recently, anthropologists have begun celebrating as "opposable thumb" or as "precision grip" that drove the evolution of humanoid aggression.

        Not only limbs, but also the posture of the entire human body is being used to communicate religious as well as not-so-religious attitudes. It appears as though the human rational animal, when it turns back to act religiously, does not only retreat in space but also in the full dimension of time. It usually retreats into the past but, occasionally, also by way of fleeing ahead into the future. With added mental ability, our kind has always known the road of nostalgia that extends back into a simpler past. In fact, with the help of nostalgic memories we travel back in time farther than ordinary mental recollection can sustain. Subconsciously we continue to respond to very primitive norms of behavior from along the larger evolutionary dimension. This fact becomes apparent as soon as we dare to compare our human behavior with the natural behavior of animals close to us. Sometimes a dog approaches its master guiltily, crouching low and dragging its belly. While normally it exists and functions well at the level of quadrupeds, it tends to retreat to an earlier reptilian posture during an act of religious penitence. In similar proportion, man as a Homo erectus retreats religiously from his aggressive upright bipedal posture to the more primitive posture of his ancestral quadrupeds. He kneels and bows. Certain practitioners of Islam and Tibetan Buddhism may be seen prostrating themselves and retreating to the prone reptilian position.

        Physical postures are not the only manner of expressing one's attitude of religious retreat. Mental postures range as well across the full scale of the existential teeter-totter—all the way from analytic aggression and conquest to self-effacing mystic retreat and surrender. That is what the miracle of human reason has come to—it is capable of mentally imaging the entire concrete experiential teeter-totter at the point of Hypothetical Rearrangement. The analytic mental posture is active while the intellectual posture of mystics appears passive. About midway between analytic conquest and mystic surrender our rational minds do occupy themselves with doing synthesis. The ultimate degree to which philosophical synthesis can be pursued is being achieved by the mystics. The "all" of reality always will reveal itself to honest human reason as being greater than human. And so attitudes in philosophical discourse do ebb and flow along the same entire teeter-totter scale. If one engages the various types of philosophic temperaments in actual debate they will, like everyone else, display gestures that still resonate well with behavior in past animal strata, all the way back along the trail of evolution.

        Theological reasoning does yield similar results. Back in time along the evolutionary track, left on the existential scale and at an early level of animal existence, acts of killing and eating have defined the original sin of ultimate aggression. At the opposite extreme of the act of "killing and eating" lies the experience of "being killed and eaten." Yes, the full opposite is far more intense than temporary sacramental eating or fasting. Sublimated by way of theological reasoning, this basic fact of life—of being killed, eaten, and absorbed—translates into the mystic formula which the Apostle Paul has adopted from the pagan philosopher Aratus: "In him [God] we live and move and have our being." Thus, rational mysticism, as it was prefigured physically at the animal level, raw and "red in tooth and claw," does in the end add up to surrender and to simply being eaten and absorbed by greater than human reality. There are two opposite perspectives possible—and only two—from which life processes in a Food Chain can be viewed, namely, the perspective of predators and the perspective of their victims. Rationalized aggression derives straightway from aggressive hunters who lived and moved about under totemic predators, while our symbolism of religious retreat derives from their remorseful encounters with totemic masters who owned and represented animals that fell victim to those predators.

        The explanations given in this section were added primarily to facilitate discourse between historians of religions and anthropologists. If you are not immediately involved or interested in this kind of dialogue, you may wish to skip and return to it later.

        Religious responses, or religious retreat behavior, generally speaking and always are the behavior of individuals. If I coerce someone to retreat as I do, I do not act religiously toward that person but aggressively. However, if that person retreats by way of imitating my retreat behavior, both of us act religiously. Managed or culturally organized retreat behavior, therefore, never is completely religious for all those who participate.

        A similar ambiguity exists at the culture-building or Aggression side of the continuum. A soldier, for example, who obeys a commanding officer to attack an enemy position acts aggressively toward the enemy; he acts religiously toward the commander and toward the entire superior chain of command. Each superior in that chain acts religiously toward his respective superior and aggressively toward his subordinates—unless he decides to disobey an order and suffer the consequences. In that case the subsequent sufferings of punishment tend to absorb into themselves all the religious behavior that otherwise would have been evoked down the line, all the way to the soldier and the enemy.

        Then, reaching for another analogy farther back in time, latter-day cultural struggles may be regarded as having been prefigured already in a primitive hunter's simple quest for food. His aggressive scavenging, hunting, killing, and eating are followed inevitably by religious retreat behavior, by inactivity occasionally associated with remorse and fasting, and by other restrictions imposed on him during his ordeal or the consumption of food. Such restrictions usually are explained by primitive hunters religiously, as having been imposed on them by some greater-than-human hunter deity. In the modern atheistic idiom the effect, which such greater-than-human obstacles have had on the human soul, continues to register as conscience; that is "con-science," in the sense of being contra to greedy progress-oriented science.

        Inasmuch as religious retreats generally do imply a confession of weakness, the political enforcement of religious behavior among groups of people may evoke embarrassment or even shame. It eventually also may generate resentment at being bullied. Or it may evoke defensive-aggressive reactions. If left to themselves, people ordinarily do engage in religious retreat behavior together, and they do think religious thoughts naturally and voluntarily. They ordinarily do so within the safe context of mutuality. They withdraw and retreat together for comfort and encouragement. They share religious retreat behavior with other people and trust those who happen to be on a similar path of retreat. In shared states of weakness lies comfort, and also the potential and the strength for a joint comeback. Together, religious folk tend to acknowledge and submit to benevolent greater-than-human realities that in some way endorse, sustain, or at least tolerate their survival.

        Every surviving individual lives by balancing his or her life, embedded in collective modes of cultural aggression and religious retreat. Likewise, every social group, every culture and civilization, survives by trying to achieve a similar systemic balance—by cultivating a balance somewhere between states of predatorial aggression and mystic surrender.

        Collective imbalances in the direction of either extreme, aggression or retreat, sooner or later will result in reactionary movements in the opposite direction that, in turn, tend to overshoot their points of balance. Aggressive military campaigns and penitential religious pilgrimages therefore tend to alternate in the ebb and flow of tribes and nations. A necessity for balance determines the fate of all strata of society, even in situations where at one or the other behavioral extreme, at the point of control or surrender, an elite stretches its theatrical high wires to perform upon.

        Aggressive heroes provoke regressive and gentle saints; pious folk stimulate haughty scoffers; and scoffers in turn provoke humble pious folk into becoming first defensively proud—and later aggressively proud. Aggressive grand domesticators drive sensitive people to a point where they identify with doves; stubborn martyrs suffer in hope of shaming their killers into repentance. And finally, kings on horseback have at one point in the history of Near Eastern civilization generated a political climate, of popular disdain, that even a poor man on a donkey could be acclaimed the next and better eternal King of kings.

        Religious soteriologies, gospels of salvation, are initially always predicament-specific. They are invoked in response to specific socio-cultural imbalances. Religious gospels are designed to neutralize specific excesses of aggression; they exist to balance specific cultural emphases or sins.

        Religion and culture together, up to this point, have been delineated behavioristically as opposites, and in terms of a directional movement toward one or the other extreme. A closer look at socio-political dynamics is now called for. My deliberations categorically place "retreat" (blue in diagram) in opposition to "aggression" (red in the diagram). The primary behavior that builds and supports culture is aggression (sometimes red in tooth and claw); its outer limit is conquest, killing, and the imposition of  "control." In contrast, the essential religious behavior is marked by retreat that, at its extreme limit, culminates in total surrender of the ego. Please note that the ninefold dotted scale, above the colors, corresponds to the teeter-totter scale given earlier.

        In the course of a person's struggle for survival, full religious retreat is usually compromised in the form of "structured retreat" (violet in the diagram)—analysis and hypothetical rearrangement are imported from the aggression side to impose rational communicational structure onto ineffable experiences of  greater-than-human reality. For instance in the previous section, the Behaviorology of Religion, we have indicated how musical structure is being applied even in the most religious of songs. Structured retreat behavior may be compromised along the scale by sliding over into the general realm of aggression, thus establishing the subcategory of "justified aggression" (reddish purple). Aggressive behavior, for the sake of cultural balance and survival, must derive its justification from the ontology of structured retreat at the other side; whereas inversely, structured retreat is obliged to obtain its tools and skills of organization and communication from the side of culture and aggression. And finally, the category of justified aggression (reddish purple) may be compromised by way of letting it degenerate into unchecked aggressive behavior (red)—which then, of course, is being "justified" in the more weak manner of appealing only to its own tradition. In the latter instance, its own tradition will be valorized  to represent greater-than-human reality.

        For the purpose of stimulating a dialogue between anthropology and the history of religions,  Culture and Religion may be explained as follows: Culture participates foremost in its realm of Aggression. It is legitimized by cultivating its own subregion of Justified Aggression. To sustain justified aggression, Culture must draw ontological validation from the greater realities that are being acknowledged in the religious dimension of  Structured Retreat. 

        Religion is complementary to Culture and anchored first in its realm of full Retreat (blue). It is conceptualized and communicated in its subregion of Structured Retreat (violet). Finally it is organized or institutionalized as part of Culture, more or less aggressively, within the dimension of Justified Aggression (purple).

        An emphasis on Justified Aggression, that no longer is in touch with Retreat ontology (blue and violet), ceases to be religiously justified. By the same token, Pure Retreat behavior by itself contributes nothing tangible to Culture. Only the structuring or organization of retreat behavior (in the violet shades) will begin to add lasting monuments. Organized religion, at its best, does score mostly within the range of Structured Retreat while being inspired by Pure Retreat. But from that ideal point onward it can easily degenerate into Justified Aggression and become a mere element of Culture.

        Religious retreat behavior and culturally aggressive behavior are both being expressed by all living beings, all the time. Nevertheless, among higher and rational animals there is copresent a heightened sense of self-awareness, namely, an awareness of one's own habits of analytic aggression (science) as well as of one's own habits of religious retreat (con-science). Aggression and progress on one side, and religious retreat on the other, therefore do interplay with one another in human society as checks and balances. This interplay happens as naturally as breathing. Every intake of breath is followed by an exhaling of approximately equal importance and duration. The same substance, life-enabling air, is involved in both of these contrary types of movement. Culture and Religion are contrary and interrelated, likewise, at the level of life itself. Expressed in the mode of Ecclesiastes 3, there is for all living beings a time to grasp, and a time to let go.

        Near the midpoint of the existential teeter-totter scale all these realms and subrealms may contribute together, as checks and balances, to a favorable balance for societal survival, supported by rites that embody the Golden Rule. There along the teeter totter, in the vicinity of that egalitarian point of balance, between cultural bouts of aggression and religious common-sense retreats, equals do share (for example thoughts on the internet), compete, coexist, mate, multiply, and survive for a while.

Religion in Evolution

        The process of "evolution," as it has been refined by anthropological theories during past decades, no longer means what it meant in the nineteenth century, progress from lower to higher levels of existence. Modern anthropological evolutionists, nevertheless, may recognize a gradual increase in the complexity of human cultures over the long haul, to the extent that archaeological data support such conclusions. The "primitiveness" or lack of complexity, among certain cultures, is not an indication of the quality of concomitant primitive religion—more is not necessarily better. However, cultural complexity requires commensurate styles of aggression, or "sins," which in turn require commensurate religious solutions of retreat behavior.

        Inasmuch as in the previous section we already have carefully delineated the reciprocal relationship between "culture" and "religion," there exists no longer a need for holding evolutionary thinking in the history of religions hostage to the old ghosts of our progress-oriented founding fathers. Religion defined as retreat behavior never can mean "progress." Religion may entail not only physical retreat behavior in environment and space, but include retreat nostalgia and remembrance rites in the dimension of time. There is not a single religious founder, recorded in the annals of our discipline, who has not in some way returned his or her followers to an earlier simpler relationship with greater-than-human reality. These founders did so in the hope of  luring not only their immediate followers unto a return path, but whole cultures and nations as well.

        Another common misconception about "evolution" must be dispelled at the outset. The evolutionary eras suggested here are not successive stretches of time where each has been replaced progressively by a next; rather, they are accumulated strata. All may be visualized as interfused strata representing overlapping time sequences that, together, continue to the present moment. For example, hunter-gatherer cultures and their corresponding religions are still with us and in some parts of the world are still alive and exposed to sunlight. I myself have lived and participated in all the evolutionary culture strata mentioned here. People of different livelihood do commit somewhat different "sins" of aggression. So, while participating in different cultural contexts I became existentially involved in the people's aggressiveness, their perceived sins and guilt, as well as their retreats toward atonement. They differed from someone like myself only because their struggle for existence has left them stranded at some more specialized level of culture, livelihood and religiosity, than my own happens to be. The general evolutionary eras, illustrated here, can be harmonized with most current anthropological theories on evolution. The time scale, of course, is tentative.

       ca. 3,000,000 years ago: gathering, scavenging, hunting ———————————

                                    ca. 12,000 years ago: domestication ————————————

                                            ca. 5,000 years ago: grand domestication ————————

                                                   ca. 3,000 years ago: religions of universal salvation ——

                                                                              ca. 300 years ago: democratic revolts —

Eras in the Evolution of Cultures and Religions

Gathering, Scavenging, Hunting—The span of time in humanoid evolution identified here with the activities of gathering, scavenging, and hunting may be estimated in excess of 3 million years, as having begun with the manufacture of stone tools. In isolated regions of our globe this culture stratum survives to this very day. Subsistence in this culture depends on the ability to forage and on the ability and courage to kill animals. Gatherers, scavengers, and hunters increasingly interfered at the end of their victims' life cycles; they exploited natural deaths, learnt to inflict death themselves, and assume full control over their victims' remains by consuming them.

        With an increase in intelligence, driven by the desire to have better weapons, there also increased the possibility for discerning responsibility, guilt, and suitable paths of justification. Hunting is trickery par excellence. Hunter gods therefore were mostly greater-than-humanoid hunters who, accordingly, appeared mostly in the form of predators. Some hunters paid share offerings to gods from the carcasses of the victims they killed. To alleviate guilt they atoned for their trespasses. For their sins of killing, primitive hunters developed and performed religious retreat rituals—establishing a better relationship with victims and divine sponsors ceremonially.

Domestication—Domesticators claimed ownership of seeds, plants, and livestock, and they paid their gods with sacrifices in kind—often whole specimens of animals and sheaves. The cultures of domesticators are marked by the activity of taking control over entire life cycles of plants and animals, from fertilization to consumption. They no longer just interfered at the moment of their victim's death.  Domesticators also claimed ownership of their dwellings and land, while newly discovered creator gods vouched and bestowed titles pertaining to these properties. Herders continued for some time the nomadism of their hunter ancestors, whereas domesticators who practiced agriculture built more permanent houses and traveled increasingly less.

        In tropical areas the earliest practice of horticulture was probably dominated by women while the men continued to specialize on hunting. Success in horticulture produced for these people an increase in population; the increase, in turn, left fewer animals for the men to hunt and, subsequently, saddled them with an identity crisis. Secret warrior societies, and cults of headhunting and cannibalism, were some of the men's religio-cultural adaptations to this decadent-hunter ego-crisis. Subsequent aristocratic warrior societies and priesthoods, together, have drawn much of their ethos and mythos from this crisis of readjustment among men—the transition from hunting to domestication.

        On prairie lands where hunters gradually adapted to shadowing remnant herds, where they claimed and guarded these herds as their own, the men remained the chief providers. Women in these situations achieved status only with great difficulty. This adaptation was typical on the semiarid prairies of northern Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia. On the other hand, cultures that came to practice a mixture of gardening, animal husbandry, and simple mechanized cultivation with draft animals were able to distribute labor and gender roles more evenly.

Grand Domestication—The grand domestication phase is important for understanding the larger panorama of human evolution and history. It represents a simple logical extension from the ordinary practice of domesticating plants and animals. Grand domestication began wherever ambitious domesticators, very often men of a herder tradition, have pushed beyond the limit of merely controlling the life cycles of plants and animals. They proceeded  to take control also of human groups as herds—together with the gods as protectors of those herds. Their most conspicuous methods for over-domesticating humankind were militarism, slavery, castration, and human sacrifice. Methods for domesticating the gods of subjected peoples included the building of stately "barns" or temples, setting up their gods in form of statues, feeding them on altars, and organizing the life of subject people by means of sacred calendars and festivals, thereby fixing the visiting and feeding hours for the safely sequestered gods.

        Many of these grand- or over-domestication schemes began innocently enough with the full collaboration of their subjects. Efforts of defense against other grand domesticator hordes required strict organization under some kind of King of kings who, in turn, drew his authority from a superior God of gods. This is to say, that great divine beings functioned in a real way as saviors of the people who, in response, united by worshipping them and organizing beneath them. The people remained strong and survived because they ordered their lives under strong grand domesticators and their even stronger divine sponsors.

        Whereas warrior, headhunter, and cannibal societies already may be classified as primitive forms of grand domestication, the practice of human sacrifice, in any form, represents a decadent hunters' elaboration on the advanced religious logic of domesticators. By sacrificing a representative specimen from a human "herd," grand domesticators paid for owning the remainder of that herd. They purchased humankind, herd animals, from their original divine owners. Human sacrifice legitimized the grand domesticators' claim for absolute power over the lives and deaths of their subjects. It established their divine title of ownership by legitimate and religiously sanctioned purchase.

        Egypt as the mother of Western Civilization has been a grand domestication system par excellence. The Hebrew "Exodus" tradition has defined itself as a reaction against it by arguing from some of it's own presuppositions. Greek philosophers also reacted to the problems of grand domestication, and they also have drawn basic ontology from Egyptian grand domesticator religion. Subsequently Christendom has, from the land of its origin, inherited the Hebrew reaction against Egyptian grand domestication and, along with this, has taken up into itself Egyptian ontology and theological structure as well—first in reaction against grand domestication and later by assimilation.

        A history of religions approach, in the larger perspective of human evolution, need not follow slavishly the valuations of field historians who, since time immemorial, have been singing the praises of empires and other kinds of grand domestication schemes. Kept on the payroll of grand domesticators, many repaid their sponsors with valuing and glorifying grandiose aggressiveness as "civilization." Let the historians of grand domestication continue to glorify the battlefronts and victories of empires, it remains the task of historians of religions to understand and show off  types of religious retreat behavior as opposites. Historians of religions are interested foremostly in the histories of commonsense retreat movements—in movements away from aggression and expansive nation building.


Universal Salvation Religions—These are movements on behalf of ordinary people, which attempted to liberate them from the clasp of grand domestication systems that had become unbearable. Universal salvation religions are popular patterns of religious retreat behavior that attempt to reclaim universal dignity for all people, regardless of imperial boundaries, wealth, or inherited privileges. Theologically they would deny, or would claim as their own to counter, the privileged relationship of grand domesticators to their divine sources of authority and justification.  Universal salvation religions have spread beyond imperial boundaries and become international movements.

        Approximately during the thirteenth century B.C.E., the biblical Moses is said to have led a group of slaves to freedom under the auspices of a God (Yahweh) who in all respects was equal to the God of gods of the Egyptian empire (Amun). The religion of these ancient escapees has survived partially in Judaism and Samaritanism. Strong traces of its prophetic theological impulse continue also in Christianity and Islam.

        Some time before two and a half millennia ago, in Iran, the man remembered as Zoroaster effected a religio-political reform against a herder priesthood that thrived on performing animal sacrifices. He enlisted the help of a benign grand domesticator and introduced worship of a universal deity, Ahura Mazda.

        During the fifth century B.C.E., in India, the founder of Buddhism ignored the authority of the traditional Aryan priesthood and nobility, whose powers were amplified regularly with the performance of spectacular sacrificial festivities that mediated the blessings of the gods. And with these he disregarded the endorsement of acquired prosperity and wealth. Gotama dropped out from his aristocratic social class and became a mendicant hippie-monk, bent on finding an escape route from samsara and the effects of karma and on making available to all a universal path to happiness and nirvana.

        Soon thereafter, in China, the sage Lao Tzu recorded his philosophy in a little book that gave prominence to the need of living in harmony with the universal Dao (Way). He gave his readers the mental tools with which they could ignore the mongering warlords and ambitious overdomesticators of his time. Some Daoist faithful, as at the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, still revere this ancient hippie-philosopher as Lord Most High—a similar status that, for similar reasons, has been attributed in the West to Jesus, as Christ the Lord.

        About that same time, in China, the sage Kung Futzu (Confucius) taught a doctrine of universal ethics for decent political behavior that imposed Heaven and formal etiquette upon people's relationships toward one another. His ethical teachings eventually put ambitious grand domesticators on the defensive; he prescribed for them a gentlemen's code of behavior, under the tutelage of Heaven and the ancient Sage Kings. When his behavioral and ethical prescriptions gradually took hold, and when they were adopted by farsighted grand domesticators, they helped stabilize China for over two thousand years.

        The many "heavenly emperors" of Chinese religious Daoism—rising in popularity again today—do constitute a multiplicity of religious hopes similar to the "kingdom of heaven" that Jesus gave to Christendom. Chinese Daoist priests balanced their traditional problem, of having an earthly grand domesticator rule the Middle Kingdom (China) as the Son of Heaven. They balanced it with the counterweight of a number of heavenly emperors and their generals. This multiplicity of heavenly saviors may reflect prior knowledge of hosts of Buddhist bodhisattvas. In part, the problems that Daoists had with overdomestication resulted from the generous endorsement that Confucians rendered to the office of the Son of Heaven. Still, Confucius should not be blamed for the exaggeration of imperial power that resulted in his name. He lived and taught during times of war when the emperor was powerless. He was convinced that the imperial office was necessary to restore a semblance of peace and order.

        During the first century C.E., in Palestine, a man named Jesus lived the role of a Son of God—a title that in the Near East for three thousand years had signified "heir of a divine emperor." He acted this role so obstinately that the masses of people followed him even after he had been crucified. They proclaimed his resurrection from death as their salvation, and in the religious movement that ensued they became all brothers and sisters of this heavenly Son of God. The hereditary kings and emperors of the region gradually lost their following to this universal "king of heaven." The promotion of Christ's followers to the status of being his brothers and sisters, and God's own children, has lifted them to a level of equality with their kings and popes. When the time was ripe, their somewhat secularized offspring traded in this religious currency on secular equality and democracy.

        During the seventh century, in Arabia, Muhammad the prophet organized a semi-nomadic people who had been dwarfed in the shadows of two re-overdomesticated universalisms: Zoroastrian Persia and Christian Byzantium. His universalism, of inviting all people to submit to Allah's will together, as equals, has quickly arrived at a synthesis for the religion of Islam—by way of assimilating the ambitions of grand domestication during competitive warfare with Byzantium and Persia. Whereas it took the Christian universal salvation religion three centuries to accommodate grand domestication, it happened with Islam during the lifetime of its founder.

Democratic Revolts—Revolutions in recent centuries, which in Europe and America deposed hereditary kings and instituted democratic forms of government, drew their sanctions from a long history of ideological conditioning. For nearly two millennia Christians in Western civilization have become accustomed to think of themselves as brothers and sisters of Christ, the new type of King of kings. All along they have lived in hope of "reigning" some day with Christ in his heavenly kingdom. Secularized descendants of these Western peoples, of peoples who knew themselves saved by Christian universalism, became disillusioned with the re-overdomesticated state of that religion. They therefore abandoned its theology. But they continued to hold on to much of the ethics of universal salvation. This time around they attempted to re-establish universal salvation without the burden of having to subscribe to Christianity's beleaguered "God."

        This is not to suggest that Western democracies were the pure offspring of Enlightenment philosophy, as they often are portrayed by students of intellectual history. The stuff of which mythologies and religions are made is manifest everywhere in the Social Contract philosophies of Locke and Rousseau. Social Contract theory was their myth that summarized and justified, without recourse to Christian theology, the aforementioned new democratic and egalitarian consciousness. It was a parable-like story that was projected into the beginnings of human history. There is no anthropological or archaeological evidence anywhere to the effect that this primeval contract has actually been made in an archaic society. But the story did ring true during the period of Democratic Revolts. It was being told, it seems, to legitimize and valorize the Magna Carta. In a similar fashion, Marxist ideology reached back to mythical beginnings to establish its normative original human state of a class-less society—the Utopia to which Communism hoped to return its people. Both streams of revolutionary ideology, the Western as well as that which became "Eastern," attempted to draw authority from distant greater-than-human beginnings—from deep within the evolutionary bedrock of humanity.

        The Christian faith may have been a "pie in the sky" notion, as Marxist ideologists have evaluated it; but the Christian hope also was the power that has depreciated the status of hereditary kings to a point where their subjects—ancestors of the new revolutionaries—could begin to depose them. Karl Marx came out of Judaism, and Friedrich Engels came from conservative Christian Pietism. Their communism need not surprise us in light of the fact that primitive Christianity itself, a Jewish sect, began as a communism. The "commune" ideal is a historical datum in the early records of Christendom; it is still practiced in the modern state of Israel today. So, dissatisfied with organized religion during the Industrial Revolution, and blessed with the prophetic conviction that a Judeo-Christian God who sponsors organized injustices cannot be real, both of these revolutionaries chose for their platform an ontology of reactionary atheism.

        While following the atheistic reactionary trail of Marx and Engels (heirs of Jewish and Christian values), the Communist liberation armies of Russia and China, and elsewhere, have themselves spread the Judeo-Christian ethos—minus its theology. They spread it unknowingly, like a heron's legs carry the eggs of fish from one pond to another. To the extent that nowadays, in lands where Communist systems are being restructured, the Christian religion acquires many new followers, this turnabout results not only from the lure of wealth that emanates from Christianized lands. Latter-day followers of Communism have been drilled for decades on a radical version of Judeo-Christian ethics, minus God. They now simply are trying to discover their own theological-ontological soul that had been kept obliterated by Marxist atheistic dogma.

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