It seems to me that for most people, belonging to a community is more important to them than the beliefs of their religion. Relatively few people seem to be as enthusiastic about their religion's beliefs as they are about meeting up with their friends and acquaintances for services, etc.
Please note. I'm talking about most people here, and not specifically about members of RF. I think RFers are probably more interested in beliefs than most people because, basically, this forum is for discussing beliefs. But the average religious person seems more interested in community to me than to his or her religion's belief system.
What do you think?
Hi Sunstone,
I think that the
community aspect is very important but it is also key to the beliefs, certainly in a religion with communalized worship at the heart of its theology like Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity. So I tend not to separate the two.
For Catholics, the maturation of individual consciences takes place within the context of the universal community localized in the neighbouring parish - the Church and Her sacramental life. We do not grow as Christians apart from the life of the Church. The church community is the constitutive basis of our identity. We are embedded in its life and teachings.
From the archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe, the earliest known example of purpose-built megalithic religious architecture constructed by hunter-gatherers using Stone Age tools, we find that at the very origins of religious belief in human history:
A spiritual concept seems to have linked these sites to each other, suggesting a larger cultic community among PPN mobile groups in Upper Mesopotamia, tied in a network of communication and exchange.
These places form a group of sites belonging to one cult, but their community was not confined to these sites...
This explosion of images, with few forerunners in Palaeolithic art, offers a view of a symbolic world, which had commonalities shared among the residents of PPN sites in Upper Mesopotamia. They are part of a system of symbolic communication that preceded writing as an essential method of storing cultural knowledge (Watkins 2004, 2010; Morenz & Schmidt 2009). These people must have had a highly complicated mythology, including a capacity for abstraction. Following these ideas, we now have more evidence that Cauvin (1994) was right in his belief that the social systems changed before, not as a result of, the shift to farming.
This complex symbolic system continued for millennia. A prerequisite for its long life must have been an extensive network of supra-regional contacts sustained on a regular basis (Watkins 2008, 2010)...The character of Gobekli Tepe makes it clear that these feasts had a strong cultic significance...
In other words, the archaeological and anthropological studies of
the earliest known manifestation of ritualized communal religious worship suggests that it served to create a broad cultic community beyond the level of the enclosed tribe and moreover that this was a necessary development for the emergence of settled life and agriculture, leading to the first towns and cities of the first discernible civilizations. Only by giving people a sense of community beyond the restrictive bounds of the tribal family unit, through the device of shared religious beliefs and practices, could the foundations of a settled, civilized life lived in common with people from different "
tribes" working together come into existence.
This same emphasis resurfaces much later on in the course of religious history with Jesus, who consciously detached himself from conventional family affiliations in favour of broader, inclusive membership in a cultic community - which we call, "the Church". For example, when informed that his mother and brothers were outside looking for him, Jesus replies that those who comply with God’s will are his brothers and mother (Mark 3: 31-35). This teaching arises from Jesus’ determination to broaden the boundaries of "community". The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37) therefore teaches that our "neighbours" are not merely those who share our ancestry, religious heritage, ethnicity or who belong to our tribe.
This became very important to the Catholic Church i.e. for instance underlying its opposition to consanguineous (cousin) marriages in the Middle Ages:
From Jack Goody’s “
The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe” [pgs. 56-8]:
“...What were the grounds for these extensive prohibitions on consanguineous marriages? The ‘Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique’ (1949) gives three general reasons that have been proposed:
2. The social reason, that distant marriages enlarge the range of social relations. This common ‘anthropological’ notion was put forward by those great theologians, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognised that out-marriage multiplied the ties of kinship and thus prevented villages from becoming ‘closed communities’, that is, solidary ones..."
From Avner Greif (“Family structure, institutions, and growth – the origin and implications of Western corporatism”):
“The conquest of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes during the medieval period probably strengthen the importance of kinship groups in Europe. Yet, **the actions of the Church caused the nuclear family — constituting of husband and wife, children, and sometimes a handful of close relatives — to dominate Europe by the late medieval period.
“The medieval church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined large kinship groups*. From as early as the fourth century, it discouraged practices that enlarged the family, such as adoption, polygamy, concubinage, divorce, and remarriage. **It severely prohibited marriages among individuals of the same blood (consanguineous marriages), which had constituted a means to create and maintain kinship groups throughout history. The church also curtailed parents’ abilities to retain kinship ties through arranged marriages by prohibiting unions in which the bride didn’t explicitly agree to the union.*
“European family structures did not evolve monotonically toward the nuclear family nor was their evolution geographically and socially uniform. However, by the late medieval period the nuclear family was dominate.
“The practices the church advocated, such as monogamy, are still the norm in Europe. Consanguineous marriages in contemporary Europe account for less than one percent of the total number of marriages. In contrast, the percentage of such marriages in Muslim, Middle Eastern countries, where we also have particularly good data, is much higher – between twenty to fifty percent. Among the anthropologically defined 356 contemporary societies of Euro-Asia and Africa, there is a large and significant negative correlation between Christianization (for at least 500 years) and the absence of clans and lineages; the level of commercialization, class stratification, and state formation are insignificant.”
Also see:
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama: review
Starting with the altruistic and co-operative behaviour observable in chimps – often when they repel a marauding rival group – Fukuyama traces the evolution of hunter-gathering bands into tribes, which, with the aid of religion, transformed themselves into states...
In Europe, Fukuyama highlights the role of the Roman Catholic Church in eradicating tribal customs, particularly pertaining to inheritance, and in instituting both the rule of law and separation of temporal and spiritual powers, developments which long preceded the mercantile individualism to which Marx, Weber and Niall Ferguson ascribe so much influence.
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama - Ethics & International Affairs
The problem, though, is that this kind of emotion-laden, status-conscious, pro-social rule-following is in service of the narrow interests of family lineages, such as tribes, or similar networks based on personal connections and mutual back-scratching. Initially, all human groups were based on this kind of patrimonialism, and in the developing world many still are. This lineage favoritism is not based mainly on the inclusive fitness idea of evolutionary biology, says Fukuyama: favoring your fourth cousin in a business deal is all about ancestor worship, not genetic propagation.
Patrimonialism is an easy fit with human nature, but it has serious drawbacks. It limits the scale of social organization, limits the division of labor, impedes economic efficiency, and tends to encourage a violent, self-help approach to solving security problems. A better system has the features described in classic modernization theory: a rational-legal, impersonal administrative state that monopolizes legitimate violence across a large enough territory to sustain an efficient division of labor, while being accountable to a system of rules and to the public. But how do you get one of these states, and what keeps you from sliding back to the universal default setting of patrimonialism?
One of the most interesting parts of Fukuyama’s account explains that one of Europe’s great advantages in developing the modern state was the Catholic church’s assault on the extended familial lineage by backing late marriage and banning divorce, adoption, and marriage with close kin and kin’s widows in order to hinder familial lineages from amassing assets.
Drawing on this argument, Fukuyama shows that the historical sequence of state building is crucial for determining its outcome. In Europe administratively strong states developed late, after institutions of law and accountability, backed by religious ideology, had already gained a toehold in some places, and after Christianity had weakened the familial base of patrimonialism
To this end, the Second Vatican council in its
dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, noted:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_c...entium_en.html
At all times and in every race God has given welcome to whosoever fears Him and does what is right.(85) God, however, does not make men holy and save them merely as individuals, without bond or link between one another. Rather has it pleased Him to bring men together as one people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness...
All men are called to belong to the new people of God. Wherefore this people, while remaining one and only one, is to be spread throughout the whole world and must exist in all ages, so that the decree of God's will may be fulfilled. In the beginning God made human nature one and decreed that all His children, scattered as they were, would finally be gathered together as one...
It follows that though there are many nations there is but one people of God, which takes its citizens from every race, making them citizens of a kingdom which is of a heavenly rather than of an earthly nature. All the faithful, scattered though they be throughout the world, are in communion with each other in the Holy Spirit, and so, he who dwells in Rome knows that the people of India are his members..."
