In previous posts I have been asking what forms of knowledge might religion produce? Even illusions can be forms of knowledge-at least when they promote health or survival or fitness. But that would be stretching the term ‘knowledge’ more than a bit. Knowledge should refer to understanding to true understanding-not illusory understanding. Many people down through the centuries have asserted that religion produces true knowledge and I have been systematically exploring the major suggestions concerning that issue in previous posts. Despite summarizing several of these theories concerning knowledge supposedly produced by religion I have found little or no support for any of the theories save the argument from religious experience. Given that religious experiences as reported by people across the centuries and across cultures has some common features it is reasonable to claim that the experiences can then be associated with stable forms of cognition and therefore some form of knowledge. But I feel that that is a slim reed on which to base claims of religious knowledge.
I next summarize claims that religious knowledge comes from the practice of religious rituals rather than religious experiences per se. Though rituals undoubtedly help to create religious experiences the two are not identical. You can have religious experiences spontaneously without engaging in any religious rituals at all. In recent years, anthropological and cognitive approaches to ritual behaviors and ritual form have registered some remarkable advances..
Religious rituals often involve a reduction in agency/volition. The individual sets aside his own immediate intentions and instead performs actions stipulated by others- such as gods and ancestors, long ago (Humphrey and Laidlaw, 1994). Rappaport (1999) suggested that rituals involve “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (Rappaport, 1999, p. 24), Liénard and Boyer (2006; p. 815) recently proposed that ritualized behaviors are characterized by ‘compulsion (one must perform the particular sequence), rigidity (it must be performed the right way), redundancy (the same actions are often repeated inside the ritual) and goal demotion (the actions are divorced from their usual goals). pointed out that instead of performing one’s own intended actions during a ritual, one performs actions stipulated by others-others who devised the actions long ago-sometimes centuries ago.
Whitehouse (2004) suggested that religion’s key rituals might be usefully classified into two broad subgroups depending on the accent they place on verbal vs. nonverbal procedural displays. Religions in the doctrinal mode rely on verbal expression; are highly repetitive; spread by proselytization; and can occur over wide areas. Religions in the imagistic mode prefer use of visual symbols and iconic imagery. Whitehouse tentatively suggested that the contrast between imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity is mediated by differing forms of memory: flashbulb memories for the former and semantic memory for the latter.
McCauley and Lawson (2002) note that in religious rituals God or a supernatural being may act as the doer (and thus appear in the agent slot of a ritual representational sentence), or the receiver and thus would appear in the patient slot, of the main clause in the sentence. The centrality of a ritual will correspond to how deeply the supernatural being is embedded in a sentential clause. They also argue that “special agent rituals” (those in which the relevant supernatural being is the agent of the action) are reversible but non-repeatable: there are rituals that can reverse the results of these rituals (for a marriage ceremony there is, in principle, a divorce ceremony), but in general there is no need to repeat these rituals, since once they have effected a result, that result is fairly permanent. Special patient rituals, in contrast, are repeatable but nonreversible.
While these classification and theoretical efforts to capture variability in religious ritual forms are laudable they do not answer the question of the functions of ritual. Very little else can be said with any degree of confidence concerning ritual and cognition because so little work has been done in this area. Interestingly, temporal cognition is altered in religious rituals-the sense of time is slowed down in solemn rituals and speeded up in ecstatic rituals. Emotional processing is altered in favor of emotions that ‘elevate’ or link-up the self with the deity, and attentional and executive functions are focused away from the Self and onto the deity. With respect to the issue of the kinds of knowledge produced by ritual it is clear some interesting proposals are on the table but no from conclusions can be drawn at this point in time.
References
Humphrey, C., & Laidlaw, J. (1994). Archetypal actions: A theory of ritual as a mode of action and th caseof the. Jain Puja. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Liénard, P., & Boyer, P. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 1-56.
McCauley, R. N., & Lawson, E. T. (2002). Bringing ritual to mind: Psychological foundations of religious forms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and religion in the making of humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
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