People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion.
Ljudi stalno govore razne stvari o religiji. (Smeh) Sada već pokojni, veliki Kristofer Hičens napisao je knjigu po imenu "Bog nije velik". čiji je podnaslov bio "Religija truje sve." (Smeh) Ali prošlog meseca, u časopisu Tajm, rabin Dejvid Volp, koga ja smatram američkim rabinom, rekao je, kako bi ublažio negativnu karakterizaciju, da nijedan važan oblik društvene promene ne može biti ostvaren nikako osim kroz organizovanu religiju.
Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it.
Primedbe na ovaj oblik negativne i pozitivne strane su veoma stare. Imam u svom džepu, iz prvog veka pre nove ere, Lukrecijovu "O prirodi stvari", gde je autor rekao: "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" - Trebalo bi da znam ovo napamet - što znači, da koliko je religija u mogućnosti da ubedi ljude da čine zlo, a govorio je o činjenici Agamemnonove odluke da smesti svoju ćerku Ifigeniju na žrtveni oltar kako bi osigurao uspeh svoje vojske. Postojale su velike rasprave, vekovima, i u tom slučaju, zapravo možemo govoriti o milenijumima, o religiji. Ljudi su govorili o tome mnogo, i rekli su dobre i loše i ravnodušne stvari o tome.
What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with.
Danas želim da vas uverim u veoma jednostavnu tvrdnju, a to je da su te debate u neku ruku besmislene, jer ne postoji nijedna stvar kao religija o kojoj se grade takve tvrdnje. Ne postoji stvar pod imenom "religija", pa ne može biti dobra ili loša. Ne može čak biti ni neutralna. Ako razmislite o tvrdnjama o nepostojanju stvari, očigledan način da se pokuša i postavi nepostojanje smislene stvari bi bilo pružanje definicije te stvari i videti da li ju je bilo šta zadovoljilo. Počeću sa tom premisom za početak.
So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.
Ako pogledate u rečnike i ako razmisilite o tome, veoma prirodna definicija religije je da ona uključuje verovanje u bogove ili duhovna bića. Kao što rekoh, to stoji u mnogim rečnicima, ali ćete zapravo pronaći u radu Ser Edvarda Tajlora, koji je bio prvi profesor antropologije na Oksfordu, jedan od prvih modernih antropologa. U njegovoj knjizi o primitivnoj kulturi, kaže da je srce religije ono što on zove animizam, što je verovanje u duhovni organ, verovanje u duhovnost. Prvi problem za tu definiciju potiče od skorašnjeg romana Pola Betija pod imenom "Taf". Čovek priča sa rabinom. Rabin kaže da ne veruje u boga. Čovek kaže: "Ti si rabin, kako možeš da ne veruješ u boga?" On odgovara: "Zato je tako dobro biti Jevrej. Ne moraš da veruješ u boga samog po sebi, samo zato što si Jevrej." (Smeh) Ako je čovek rabin i Jevrej rabin i ako morate da verujete u boga da biste bili religiozni, onda imamo kontraintuitivni zaključak da pošto je moguće biti jevrejski rabin bez verovanja u boga, judaizam nije religija. To izgleda kao prilično kontraintuitivna misao.
Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)
Evo drugog argumenta protiv ovakvog viđenja. Moj prijatelj, Indijac, išao je kod svog dede kad je bio veoma mlad kao dete, i rekao mu: "Želim da pričam sa tobom o religiji." a deda mu je rekao: "Premlad si. Dođi kad budeš tinejdžer." Došao je kad je postao tinejdžer, i rekao je dedi: "Možda je sad malo kasno jer sam otkrio da ne verujem u bogove." Deda, koji je bio mudar čovek, reče mu: "Dakle, ti pripadaš ateističkoj branši Hindu tradicije." (Smeh)
And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God.
Na kraju, postoji jedan čovek koji uopšte ne veruje u boga. Njegovo ime je Dalaj Lama. Često se šali da je on jedan od najvećih svetskih ateista. Ali to je istina, jer religija Dalaj Lame ne uključuje verovanje u boga.
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
Možete misliti da to samo pokazuje da sam vam dao pogrešnu definiciju i da bi trebalo da imam drugu i da je testiram sa ovim slučajevima i pokušam da nađem nešto što obuhvata ateistički judaizam, ateistički hinduizam, i ateistički budizam kao forme religioznosti, ali zapravo verujem da je to loša ideja, a razlog zbog kojeg mislim da je to loša ideja je da ne verujem da je to način na koji naš koncept religije funkcioniše. Mislim da naš koncept religije funkcioniše tako što imamo listu paradigmi religija i njihove poddelove i ako se nešto novo pojavi što nagoveštava religiju, ono što pitamo je: "Da li je nešto poput ovih?" Zar ne? Mislim da to nije jedini način kako mislimo o religiji. To je, kao što je bilo, sa naše tačke gledišta, bilo bi dobro da išta na toj listi bude religija, zbog čega mislim da prikaz religije koji isključuje budizam i judaizam nema šanse da bude dobar početak, jer su na našoj listi. Ali zašto imamo tu listu? Šta se dešava? Kako je došlo do toga da imamo listu?
I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity.
Mislim da je odgovor prilično jednostavan i stoga sirov i sporan. Siguran sam da se dosta ljudi neće složiti sa time, ali evo moje priče, i istinita ili ne, to je priča koja vam daje dobar osećaj za to kako je lista možda nastala i stoga vam pomaže da razmislite o tome koja upotreba liste može postojati. Mislim da je odgovor ovde, kada su evropski putnici, počevši otprilike u vreme Kolumba, krenuli na put oko sveta. Potekli su iz hrišćanske kulture, i kada su stigli na novo mesto primetili su da neki ljudi nemaju hrišćanstvo i pitali su se sledeće: šta imaju umesto hrišćanstva? A onda je lista nastala. Sastoji se od stvari koje su drugi ljudi imali umesto hrišćanstva.
Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way.
Postoji poteškoća sa napretkom u tom smeru a to je da je hrišćanstvo ekstremno, čak i na toj listi, ekstremno specifična tradicija. U sebi ima svakakve stvari koje su izuzetno posebne i koje su posledice specifičnosti hrišćanske istorije i jedna stvar koja je u srcu toga, jedna stvar koja je u srcu većine shvatanja hrišćanstva, što je posledica specifične istorije hrišćanstva, a to je da je to veoma ubedljiva religija. To je religija u kojoj su ljudi veoma zabrinuti za to da li verujete u prave stvari. Interna istorija hrišćanstva je većinom istorija ljudi koji su ubijali jedni druge jer su verovali u pogrešne stvari, i takođe je uključena u borbe sa ostalim religijama, očigledno počevši od Srednjeg veka, borba sa Islamom, u kojem je, ponovo, nevera, činjenica da nisu verovali u prave stvari, to je delovalo veoma uvredljivo za hrišćanski svet. To je veoma specifična i posebna istorija koju hrišćanstvo ima, i nije svuda sve što je ikada bilo stavljeno na ovakvu vrstu liste. Evo i drugog problema. Dogodila se veoma posebna stvar. Zapravo je spomenuto ranije, ali veoma posebna stvar se dogodila u istoriji vrste hrišćanstva koju vidimo oko sebe većinom danas u Americi i desila se krajem 19. veka, a ta posebna stvar koja se dogodila krajem 19. veka je bila vrsta dogovora koji je postignut između nauke, novog načina organizovanja intelektualnog autoriteta, i religije. Ako pomislite na 18. vek, recimo, ako mislite o intelektualnom životu pre kraja 19. veka, sve što ste uradili, sve o čemu ste mislili bilo da je fizički svet, ljudski svet, prirodni svet van ljudskog, ili moralnost, bilo šta što ste radili bi se uokvirilo u pozadinu grupe religioznih pretpostavki, hrišćanskih pretpostavki. Ne biste mogli da ispričate o prirodnom svetu, a da ne kažete nešto o njegovoj vezi, na primer, za priču o postanju u avramskoj tradiciji, priču o postanju u prvoj knjizi Tore. Sve je bilo uokvireno na taj način.
But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition."
To se menja krajem 19. veka i po prvi put, moguće je da ljudi razviju ozbiljne intelektualne karijere kao prirodni istoričari poput Darvina. Darvin je bio zabrinut za vezu između onoga što je rekao i istina religije ali je mogao da nastavi, da piše knjige o svojoj temi, a da ne mora da objasni kakva je bila veza sa religijskim tvrdnjama i takođe, geolozi su mogli da o tome govore. U ranom 19. veku, ako biste bili geolog i izneli tvrdnju o dobu Zemlje, morali biste da objasnite da li je bila saglasna ili kako jeste ili nije saglasna sa dobom Zemlje koje se navodi u Postanju. Krajem 19. veka, mogli ste da napišete udžbenik o geologiji u kojem dajete argumente koliko je Zemlja stara. Dakle, postoji velika promena i ta intelektualna podela rada se javlja i učvršćuje tako da krajem 19. veka u Evropi nastaje intelektualna podela rada, i možete da radite svakakve ozbiljne stvari uključujući, čak i filozofiju, a da ne budete ograničeni mišlju: "Ono što moram da kažem mora biti u saglasnosti sa dubokim istinama koje mi je dala religijska tradicija."
So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity?
Zamislite nekoga ko izlazi iz tog sveta, tog sveta iz kraja 19. veka, ulazi u zemlju gde sam ja odrastao, Ganu, društvo u kojem sam odrastao, Asante, ulazi u taj svet na prekretnici 20. veka sa pitanjem koje je sačinilo listu: šta oni imaju umesto hrišćanstva?
Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion.
Evo jedne stvari koju bi primetio, i inače, postojala je osoba koja je uradila to. To je bio kapetan Ratrej, i bio je poslat kao antropolog britanske vlade i napisao je knjigu o Asante religiji.
This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play.
Ovo je disk duše. Ima ih gomila u Britanskom muzeju. Mogao bih da vam dam zanimljivu, različitu istoriju o tome kako je došlo da toliko mnogo stvari iz mog društva završi u Britanskom muzeju, ali nemamo vremena za to. Ovaj predmet je disk duše. Šta je to disk duše? Nošen je oko vrata čistača duše Asante kralja. Šta je bilo njihov posao? Da čiste kraljevu dušu. Trebalo je dosta vremena da se objasni kako duša može biti stvar koja se može čistiti, ali je Ratrej znao da je ovo religija jer su duše bile u igri.
And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this.
I takođe, bilo je mnogo drugih stvari, mnogo običaja. Na primer, skoro svaki put kad bi neko pio piće, prosuli bi malo na zemlju nazivajući to prolivanjem u slavu boga, i dali bi nešto precima. Moj otac je to radio. Svaki put kad bi otvorio bocu viskija, što je srećom bilo često, skinuo bi čep i prosuo veoma malo na zemlju, i govorio bi, obraćao bi se Akromi-Ampimu, osnivaču naše loze, ili Jao Entoniju, mom pradedi, govorio bi im, nudeći malo toga.
And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure.
I konačno, bile su ogromne javne ceremonije. Ovo je crtež iz ranog 19. veka koji je nacrtao drugi britanski oficir i koji prikazuje takvu ceremonju, gde je uključen kralj, i kraljevski posao, jedan od većih delova njegovog posla, pored organizovanja rata i sličnih stvari, bilo je da nadgleda grobove svojih predaka i kada je kralj umro, tron na kom je sedeo bio je zacrnjen i odnešen u kraljevski hram predaka. I svakih 40 dana kralj Asantea morao je da ode i izvrši kult za svoje pretke. To je veliki deo posla i ljudi smatraju da ako ne uradi to, stvari će se raspasti. Dakle, on je religiozna figura, kao što bi Ratrej rekao, kao i politička figura.
So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened.
Sve ovo bi se računalo kao religija za Ratreja. ali moje mišljenje je da kada gledate u živote tih ljudi, otkrivate da svaki put kad urade nešto svesni su svojih predaka. Svako jutro na doručku odete napolje ispred kuće i date ponudu božjem drvetu, nima due van vaše kuće, i ponovo, razgovaraćete sa bogovima, visokim i niskim bogovima, precima i tako dalje. Ovo nije svet u kojem se desilo razdvajanje između religije i nauke. Religija se nije razdvojila od bilo koje oblasti života, i posebno, što je ključno za razumevanje sveta, je to da je to svet u kojem posao koji nauka obavlja za nas urađen onim što će Ratrej nazvati religijom, jer ako žele da objasne nešto, da znaju zašto usev nije uspeo, da znaju zašto pada kiša ili ne pada, ako im treba kiša, ako žele da znaju zašto im je deda umro, pozvaće se na ista imena, iste jezike, govoriće istim bogovima o tome. Ovo veliko razdvajanje, drugim rečima, između religije i nauke se nije dogodilo.
Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not -- This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role.
Ovo bi bila samo istorijska zanimljivost, samo što je to u velikom delu sveta i dalje istina. Imao sam privilegiju da idem na venčanje pre neki dan u severnoj Namibiji, oko 30km južno od granice sa Angolom u selu od 200 ljudi. Ovo su bili moderni ljudi. Sa nama je bilaUna Čaplin, za koju ste neki od vas i čuli i jedan od ljudi iz sela joj je prišao i rekao: "Video sam te u Igri prestola." To nisu bili ljudi koji su se izolovali iz našeg sveta, ali ipak za njih, bogovi i duše su još uvek tu i kada smo bili u autobusu, vozeći se između različitih delova ceremonije, nisu se molili samo na opšti način već za sigurnost putovanja i to su i mislili i kada su mi rekli da je majka, mladina baba, sa nama, nisu mislili figurativno. Mislili su, čak i ako je bila mrtva osoba, mislili su da je i dalje živa. U većini delova sveta danas, to razdvajnje između nauke i religije nije se dogodilo, i kao što sam rekao, to nisu - Ovaj momak je radio za Čejs i Svetsku banku. Ovo su stanovnici sveta zajedno sa vama ali dolaze iz mesta u kojem religija igra veoma različitu ulogu.
So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true.
Sledeći put kad neko želi da napravi široku generalizaciju o religiji želim da pomislite da možda ne postoji religija, religija kao takva, i stoga ono što kažu ne može sigurno biti istina.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)