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.
人們常常討論宗教。 (觀衆笑聲) 已逝的著名作家克里斯托弗·希欽斯 寫了一本書叫做《上帝不偉大》, 副標題叫做“宗教毒害一切”。 (觀眾笑聲) 但是上個月,時代雜誌刊登了 拉比大衛·沃普的一段話, 他被公認為美國的拉比(智者), 反駁這些對宗教的負面描述, 他說:任何形式的社會改革 都只能通過有組織的宗教活動進行。
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.
這些關於宗教正面與負面的評價 都是老生常談了。 我口袋裡就有一句話是 公元一世紀的盧克萊斯說的, 他是《物性論》的作者,他這樣說道, “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum”(拉丁文), 我應該把這句話背下來。 這句話的意思就是,宗教 就是這樣慫恿人們向惡。 他講訴了 阿伽蒙農爲了軍隊無往不勝 而要把他自己的女兒依菲琴妮婭 送上祭壇作爲犧牲的事實。 所以這些關於宗教的辯論 已經持續了幾個世紀,而按這個例子來看, 我們可以說關於宗教的爭論 已經持續了幾千年。 人們經常討論這個話題, 他們表達了很多關於宗教的好的壞的 和無所謂的觀點。
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.
我今天想跟大家說的, 是一個簡單的觀點。 那就是,這些爭論 從某種意義上來說都是荒謬可笑的, 那是因爲這個世界上 根本就沒有宗教這個東西, 所以這些爭論純是無稽之談。 既然沒有宗教這個東西 也就沒有好於壞之分, 甚至都不可能對其無所謂。 如果你想想這些關於 事物的不存在性的觀點, 有一個顯而易見的 來確定這些想像的事物的 不存在性的方法 就是先提出一个定義, 然後看看哪些事物符合這個定義。 現在我準備就開始 以這一點開始討論。
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.
如果你去查字典, 如果你想想這些事情, 一個對宗教的非常自然的解釋就是 宗教是對神靈和有神性事物的信仰。 我是說,這是在很多字典裏面的解釋, 但是你也會發現其實在 牛津大學第一位人類學教授, 現代人類學先鋒之一, 爵士愛德華泰勒的著作中就提到過。 在他的有關原始文化的書裡面, 他提到,宗教的核心就是萬物有靈, 也就是相信神體, 信仰靈性。 這個定義的第一個挑戰 來自最近保羅貝·蒂的一本小說《塔夫》。 他寫到一個人向拉比求教, 拉比說他自己不相信上帝。 那人就說“你可是拉比啊,你怎麼能不相信上帝?” 回答是“這就是做猶太人的好處。” 你不需要去相信上帝本身, 只要相信自己是猶太人。“(笑聲) 所以如果這個人是拉比,並且是猶太拉比, 而如果只有信仰上帝才算信教, 那麼我們會得到一個有悖常理的結論, 那就是你不可能成爲一位不信仰上帝的 猶太拉比, 猶太教不是一個宗教。 這個結論似乎有悖常理。
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)
這裡還有另外一個反駁這個定義的觀點。 我有一個印度的朋友, 他年輕的時候去他祖父家, 還是個小孩,他跟祖父說, “我想跟你談談宗教。” 祖父回答他說:“你還太小。 等你長大成少年了再來找我。“ 所以他長大成少年後又去找他祖父, 他跟祖父說: “現在可能有點晚了, 因爲我發現自己根本不相信有神靈。“ 他的祖父是一個很有智慧的人,他說道: “哦,所以你是屬於印度教 無神論派的嘍。”(笑聲)
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.
最後,這人 成了世界有名的不相信神的人。 他的名字是達賴喇嘛。 他經常開玩笑的說自己是世界上 領先的無神論者。 但是這是真的,因爲達賴喇嘛的宗教信仰 並不包括信仰神。
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?
現在你可能認爲這只能說明 我提出了一個錯誤的定義。 那麼我必須得重新定義, 然後再檢驗這些例子, 找到一個可以涵蓋 無神猶太教,無神印度教 和無神佛教的宗教定義, 但是其實我認爲這不是個好主意, 我認爲這不是個好主意的理由是 我不認爲 我們的宗教概念是這樣來的。 我認爲我們的宗教概念是這樣來的, 我們實際上有的是一個 宗教範例的列表 和其支系的清單,對麼, 如果有新的 聲稱是宗教的事物出現, 我們只需要問“這個是其中之一麼?” 對麼? 我認爲我們不止這樣理解宗教, 而且,從某種意義上來說, 我們認為 那個列表上所列的應該都是宗教, 這就是爲什麼我認爲 無法包含佛教和猶太教的宗教定義 不是一個好的開始, 因爲這兩個宗教都在我們的列表上。 但是我們爲什麼有這樣一個列表呢? 到底發生了什麼? 我們是怎麼想到要這樣一個列表呢?
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.
我認爲答案非常簡單, 也因此粗糙和爭議不斷。 我相信很多人都會持反對觀點, 但是這是我的故事, 不管是真是假,我認爲 這個故事告訴我們 這個列表是怎樣來的, 也因此可以幫助你思考 這個列表的作用。 我認爲答案就是,歐洲的旅行家們, 粗略地從哥倫布開始算起, 開始環遊世界。 他們都是來自基督教文化, 當他們來到一個新地方, 他們發現有些人並不信仰基督教, 所以他們就問自己這個問題: 沒有基督教,他們有什麼? 由此一個列表就誕生了。 這個列表包括了很多 非基督教的信仰。
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.
到這裡我們就遇到了一個問題, 基督教,即使在這個列表上面, 有著非常具體的傳統。 它包含了各種各樣的 非常獨特的東西, 這些都是由其獨特的基督歷史 所形成的結果, 而居於此核心的是, 大部分對由獨特基督教歷史所形成的 基督教的理解的核心是, 它是非常教條的宗教。 這個宗教非常注重 你是否信仰正確的事物。 基督教的歷史,它內部的歷史, 大部分是人們互相殘殺的歷史, 因爲他們信仰了錯誤的事物, 這歷史還包括了 與其他宗教的爭鬥, 當然是由中世紀開始, 和伊斯蘭的衝突, 就是因爲無神論, 因爲他們不信仰正確的事物, 讓基督教世界感到備受侮辱。 這是基督教歷史 非常獨特的地方, 不是所有被放在這個清單上的東西 都是這樣的。 我認爲,還有一個問題, 一件非常特殊的事情發生了。 其實我們前面有提到過, 我們現在大部分美國人 所熟知的基督教歷史上 發生了 一件非常重要的事情, 這件事情發生在十九世紀後期。 這件發生在十九世紀後期的 特殊的事情 在科學與宗教之間 樹立了界限, 科學成為了新的 組織知識的權威。 你設想一下十八世紀, 你設想一下 十九世紀以前的知識界, 你做的任何事,想的任何事, 不管是物質世界, 人類世界, 還是與人類相對的自然世界, 或是道德,你做的任何事 都會被放在 宗教信仰、基督教信仰的 背景下去考慮。 你會發現 任何一個對自然世界的描述 都涉及到自然世界與宗教世界的關聯, 比如,亚伯拉罕故事中的 創世論, 第一本猶太宗教律法《托拉》中的創世論。 所有的東西都是跟宗教有關的。
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."
但是十九世紀後期發生了改變, 這是第一次,人們可以 認真從事科學事業, 就像自然歷史學家達爾文那樣。 達爾文擔憂他所說的 和宗教真相之間的關係, 但是他能夠繼續, 並寫下自己的題材, 而不需要提及它們與 宗教信仰之間的關係, 相同地,地質學家也可以 開始逐漸發表言論。 在十九世紀初期,如果你是一個地質學家 對地球的年紀進行推測, 你必須解釋這個年紀 是否與創世紀中提到的 地球年紀吻合, 怎樣吻合或是怎樣不吻合。 到了十九世紀末期, 你則可以寫一本地質學的教科書, 裡面談到你對地球年紀的推測。 所以這是一個很大的改變,這種分離, 使得腦力勞動分工得以發生, 在十九世紀末期的歐洲 更加得到了鞏固, 產生了真正意義上的腦力勞動分工, 你可以做很多嚴肅的事情, 包括很多,甚至哲學, 思想不再被禁錮, “我所說的需要與 宗教教會我的事實 保持一致。”
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?
想像一下一個人走出 那個十九世紀末期的世界, 來到我成長的國家,加納, 我成長的社會,阿桑特部落, 來到20世紀轉折點的 那個世界, 帶著形成那個清單的問題: 沒有基督教,他們有什麼?
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.
有個事情他將會注意到, 順便一提,的確有人注意到了。 他的名字叫船長拉特雷, 他是英國政府派遣的人類學家, 寫了一本關於阿桑特宗教的書。
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.
這是一個靈魂盤, 大英博物館有很多。 我可以給你一個 有趣的、不一樣的歷史, 關於我們部落的東西 最後是怎麼跑到大英博物館的, 但是我們現在沒有時間講這個。 言歸正傳,這是一個靈魂盤。 什麼是靈魂盤? 這是繞在阿桑特國王的 靈魂洗滌人的脖子上的東西。 他們的工作是什麼?洗滌國王的靈魂。 估計得花不少時間 來解釋靈魂這種東西 怎麼能被洗, 但是拉特雷知道這是宗教, 因爲有靈魂參與其中。
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.
同樣的, 還有很多其他的東西,儀式。 舉個例子,任何人每次喝東西,多多少少 總要潑一點在地上, 這被稱爲祭酒, 他們獻一點給祖先。 我的父親也會這樣做。 每次他打開一瓶威士忌, 我很高興地說,他經常這樣做, 他會去掉瓶蓋,倒一點在地上, 然後他會跟, 他會跟我們的祖先 Akroma-Ampim 或者姚‧安東尼,我的祖叔叔, 他會跟他們交流, 給他們嚐點這酒。
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.
最後,還有大的公衆慶典。 這是十九世紀早期 另一位英國軍官畫的 這樣一個慶典的畫作, 國王也在其中, 國王的任務, 他最主要的任務, 除了組織打仗之類的事情外, 就是照看祖先的墳墓, 當一個國王去世, 他坐過的椅子會被塗黑 並被放在皇室祖墳廟裏, 每40天, 阿桑特國王就要去一次,祭拜一下 他的祖先。 這是他的主要工作 , 人們覺得如果國王沒有做到這點, 這個國家就要分崩離析了。 所以國王既是一個宗教領袖, 就像拉特雷會說的, 也是一個政治領袖。
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.
所有的這些對拉特雷來說都是宗教, 而我想說的是,當你 注意觀察這些人的生活時, 你也會發現每次他們做任何事情 都會想着祖先們。 每天早晨吃早飯的時候, 你要走到房子前方 給你房子外面的 聖樹獻上一些祭品, 然後你要跟聖樹說話, 有高階位的神,低階位的神, 祖先,其他等等。 這是一個 宗教與科學還未分離的 世界。 宗教還沒有 從生活的任何方面剝離出去, 尤其是, 理解這個世界的重點是, 在這個世界裡, 科學爲我們做的事情 是由拉特雷所說的宗教完成的, 因為如果他們想要任何解釋, 如果他們想知道爲什麼莊稼謝了, 如果他們想知道爲什麼下雨了, 或者他們想下雨卻沒有雨, 如果他們想知道爲什麼 他們的祖父去世了, 他們會向同一個地方求助, 用相同的語言, 跟相同的神靈訴說。 這個偉大的分離,換句話說, 宗教與科學的分離還未發生。
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.
也許這只是單純的歷史趣事, 不過事實是在世界很大一部分地方 還是這樣的情況。 有天我很榮幸參加 在納米比亞北部舉行的一個婚禮, 位於安哥拉邊界向南20英里 一個200人的村莊。 這些都是現代人。 和我們在一起的一個人是歐娜‧卓別林, 你們有些人可能聽過她的名字, 一個村民走向她, 說,“我在‘權力遊戲’電視劇裏面見過你。” 所以這些人並不是 與我們的世界隔離的人, 但是,對他們來說, 上帝和神靈佔據了生活的大部分, 當我們坐上巴士 在(慶典的)各個場合來回時, 他們並不是籠統地祈禱, 而是祈求旅途平安, 他們都是真心的, 當他們和我說,我媽媽, 新郎的“祖母”, 也跟我們在一起的時候,他們並不是比喻。 他們意思是,儘管她已不在人世, 她仍舊在他們周圍。 所以在這個世界的很多地方, 宗教與科學的分離 尚未發生, 就像我說的,這些人不是-- 這個人曾經在大通銀行和世界銀行工作, 這些是跟你一樣的人, 但是在他們的世界裡, 宗教扮演着非常獨特的角色。
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.
所以我想告訴你們的是,下次有人 想對宗教做一個寬泛的概括的時候, 可能宗教根本不存在, 沒有宗教這個東西, 所以他們所說的任何東西 都不可能是真的。
(Applause)
(掌聲)