Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the most probing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, being subjected to antireligious indoctrination, or even repression, does not result in the abandonment of religion. Ignorance, primitive living conditions, extreme tolerance and liberalism, the possibility to freely choose one's religious affiliation from the many competing for each soul might lead to skepticism, if not to outright rejection of Divinity. In other words, conditions that seem to support religious beliefs do not automatically lead to practical experiences of human self-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditions generate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is no simple answer to the question of why some people are religious, some indifferent, and others actively against religion. Enlightenment did not result in generalized atheism; the pressure of the church did not generate more believers. Scientific and technological progress of the magnitude we experience did not erase the verb to believe from among the many that denote what people do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and this applies to religion as it applies to all other forms of belief, is part of the practical experience of human self- constitution. It involves our projection in a world acknowledging distinctions that are pragmatically significant and synchronized with the dynamics of life and work.
The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. We humans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities, forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through many filters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, in particular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probably as good a source as any reference book) defines religion as "belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe." Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practical experience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks.
The manifold relation between literacy and religion can be meaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context of the constitution of religion. Its further development into different theologies, and its embodiment in various churches and other institutions connected to religion, also help in this understanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure of religion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, and the dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflect adaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make it fit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formed and transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion, especially language after the experience of writing, developed practically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth to incipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitive expression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, and sound, to a more self- organized system of expression becoming communication. During the process, presented here in compressed form, writing appears as a result of interactions between the experiences of language and religion.
That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that will eventually lead to literacy has already been generously explained. It has also been pointed out that with writing emerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many more practical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy and religion are intertwined in ways different from those characteristic of other human practical experiences. In the historic overview to be provided, these peculiarities will be pointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of genetic replication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetic transmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together, and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequence of generations. The role of scale of human experience, the relation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, and other aspects, the relation between individual and community, and between right and wrong will also be addressed in their context. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments will be employed to clarify what religions have in common.
In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other, but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and especially involving relativity in the search for options leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject human existence to doubt.
In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts. The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through a religious past to which they have lost any meaningful connection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians try to reconnect to the world of experiences to which they traditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts, allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselves with the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of a new pan-Turkish empire.
In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism, as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in different contexts and with different motivations. This might sound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes of existence and faith, or lack thereof.
Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better or worse, it has played an important role in the history of humankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: We cannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The new world order brought about by the downfall of communism in the Soviet Union and East Europe raises even more questions regarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- forms of religion that replace official atheism religion or disguised forms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent do they reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy or safe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature were all affected by a change in their details: different ways of preserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towards authority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not in the fundamental acceptance of Divinity.
Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance, religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merely ceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with the newest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks. Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religious ceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is the appropriation of social, political, and moral causes, as religion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, and progressive, or conversely as the guardian of permanent values, justifying its active role outside its traditional territory. This ascertainment is dictated by the pragmatic framework of the dynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by the memetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reason for not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, no matter how exciting this might appear.
But who made God?