Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)

153,769 views ・ 2014-06-16

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People say things about religion all the time.
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(Laughter)
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The late, great Christopher Hitchens
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wrote a book called "God Is Not Great"
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whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything."
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(Laughter)
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But last month, in Time magazine,
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Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi,
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said, to balance that against that negative characterization,
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that no important form of social change
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can be brought about except through organized religion.
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Now, remarks of this sort on the negative
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and the positive side are very old.
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I have one in my pocket here
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from the first century BCE by Lucretius,
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the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said,
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"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" --
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I should have been able to learn that by heart —
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which is, that's how much religion
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is able to persuade people to do evil,
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and he was talking about the fact
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of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter
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Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice
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in order to preserve the prospects of his army.
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So there have been these long debates
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over the centuries, in that case, actually,
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we can say over the millennia, about religion.
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People have talked about it a lot,
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and they've said good and bad
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and indifferent things about it.
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What I want to persuade you of today
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is of a very simple claim,
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which is that these debates are
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in a certain sense preposterous,
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because there is no such thing as religion
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about which to make these claims.
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There isn't a thing called religion,
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and so it can't be good or bad.
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It can't even be indifferent.
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And if you think about claims
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about the nonexistence of things,
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one obvious way to try and establish
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the nonexistence of a purported thing
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would be to offer a definition of that thing
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and then to see whether anything satisfied it.
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I'm going to start out on that little route
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to begin with.
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So if you look in the dictionaries
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and if you think about it,
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one very natural definition of religion
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is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings.
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As I say, this is in many dictionaries,
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but you'll also find it actually
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in the work of Sir Edward Tylor,
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who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford,
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one of the first modern anthropologists.
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In his book on primitive culture,
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he says the heart of religion is what he called animism,
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that is, the belief in spiritual agency,
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belief in spirits.
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The first problem for that definition
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is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff."
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There's a guy talking to a rabbi.
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The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God.
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The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?"
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And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish.
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You don't have to believe in a God per se,
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just in being Jewish." (Laughter)
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So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi,
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and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious,
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then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion
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that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi
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without believing in God,
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Judaism isn't a religion.
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That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.
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Here's another argument against this view.
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A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine,
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went to his grandfather when he was very young,
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a child, and said to him,
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"I want to talk to you about religion,"
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and his grandfather said, "You're too young.
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Come back when you're a teenager."
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So he came back when he was a teenager,
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and he said to his grandfather,
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"It may be a bit late now
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because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods."
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And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said,
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"Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch
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of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter)
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And finally, there's this guy,
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who famously doesn't believe in God.
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His name is the Dalai Lama.
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He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists.
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But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion
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does not involve belief in God.
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Now you might think this just shows
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that I've given you the wrong definition
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and that I should come up with some other definition
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and test it against these cases
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and try and find something that captures
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atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism,
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and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity,
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but I actually think that that's a bad idea,
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and the reason I think it's a bad idea
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is that I don't think that's how
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our concept of religion works.
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I think the way our concept of religion works
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is that we actually have, we have a list
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of paradigm religions
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and their sub-parts, right,
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and if something new comes along
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that purports to be a religion,
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what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?"
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Right?
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And I think that's not only how we think about religion,
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and that's, as it were,
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so from our point of view,
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anything on that list had better be a religion,
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which is why I don't think an account of religion
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that excludes Buddhism and Judaism
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has a chance of being a good starter,
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because they're on our list.
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But why do we have such a list?
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What's going on? How did it come about
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that we have this list?
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I think the answer is a pretty simple one
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and therefore crude and contentious.
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I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it,
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but here's my story,
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and true or not, it's a story that I think
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gives you a good sense of how
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the list might have come about,
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and therefore helps you to think about
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what use the list might be.
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I think the answer is, European travelers,
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starting roughly about the time of Columbus,
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started going around the world.
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They came from a Christian culture,
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and when they arrived in a new place,
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they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity,
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and so they asked themselves the following question:
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what have they got instead of Christianity?
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And that list was essentially constructed.
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It consists of the things that other people had
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instead of Christianity.
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Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way,
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which is that Christianity is extremely,
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even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition.
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It has all kinds of things in it
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that are very, very particular
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that are the results of the specifics
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of Christian history,
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and one thing that's at the heart of it,
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one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity,
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which is the result of the specific history of Christianity,
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is that it's an extremely creedal religion.
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It's a religion in which people are really concerned
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about whether you believe the right things.
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The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity,
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is largely the history of people killing each other
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because they believed the wrong thing,
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and it's also involved in
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struggles with other religions,
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obviously starting in the Middle Ages,
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a struggle with Islam,
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in which, again, it was the infidelity,
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the fact that they didn't believe the right things,
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that seemed so offensive to the Christian world.
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Now that's a very specific and particular history
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that Christianity has,
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and not everywhere is everything
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that has ever been put on this sort of list like it.
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Here's another problem, I think.
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A very specific thing happened.
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It was actually adverted to earlier,
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but a very specific thing happened
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in the history of the kind of Christianity
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that we see around us
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mostly in the United States today,
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and it happened in the late 19th century,
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and that specific thing that happened
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in the late 19th century
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was a kind of deal that was cut
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between science,
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this new way of organizing intellectual authority,
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and religion.
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If you think about the 18th century, say,
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if you think about intellectual life
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before the late 19th century,
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anything you did, anything you thought about,
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whether it was the physical world,
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the human world,
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the natural world apart from the human world,
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or morality, anything you did
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would have been framed against the background
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of a set of assumptions that were religious,
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Christian assumptions.
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You couldn't give an account
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of the natural world
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that didn't say something about its relationship,
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for example, to the creation story
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in the Abrahamic tradition,
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the creation story in the first book of the Torah.
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So everything was framed in that way.
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But this changes in the late 19th century,
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and for the first time, it's possible for people
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to develop serious intellectual careers
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as natural historians like Darwin.
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Darwin worried about the relationship between
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what he said and the truths of religion,
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but he could proceed, he could write books
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about his subject
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without having to say what the relationship was
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to the religious claims,
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and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it.
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In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist
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and made a claim about the age of the Earth,
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you had to explain whether that was consistent
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or how it was or wasn't consistent
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with the age of the Earth implied
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by the account in Genesis.
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By the end of the 19th century,
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you can just write a geology textbook
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in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is.
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So there's a big change, and that division,
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that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think,
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and it sort of solidifies so that by the end
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of the 19th century in Europe,
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there's a real intellectual division of labor,
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and you can do all sorts of serious things,
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including, increasingly, even philosophy,
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without being constrained by the thought,
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"Well, what I have to say has to be consistent
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with the deep truths that are given to me
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by our religious tradition."
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So imagine someone who's coming out
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of that world, that late-19th-century world,
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coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana,
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the society that I grew up in, Asante,
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coming into that world
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at the turn of the 20th century
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with this question that made the list:
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what have they got instead of Christianity?
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Well, here's one thing he would have noticed,
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and by the way, there was a person who actually did this.
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His name was Captain Rattray,
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he was sent as the British government anthropologist,
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and he wrote a book about Asante religion.
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This is a soul disc.
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There are many of them in the British Museum.
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I could give you an interesting, different history
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of how it comes about that many of the things
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from my society ended up in the British Museum,
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but we don't have time for that.
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So this object is a soul disc.
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What is a soul disc?
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It was worn around the necks
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of the soul-washers of the Asante king.
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What was their job? To wash the king's soul.
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It would take a long while
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to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing
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that could be washed,
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but Rattray knew that this was religion
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because souls were in play.
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And similarly,
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there were many other things, many other practices.
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For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less,
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they poured a little bit on the ground
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in what's called the libation,
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and they gave some to the ancestors.
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My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey,
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which I'm glad to say was very often,
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he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground,
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and he would talk to,
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he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line,
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or Yao Antony, my great uncle,
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he would talk to them,
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offer them a little bit of this.
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And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials.
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This is an early-19th-century drawing
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by another British military officer
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of such a ceremonial,
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where the king was involved,
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and the king's job,
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one of the large parts of his job,
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apart from organizing warfare and things like that,
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was to look after the tombs of his ancestors,
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and when a king died,
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the stool that he sat on was blackened
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and put in the royal ancestral temple,
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and every 40 days,
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the King of Asante has to go and do cult
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for his ancestors.
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That's a large part of his job,
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and people think that if he doesn't do it,
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things will fall apart.
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So he's a religious figure,
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as Rattray would have said,
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as well as a political figure.
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So all this would count as religion for Rattray,
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but my point is that when you look
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into the lives of those people,
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you also find that every time they do anything,
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they're conscious of the ancestors.
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Every morning at breakfast,
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you can go outside the front of the house
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and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua
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outside your house,
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and again, you'll talk to the gods
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and the high gods and the low gods
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and the ancestors and so on.
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This is not a world
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in which the separation between religion and science
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has occurred.
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Religion has not being separated
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from any other areas of life,
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and in particular,
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what's crucial to understand about this world
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is that it's a world in which the job
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that science does for us
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is done by what Rattray is going to call religion,
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because if they want an explanation of something,
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12:38
if they want to know why the crop just failed,
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if they want to know why it's raining
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or not raining, if they need rain,
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if they want to know why
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their grandfather has died,
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they are going to appeal to the very same entities,
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the very same language,
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talk to the very same gods about that.
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This great separation, in other words,
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between religion and science hasn't happened.
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Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity,
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except that in large parts of the world,
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this is still the truth.
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I had the privilege of going to a wedding
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the other day in northern Namibia,
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13:13
20 miles or so south of the Angolan border
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13:16
in a village of 200 people.
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13:18
These were modern people.
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We had with us Oona Chaplin,
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13:21
who some of you may have heard of,
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13:22
and one of the people from this village came up to her,
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13:24
and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'"
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So these were not people who were isolated from our world,
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but nevertheless, for them,
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the gods and the spirits are still very much there,
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and when we were on the bus going back and forth
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to the various parts of the [ceremony],
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they prayed not just in a generic way
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but for the safety of the journey,
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and they meant it,
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and when they said to me that my mother,
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the bridegroom's [grandmother],
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was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively.
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They meant, even though she was a dead person,
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they meant that she was still around.
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So in large parts of the world today,
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that separation between science and religion
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hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today,
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and as I say, these are not --
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This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank.
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These are fellow citizens of the world with you,
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14:14
but they come from a place in which religion
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is occupying a very different role.
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So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants
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to make some vast generalization about religion
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is that maybe there isn't such a thing
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as a religion, such a thing as religion,
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and that therefore what they say
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cannot possibly be true.
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(Applause)
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