Episode 75 Accidentally born again

Hello, and welcome to episode 75 of Structured Visions. Structured Visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here.

Now, I'd love to start episodes of Structured Visions with a question to put toward you, even though I never actually hear your answers, but I still like to pose the question. And the question today is, what is your relationship to religion? Okay, so I'd be curious to know what that question sparked for you, because it's not something we're supposed to talk about in polite society. We're not supposed to talk about sex, religion, or politics at the cocktail party or whatever.

And hopefully you think of Structured Visions as your own sort of fun cocktail party, and I just brought up the R word. And it can be a really, really tricky topic for people. It's one of those things where you might not actually have any relationship to religion, but I think everybody has some kind of relationship to religion, even if it's just like, oh, it kind of pisses me off, or I don't think about it, or I don't even understand it, that might be one. But if you have some kind of religious background, or religious faith, or religious practice, or spiritual practice, you don't like the word religious, we're dealing with something that's not shared.

So you're often dealing with a belief system that other people don't share, or they don't like the idea of. It can also be, and sometimes you might not be acknowledging this about your own religion, but there's also often a very clear cultural connection. And so your quote unquote belief, or your adherence, or your practice with your religion, might be more about your association with your culture, or your community, than it is about your individual faith, or your individual beliefs. And if it is about your culture, you might not accept all of it, but you might accept something, but if somebody outside your culture challenges you want it, it's just like, okay, you're challenging me on my religion, is if it were something that I could just list out the reasons for why I believe in it, when it actually is quite deeply ingrained or interwoven, in my culture, in my sense of belonging, with the people who may be a part of my family, or again, part of my potentially part of my ethnic group, my cultural group, that type of thing.

This business of, sometimes, you know, if you have a religious faith, and you come across someone who has a different religious faith, or doesn't have a religious faith, you might be, sometimes they might feel the need to quiz you about the reasons why you believe what you believe. And religion is not necessarily rational, meaning it isn't necessarily reason based, it might be emotional, or you might have had spiritual experiences, but other people simply cannot, you know, understand. So that can make it really tricky to deal with, because effectively then you have to somehow say to the other person, you're not like me, which is, which seems like an excuse, or it seems like potentially an offensive thing to say. And also, you know, people have different experiences of spirituality, and that can be very, very difficult to communicate, so you might have had a mystical experience, and you're speaking to someone who might not be quite wired that way, and so how do you explain, the unexplainable?

The other issue around religion, as you, I'm sure you know, is that it can be very trauma inducing, and a lot of people have very negative experiences, or negative memories about some aspect of religion, especially in the past, or in their family. A lot of people were not safe in their families, or their cultural, culture's religion. They might have, you might have belonged to a religion where your identity wasn't recognized, your very sense of who you are, your very being, wasn't acknowledged, it is okay, you might have been told that you are sinful when you don't feel like you're sinful. You might have belonged to a religious community where your voice simply wasn't heard, wasn't recognized, you weren't allowed to speak.

Very often people are sexually or emotionally abused by people in positions of religious power, so that's, is a reason not to talk about religion. You might have experienced hypocrisy from people in your religious institution, so that unfortunately is not uncommon. You might have just, in a slightly less stressful thing, you might have just not grown yet, you might have been in a religion, you might have been part of a religious group, or a spiritual group, or something like that, and you just outgrew it, it was just no longer with you, or also you might have been coerced, or emotionally manipulated, or somehow other manipulative, or some other way manipulated, to join a religion, or to accept a particular worldview, or maybe it just seemed like you were just joining a group and ended up having being a little bit cultish, so wow, is this ever a tricky topic? So I think maybe I've already feeling a little bit oppressed by the discussion already, I mean, I'm only discussing it.

So let's make it a little lighthearted, let's see if I, there's no question what's your relationship to religion, so I think I'll ask something else. I think now I'll ask the question, what's your most embarrassing religious moment? So hopefully everybody has one of those, or maybe you did broach the topic, or you know you had an auntie ask you a question about your religion, or you did something embarrassing in church, I don't know, something like that. So what's your most embarrassing religious moment?

I'll start. You can tell me if your embarrassing religious moment is more embarrassing than mine. Okay, so mine was when I was 12, and I had a really good friend who I had met at a summer camp. So it was a summer camp, it was for creative writing, which was really cool, and it was from people from all over the state, so she lived in another part of the state, the state of Maryland, and I lived.

And so we had gotten along with each other so well, that we kept in touch after camp ended, for several years in fact, and I would go over her house like Christmas time, and she would come to my house often in the summer. And the first time I visited her, it was over at the Christmas period, Christmas break, again I was 12, and I had known that her father was a preacher, she said her father was a preacher, and so when I met her family, and we spent a lot of time at their church, and it was like an evangelical church, it was called a Bible church, and we spent a lot of time at the church, or doing church related activities while I was there, and it was different from other churches that I attended in the past. And I had attended a lot of churches by the age of 12, I guess, I've just always been looking back, I've always had this fascination with religion, which I have to admit, I can't entirely explain, but if you ever read that young adult book by Judy Bloom, are you there, got it to mean Margaret, it was published in the early 70s, I was a little bit like Margaret, okay, so Margaret is this sort of adolescent girl who's exploring a lot of things, but one of the things she's exploring is religions because her parents come from different faith backgrounds, and so she's makes it her school project to visit all these different religious establishments and places of worship and that type of thing. And I was a little bit like that, like I would go to any church that would let me in, top tip, they all let you in.

They're very happy out of you there. So I had been to Catholic churches and Methodist churches, my parents had been Catholic and they'd been Methodist, they'd been Presbyterian, they'd been Episcopal, I'd been to Quaker Meeting House, I'd been to actually, I'd been to a Mormon church, but not until after I was 12, I'd been to Churchill Christ Church, I'd been to an Amni African Methodist Episcopal church, and then to all the churches, I have to say, I didn't have the chance to go to any non-Christian establishments, which is a shame, but I went to a lot of Catholic and Protestant ones, I've had lots of different experiences, but even so, my camp friends church was different, and one of the things, well the main thing that was different about it is they had this end times worldview. So I don't know whether you're familiar with that or not, but I'll tell you about how I learned about it. So there was a kind of intensity of this church already, and it was a little bit, I'd already noticed when we were going to church services and stuff like that, and it was not quite the structure of it, wasn't quite as formal as some of the other churches I've been to.

But the end times worldview I learned about at a New Year's Eve party at the church, so I was like, oh great, New Year's Eve party, well got dressed up, and we went to this party, and it was in the basement of the church, and they played a film, and the film was called The Thief in the Night, so I don't know if you've ever seen this film, this is another early 1970s film, and the Thief in the Night comes from the Bible verse. So if you have seen this film, it might be already sort of bringing about some emotions for you, it brings about emotions for me. It was a very scary film. It was like, okay, so it was prophesying a point in time where a whole host of people on the earth were just gonna disappear.

Like you wake up and the person sleeping in the bed next to you would just be gone, or like your kids, one minute they're playing in the lawn outside or something like that, the next minute you look out, they're not there, they're just gone. I don't think they leave their clothes behind you. I think that you're the all of them, including their clothing disappears, and you're just left alone, right? And what happens is that those people have been, they have been raptured, okay?

So this is the period of time called the rapture, so a whole group of people get like beamed up to heaven. They just disappear from the earth, and they get to sort of live this blissful heavenly life in heaven. And then all the people left behind have to undergo this thing called the tribulation. Okay, now just to give you a flavor of where I was when I was 12, when I first watched this bit about some people getting raptured up and some people having to undergo the tribulation, I just thought to myself, yeah, yeah.

My friend, who's sitting next to me, she'll probably get raptured up, and I'll probably have to undergo the tribulation. Like I didn't even know what the criterion was for whatever reason, I just assumed that the tribulation was my fate. Okay, so in the tribulation, there's this whole new world order. There's this guy who establishes himself as like the leader of the world.

He's actually the anti-Christ, and then all these new rules get put into place where everybody has to get the mark of the beast, to either tattoo it on the foreheads or on their wrists, and it's actually 666, but I think they do it in like binary or something, so you don't realize it's actually 666 or 666, but in order that you can't do any transactions, you can't like get by bread or access your bank account unless you have this stuff on your forehead or on your wrist, and it's a cashless society so you can't pay in cash, you have to pay with your account, which is just accessed by showing you the mark of the beast. But if you get the mark of the beast, you're already doomed if you're going through the tribulation, but if you get the mark of the beast, you're doubly doomed. There's no redemption for you at that point in terms of the bigger spiritual picture. But then, if you don't get the mark of the beast, then the Antichrist has decreed that you'll just get killed during this period of tribulation in the film, the way they showed it is people actually got guillotined, which was, I can't remember how much of that I saw, but I saw enough of that to be for it to really freak me out.

Scary film, I mean, maybe I'd watch it again as a horror film, hopefully not a church basement, I'd probably just avoid it if I'm totally honest. Okay, so here's the difference between the people who get raptured up and those who don't. It isn't just, you don't just think, oh, I'm probably gonna have to get through the tribulation because there's always seems to be the only thing that happens to me, you know, the difference, and it's not if you're Christian, you get raptured up, and if you're not a Christian, you don't, because you could think you're a Christian, but still stay behind, and the difference is whether or not you have accepted Christ as your personal savior. So there's a specific way of being a Christian, which is, and I think you have to profess it, I think you have to like somehow say it, that you've accepted Christ as your personal savior.

And if you don't do that, even if you're a good person, and you donate money, and you help sick children, and all those things, if you have an accepted Christ as your personal savior, then you don't get raptured up, you have to go under the tribulation, and even if the rapture doesn't happen in your lifetime, it doesn't really matter because you'll still go to hell and suffer all these horrible things. Okay, so just imagine that, imagine the kind of feeling in the room, 12-year-old girl, stressed out by all this stuff that I'm watching. And so then at the end of the film, my friend's dad, the preacher gets up, and he leads everybody in prayer, and it is a long prayer. And the idea here is that everybody has to bow their head and close their eyes with all heads bow, and all eyes closed.

And if you've ever been to a church like this, if you belong to a church like this, you probably heard that said because I've heard it several times since. And so then he kind of just gave us a little synopsis of the film, and then he sort of took us through the kind of, you know, emotional, snafu's there, like, you know, imagine what it'd be like. If you haven't accepted Christ as a personal savior, any point you could die or the rapture could happen, and then you'd either suffer hell on earth or hell and hell, and it wouldn't be awful. And then just kind of a re-hashing of the graphic experience of what it would be like to be left behind.

And so with all that in mind, then the next question is, who here would like to make the commitment today to accept Christ as their personal savior? And the idea is, a lot I thought, the idea was, well, who wouldn't? That's a rhetorical question, clearly. It's like, if you don't accept Christ as your personal savior, you're going to hell and nobody wants to go to hell.

So the obvious answer is, sure, yeah, you want to make that commitment. So I thought it was a rhetorical question. And then, but it wasn't a rhetorical question. It was a real question.

They said, OK, all heads bowed, all eyes closed. Put your hand up if you'd like to accept Christ as your personal savior. So I'm like, OK, it's not a rhetorical question. It's a group exercise.

It's a let's all show that we all belong here. And let's all participate in this. I thought it was like a, you know, if you're happy and you know it clap your hands kind of moment. You know, if you believe in fairies clapping, I thought it was just something.

I thought it was like the wave at the sporting event. You know what I mean? Everybody does that just to show that you belong. And I was just like, look, I'm a visitor here.

You have to do what the people in the church are doing. And so I don't want my friend's dad to see me as the only person who's on my hand up. So I stuck my hand up. And it turns out it wasn't everybody joining exercise.

And I kind of knew this straight away, even though my head was bowed and my eyes were closed. Because my friend's dad voiced. His voice changed. And he got really excited.

And I could just tell, by the way, like he'd been moving around the room beforehand. And then suddenly you could tell by his voice. And because you could just tell that he was standing directly in front of where I was sitting because I was sitting in the front row. Because whatever it was the family of the pastor.

And he kept talking. He's still praying out loud. He kept talking about the young girl. He'd been saved on this very night.

Or whatever. He's like, oh my god, he's talking about me. I put my hand up. I was the only damn one.

He put my hand up. I can feel my face just burning up. It's like I can't believe I did this. How was I supposed to know?

Why didn't I take a cheeky peek just to see whether other people had their hand up? Because I was trying to do the right thing. And so here we go. And it turns out that this whole put your hand up thing and make the commitment thing and the whole getting saved thing.

That's like a once and for all thing. You only do that once. Once you've done it, it's done. You don't have to put your hand up every time you watch the movie.

Or every time there's another call to conversion or whatever it's called. You just put it up once in your life and then you're done. Don't worry. I'll never put it up again.

So like, dude, I got accidentally born again. So that was just like, oh my god. Now it would be one thing to get accidentally born again at some revival or some Christian event. And then you go home and you laugh about it with your friends later.

But I was actually going home with the pastor and the pastor's family, right? So I still had another week with his family. And so I was like, OK, let's just talk about it. And of course, we'd be just having dinner or playing a novelty.

And then my friends would have it. And I'd be like, so let's talk about the film we watched the other night. I'm like, let's not. So anyway, that's my embarrassing religious moment.

I'd love to hear yours. But please tell me your embarrassing religious moment if you have one. I would love it if it were more embarrassing than mine, because I'm even more nervous about it. I'd love to sit it out loud.

But in addition to being embarrassing, the experience was actually genuinely scary. And I'm not saying scary because I was embarrassed. I'm saying the actual film itself was scary. But the implications of it were even scarier, because I just didn't like it wasn't that I didn't believe the film.

It said I didn't want to believe what the film was telling me. And I thought, I didn't want to believe that the cosmology that could be quite so cruel, which was to say that anybody who just didn't get the memo, that there was a particular form they were supposed to sign to say that it's of the crisis of personal savior. Like if they didn't get the memo, if they were absent that day, if they just missed it, they lived in a non-Christian country, they lived in a non-evegical part of the world, they weren't surrounded by it, that they would have to undergo eternal torment, like literal hell, either on Earth or in hell or both. So here I was not wanting to believe this.

And then there's a part of me that's saying, well, just because you don't want to believe something doesn't mean it's not true. I was just like, oh god, the grip of fear in my belly. Like, oh my god, maybe it is true. Like maybe me not wanting to believe it is just, I don't know.

And then your mind's like, maybe that's just the devil's way of trying to, maybe it is that. Maybe it is. How do I know? I don't actually know whether it's true or not.

You want to make it into the trouble, there's a whole bunch of other people you believe in. And it did also give me a really compassionate understanding of people who try to convert people to Christianity or to their religion. Because if you genuinely hand on heart believed that the people who didn't get the memo of that accepting Christ as their personal savior or whatever the memo says, if you genuinely believe they were going to suffer even a little bit, let alone the eternal tornance of hell, you only really have one moral choice, but the most moral choice you can make is to make sure as many people as possible get that memo. So you'd have to be giving out tracks to every single person that you saw.

You'd have to be handing out the brochure. You'd have to be doing whatever you could to convince people. And so that felt really oppressive to me. This idea of, oh my god, you know this thing.

Other people don't know this thing. And they're going to suffer because they don't know this thing. And so you have to evangelize. And what if it doesn't work?

And what if you're not? Oh god. Anyway, oh god, literally. The common denominator at the base of all of it was fear.

Certainly for me, it was fear. It wasn't this great joy. Hooray, I'm going to be raptured. Because a lot of the people in the church were like, oh, well, maybe this will be the year that we get raptured up.

And all I could think of was, oh my god, what if this is true? Like, what if all these, how could it be great to be raptured up with all your family aren't? Et cetera. So for me, the key thing was fear.

And it was fear that got me to put my hand up in the first place. And it was fear that got me to potentially consider that what was being said in that film was true. And often, people, sociologists of religion, or often people who are critical of religion, claim that fear is at the heart of all religious beliefs. So I would ask if that's true for you.

Do you, looking back over your maybe religious past, your religious experiences, has fear been a key component of that? Either fear that you have or fear that you feel like has been imposed upon you? Just look into the answer. But anyway, there's a French sociologist writing in the late 19th and early 20th century called Imidbiokheim.

And he wrote about religion. He wrote a book called the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. It was a sociological perspective on the role of religion in society. That's sort of fundamental purpose of religion, what it really was at its most stripped down level.

And he actually says, it's an estate to think of religion as based upon fear. So he's not saying that fear might not be part of it and some religions and others, but it's not fundamental to religious belief or to the religious life. So I want to share with you, because the fascination with religion, by the way, didn't stop when I had my accidental born again moment. In fact, it kind of ballooned out.

I got even more interested because it's like, okay, well, there's this group of people who believe this thing, it has particular effect on me. And here's what they do, and then there's other people who believe a different thing. And I just found it so fascinating. I felt like I wanted to be a sociologist or religion even though I didn't know what that was at the time.

So later, what I did, was start to read sociology, I think this is when I was doing my PhD. I did read the elementary forms of religious life. I found it fascinating. So we'll talk a little bit about Durkheim today, but I do want to just stop now and with the caveat, because I think there's some problematic features of Durkheim's sociology.

He's writing it during a period of imperialism. And so we're going to be talking about indigenous societies. And so we just need to be mindful that there's gonna be a colonialist flair to Durkheim's discussion. And so we just want to be aware of that.

A couple of things that I can just point out now. So it's called the elementary forms of the religious life. So what he's done is he's like, well, we need to look at religion in its most stripped down form. And by that he means where it doesn't have a huge history, where it would have had lots of influences and that it would have been influenced by migrations of peoples and technological developments and political upheavals and that type of thing.

And so that's the type of elementary form he's talking about. And he's also talking about the first forms of religion. So we get this feeling that he wants to go way way way way back in time to sort of the beginnings of civilization. Now, of course we can't.

We don't have, that's prior to written records. So what he does instead is he's looking at indigenous peoples. And so he's looking at indigenous Australians of all people. And so the assumption there is that the indigenous Australians or the just systems are somehow, they must be like they were in prehistory.

And I think, well, that's assuming that, that's assuming that just because they might not have been influenced by external forces doesn't mean they haven't been evolved over time, you know, as part of their own, you know, development as a people. Anyway, so that's already tricky. And also he's relying on ethnologies that were produced at a time of indigenous Australians, all of them written by white European men, all of them with their own particular biases, and also, you know, between groups of people as other. Okay, so that's, that's, and he also used the word primitive when he's talking about primitive religions, which is a problematic term.

Now, the editor of the book that I read tries to explain that, well, he might be using the term primitive. It doesn't have the same, didn't have the same annotations that it has now, but he is saying that all religions are developed out of this, but I just think we need to be mindful. Okay, so all of that aside, I mean, the reason, even with all of those caveats, the reason I still want to look at Durkheim is because there's a particular thing that he says, and I think it reveals something, like a belief that we hold all of those universally, but that we don't examine, and I want to examine it today, and that's about what it means to be a human being. So that's why we're looking at Durkheim, even though we're aware that there are problems from a post-colonial perspective, there are problems with his work.

Okay, so we were talking about what Durkheim had to say about religion and fear, and he, and just quoting him here, he says, the first religious conceptions have often been ascribed to feelings of weakness and dependence, a fear and anguish that must have seized man when he first came in contact with the world. So by the end, we understand human being. The victim of a kind of nightmare in his own making, he imagined himself surrounded by hostile and awesome powers that had to be appeased by certain rights. Okay, so he's saying, all right, people often have this view of religion where it's like, okay, you've got this person, and it's like, oh my God, the rules are scary.

I'm going to project onto the scary world that there are scary forces and benevolent voices, forces and that sort of religion comes from. But Durkheim says, actually no. And this is where he says, let's look at the sort of quote unquote earliest or the most elementary forms. And these he says are totonistic religions.

So these are religions that, or these are clans or societies that are totem based. So this is a system whereby each clan has some totem like a sacred object, like what's a kangaroo that distinguishes it from other clans. And then there's taboos and rituals that are set up to honor those totems, for instance, if you're part of a kangaroo clan, that might mean that you don't eat kangaroo, and that you don't marry somebody within the kangaroo clan, et cetera. So there's all sorts of divisions and rituals, and Durkheim makes a distinction between sacred and profane, so the kangaroo might be sacred to your clan if it's your totem.

And so when he talks about totonistic societies, and he talks about totonism as a religion, he says, it's not fear based. He says, instead, the gods in a totonistic religion are friends, relations, and natural protectors. So there's not this crushing sense of doom. He says, the power to which the cult is addressed is not imagined looming above it and crushing it with superiority.

On the contrary, it's very near, conferring on him useful powers he does not inherently possess. So it's like your sort of he describes it as if you're surrounded by these sort of friendly helpers that have powers you don't have. It sounds to me like a almost like a sort of indie game. And so he says, at its most elementary form, religion wasn't about fear.

And he says, perhaps divinity was never closer to man than at this moment in history, since it's present in his immediate surroundings, an imminent in part in himself. Joy is confidence then, rather than terror and oppression is at the root of totemism. So he just starts off by saying, religion is not fundamentally about fear. So what is it about?

And ultimately throughout the book, Durkheim is developing the hypothesis that religion is about connecting with something that's bigger than yourself, which perhaps is unsurprising. But the key thing is, it's not because you're afraid of the world. It's because you want to feel like you have a place, and that you have a place in a larger world than you would have if you were just on your own. So it's about belonging and connection.

And something bigger than you. And what he says is that for all religions, the thing that is bigger than you, so even though every religion has a different potentially different name for it or a different way of accessing it, Durkheim says for every religion, it is society itself. So what the individuals are all in every religion, now that we know this, but what we're doing when we're practicing religion is we are looking to the, looking to society. The thing that is bigger than us, that grants us our position in a social world, is society itself.

So it's like this sort of collective, the collective consciousness of the civilized world. Okay, and the quote is the idea of society is the soul of religion. So what you're worshiping, when you worship, whether you're worshiping your clan's totem, or you're worshiping a particular god, is you're worshiping society, meaning you're giving deference and showing reverence for this bigger world that comprises the consciousness of all of the people in that world with bigger consciousness, the kind of bigger moral order. And again, it's not just about belonging to something bigger, it's about having a sense of your own place in the world, of your existence as a person.

And he points out, without a society, you can't actually exist as a person, because your place in society is structured by the society. Okay, so the Bible Church, where I got accidentally saved. So this is not by Durkheim's definition, and quote unquote, elementary form of religion, okay? Cause Christianity, it's roots are way back, it's roots go back into monotheism, who's roots are even further back.

And from those roots branch off some monotheistic traditions, and then even though the Judeo-Christian traditions and other Christianities, it branches off to all these different directions, and there's all these influences, political, economical, et cetera, that affect them. So it's not an allen-entry religion, right? It's the Bible Church, where I was accidentally saved. But in theory, the principles are supposed to be the same regardless of the religion.

So you should be able to still draw under comes principles to make sense of this experience of being saved. So if we think, okay, people need to worship something bigger than themselves, and a thing that's bigger than themselves, a society, that's principle number one. And principle number two is they need society in order to experience themselves as people, right? So if you're in the Bible Church, what is going on in the Bible Church?

How is that worshiping of society actually working? Well, from my way of analyzing it, I can see it this way. You can imagine you're in sort of contemporary society and so many different belief systems abound. And so you're in this sort of tricky position where you could really belong to any of them.

Like I said, any church will take you in. And so what a Bible, an evangelical Bible, like End Times Church, what it does is it says, I've got this very compelling reason to belong to this one, which is, you're gonna suffer and die if you don't. Okay, so, but it's not necessarily fear-based. I mean, like I said, the people in the church shouldn't seem to be running around terrified of everything.

They seem joyful actually. They seem like quite happy with the idea of being raptured up. So there's this sense of, listen, if you're gonna be in this church, you're gonna get into it, okay, like you commit to a particular worldview, and a lot of people are committed to this. So here we got this sense of belonging, right?

So here's the particular form of society that you're worshiping when you're in this type of evangelical church, which is, you're kind of part of an elite, you're kind of part of this gritty elite that is prepared to believe something that's pretty devastating. And the funny thing is, the paradox is if you believe it, then the devastating thing won't happen to you. So that gives you that added bonus. But again, it's not really just about bonuses, it's about the type of society that you get to belong to when you worship in that particular way.

So it establishes a particular type of society for you. But in addition, in the evangelical church, you aren't just a kind of part of the masses, you are established as an individual self, okay? So it's not just like, okay, you walk through the doors, and therefore you're part of us, you actually do have to make the commitment as an individual that you're gonna give your life over to Christ. So you're giving your life over as an individual to another individual who is the Christ figure.

And then another sort of individual, another self, the God, is judging you. So you have judgment on you as a self as to whether you've properly made the commitment, as to whether you've got to rest your life. So that's your place, that business of belonging to a society and having your place in this society, your place in this society is your individual, it was your agentive choice that is gonna actually get you into heaven. Like the church is your support structure, but you're the one who actually gets you to heaven because you made the choice.

And nobody in the church judges you, it's God who judges you. So that sort of affirms your personhood. So there's this really nice balance of your part of this group, that you're part of this group of committed individuals whose final reckoning is before God himself, okay? So there's this nice balance of society plus individuality.

You are part of a group of people who are individually accountable. However, they're all accountable according to the same criteria, and it's a criteria that they all believe in. So it's an interesting sort of paradox there between or dialogue between individual and community. Okay, so we've been playing with this idea that the Durkanyan idea that people need to be part of a society, or we could also say religion, to exist or to have a place in the world.

So they need to be part of this bigger social structure. Now, if you've listened to any of my podcasters who've said anything that I do, one of the things I keep saying is that the thing that gives you your sense of self, the self itself is actually language. So the thing that Durkheim says about religion, I'm actually saying about language, and that makes me very curious about the potential connection between Durkheim's ideas about religion and the way I think of language. So I do think there's a connection.

I'm sure that other people have found connections, language is a big thing in sociology, obviously, in the language being the thing that separates humans from the rest of the world. But let's have a look, it doesn't explicitly talk about it here, but let's have a look about what he says about todonistic societies. So totemism is like, first of all, a way of dividing people from other people, so it's a way of dividing clans. So if you're part of the kangaroo clan, I mean, you're not part of the snake clan, right?

And if you're part of the snake clan, it means you're not part of the river clan. So it's a way of dividing people. But Durkheim points out, the things themselves, all the things that it had at the universe, are also part of the tribe. They're among its constituent elements since regular members, they have a definite place in the framework society, just as men do.

So in addition to people having clans, the aspects of the natural world also have clans. So a particular tree might be part of the kangaroo clan, and a cloud might be part of the emi clan. And other non-human entities are also part of clans. So effectively, totemism is this way of looking at the world and seeing it as organized and systematized, right?

So there are particular types of things that you can see according to their clans. Now, does that remind you of anything? Because that reminds me of language. Like one of the things that language does is it tells you to group things, like look around the room and see all the red things, right?

Look around the room, look outside the window and see what's alive and what's not alive. How many rivers can you name? We've got this language that allows us to group different things according to type. And that seems to be a kind of totemism, right?

So everything that is an elm tree, is an elm tree, and there's a sycamore tree, is a sycamore tree. So we've got this way of grouping things by giving them particular labels, giving them linguistic labels. And the interesting thing about this is that the totemism moment in history, he says, I'm not working at that with a critical eye, but he says this is a time when people were particularly close to a sense of divinity. He says perhaps divinity was never closer to man than at this moment in history, since it's present in his immediate surroundings and imminent part in himself, during his confidence, then rather than to tear into a question of the root of totemism.

So by looking out at the world and seeing it infused with all of the sacredness that is associated with the clan and the totem, sorry, with the totem, then it's like divinity is not, you can avoid it. Divinity is all around you, according to Durkheim. But my question is, especially when I think about this in relation to languages, isn't it actually separation that you're doing not closeness? Because you're dividing up the world, right?

So if you're looking at the world and you're seeing it as that cloud is kangaroo, that cloud is emu, it's a division. You're putting distinctions on things. If I'm kangaroo, it means I'm not emu. And the idea that Durkheim says is that when you worship the totem or when you worship anything, you're worshiping society and it gives you a way of being connected to something bigger than yourself.

But what if you didn't, what if that never happened? What if the human beings never had that moment, right? Where they somehow felt the need to connect to something bigger to themselves. Wouldn't they already be connected to something bigger than themselves in the same way that everything in the natural world is connected to something bigger themselves?

Like they're connected to everything in the world, is connected to the world. Everything in nature is connected to all of nature. Everything in the universe is connected to everything in the universe. So why should a human being feel like they need to be connected to something bigger than themselves when they already are?

Like it's a matter of default, just by virtue of existing on the planet. And so I actually wonder if religious life is a way of separating us, our species and ourselves and our sense of who we are for the rest of the natural world. So you look at the cloud and you say that to Kangaroo Cloud rather than whatever it actually is. And I don't know what cloud actually is, because I don't feel like I can actually experience it.

Because when I look at it, it's like I've drawn a line around it. I've labeled it. And the second I've labeled it, I'm separate from it. I don't know how to not separate myself from it.

And what if language does that? What if language is the thing that separates us from the natural world? OK, so I explored this idea a lot. But I explored this most recently in a flash fiction piece I posted on my blog, which is Gramer for Dreamers, which you can find at grammarfredreamers.wordpress.com.

And it's really short. So I'll just redo this story. It's called First Words. Each group of Earth-bound souls starts with a seer.

The seer proceeds their births and survives their deaths. The seer is their center, whether they acknowledge it or not. I am the very first seer of the very first human group. What were they like?

Have you ever watched a baby gazing blissfully at airborne dust suspended in a beam of sunlight? Imagine a set of souls with that level of sustained, wrapped attention all the time. Their fascination had no off switch. Imagine a single blade of grass.

Now imagine it in its startling specificity, the unique pattern of leaves shooting at various varying lengths for its pliable stem. Now imagine its shifting design as it catches a passing breeze. Now note the shifting hues of green graced by the dizzying dance of light and shadow. Behold with wonder the boundless universe with an inusality leaf blade.

Are you foolish enough to believe you have the capacity to contemplate a whole field? My task as the first seer was to limit the vision of the souls within my little human group, to reduce the infinite distinctions of the overwhelming multitudes their sense has absorbed. I achieved it by teaching them the first words of what was to become their language. Just three words in the beginning.

One, two, and many. One, two, and many taught the human souls to focus their attention, to see the world as comprised of things, and to lose the distracting eternity of ever-changing possibilities. One, two, and many engendered the world of human concepts. Thus I fulfilled my mission as the first seer.

But many an evening is dusk to stent at descends. I find myself longing for that early time before those first words when the world was known in all its innumerable faces. OK, so there's a story. So this story, like every story I write, is based upon linguistic principles.

And I just do it. Because that combination of logical principles and imagination, that just gets me dreaming of new things. So I was reflecting on grammatical number. And in English, these are the principles of singular and plural.

So singular one book, two books, a book, the book. And then what do you have on the rest of the end of books? And you have an S at the end of books. And when you put in a sentence, the books sit on my table.

So you just put sit. And if you have one book, then the S goes again, the S goes again, the S sits on my table. OK, so it's about grammatical numbers, about static rub-a-gree-men, and it's also about making things singular and plural nouns. So singular means one or one thing.

And plural is something other than one thing. So either more or less than one thing. So I have minus one books, and I have zero books, but I have one book or two books. And so English has singular and plural.

And then there are other languages that have different systems of grammatical number. As I learned, when I looked this up, you could have singular and dual. So you could have a different system where rather than being plural, you make a distinction between whether it's singular or there's two of them. Or you could have trial, or you have three.

Or you could have plural where it's just more than one. But you could also dual to trial three. You could have quadrole four. You could have pockal, which means a few.

You could have some called distributive plural. And that's plural that distinguishes each individual. Or you could have super plural, which is a way of indicating like heaps of things. So like I said, English has concepts for all of those different things, and it has words for it.

But it isn't encoded in the grammar. So when we do subject-a-gree-men, according to grammatical number, really all we have is singular and plural. We don't have all this other cool things. But we don't have to go into that.

Not much more detail is just fascinating. But what I want to know is what happens when you look out of the world, and you perceive it in terms of these expressions of quantity. One, two, three, a few, many heaps of things. And according to the narrator of my story, that is like the first step toward limiting experience.

So even though it seems like, you know, oh wow, heaps, look at all the clouds, look at all the dust, look at all the leaves. What you're actually doing is limiting your experience because you're not seeing each leaf in its singularity and all of its possibilities, and all of its changing nature. You're labeling it and grouping it. And so it's a way of limiting the experience.

Okay, so getting back to Durkheim. According to the Durkheim account, the reason human beings are drawn to religion is it allows themselves to see themselves as part of something bigger, which makes sense. It's like why wouldn't you want to feel like you're part of something bigger? But my story says that what was happening there was that this religious element, or this language element, the point there was to limit the experience was to be smaller, to be separate, to close yourself off from the bigger thing.

And the question is, why would anybody want that? So I'm kind of arguing that religion is about closing yourself off and that language is about closing yourself off to experience and possibilities. It's about making yourself smaller and separate, not about being part of something bigger. Why would you want to do that?

And I've got a wildly radical answer. And the answer is we didn't want to separate ourselves. We didn't want to have our experiences limited. We didn't want to have our viewpoints restricted.

When I wrote the story called First Words, I meant for the seer, the character of the seer, to be an agent of the natural world. And the seer says, my task as the first seer was to limit the vision of the souls within my little human group to reduce the infinite distinctions of the overwhelming multitudes their senses absorb. So like the natural world had this task in mind and an agent who was going to help bring that task forward. So this is part of the mythology that I'm exploring.

And I'm exploring it for fun. I'm exploring it for what it offers. And why is it that the natural world would want us to feel separate? Why would you do anything at all?

Why would we even personify the natural world? Why would we think of it as having preferences? Why would we think about a different about conscious entity? But what if it were a conscious entity?

Like what if it were teaming with consciousness? What if it were a whole host of endless, constant, conscious entities? What if all universe were just teaming with consciousness? So I started the podcast by asking about your relationship to religion.

We discussed how complicated and dramatic it is. And that subject. And then we learned from Durkheim that religions about how to go and you belong something bigger than yourself. You have a place in the world.

And then Durkheim says, OK, but the thing that you belong in is society. And we live in a moment where it is appropriate to be critical of society and the structures and the roles that it establishes for us, especially as these are carved out of injustices that are endemic to our various societies and to society more globally. So when we're thinking about, or you were yearning to belong, or we're looking for our place, or we are desperate to connect, to be part of something bigger to take up our place, it's not very reassuring to think that the place that we take up is provided to us by an oppressive structure. So I think the result is that you feel lost.

Durkheim's word for this is ano-ni. You don't fit. There's no bigger picture. You don't want to belong to that oppressive society, but without the oppressive society, you don't exist.

So when I play and I write these stories, I'm imagining things that to me are more welcoming. I'm painting myself a more welcoming picture. And when I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity, it makes me feel like I am part of a bigger picture, and that it's a bigger picture that I do feel welcomed in, and that I want to belong to. So even though I feel separate from the natural world, and even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society and the world views that are imposed on me by my language and my society, and a consciousness that's limited by language, even though I feel separate from those, I have a way of thinking about that.

That works for me. That works better than any other religious principle that I've tried out, and I've tried out quite a lot of religious principles. And that's the idea that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw but a design principle. That the earth itself designed the natural world so that some parts of it would feel separate, that some parts of it would experience the world through the lens of the self, which would make them think they were distinct.

And not only would it make them think they were distinct, they would experience the world as distinct from it. So what happens then is it creates this space, this separateness, this kind of hermetically sealed compartment, hermetically concealed by the linguistically creative self, and the earth produced that, and the earth produced that not for us, but for it to have the experience. And what is it that the earth is experiencing? It's something new.

You can only experience something new if you're separate from everything else. If you're part of the whole connected interwoven tapestry, you can't experience something new. But if language created a container or a space and a sense of separateness, then new things could emerge out of that. Now, they could be some shitty things.

Okay, so far in history, a lot of it has been some pretty shitty things. But I wonder what it would be like if we did start feeling like the separateness is not something to overcome, or something to pretend doesn't exist, but rather that it's there by design, and that it can be celebrated, and that it creates a space from which new ideas can emerge. I just love to play that idea. Okay, so thank you for playing with me today, and thank you for listening all the way through to the end, if you did, if you check out the show notes, you can get a link to the story that I read to you called First Words.

And there is a whole host of other linguistics inspired stories. I've written, if I had a super plural, I would tell you there's a super plurality of other linguistics inspired stories. If you go to that grammar for Dreamers.com, you can find a link to a free course called Writing Through the Lens of Language, which is similar to what you listen to today. Only it's got some writing prompts, and it's got slides to look at, and it's a video that's there for you.

You can also join my Patreon community where you can get these little writing prompts and bits of linguistic inspiration and even more of this kind of stuff, but once again, it's videos with handouts and writing prompts. So this month, I did a mini course called Zen and the Art of Primary Audisiliaries, which I really enjoyed, and I shared some ideas in there about the grammar of Bachelors Poetry. So I hope that you'll check that out. If you'd like to connect with me on the socials, I'm an Instagram grammar for Dreamers, I'm a Facebook grammar and Dreamers, and Twitter, I'm a Jodi Clark-Ling, I'm an Jodi Clark-Jodi, I use the L.E.R.K.

L.I.N.G. So make sure you hit subscribe so that you know when the podcasts are coming. If you'd like to support the podcast, please do rate and review it and support the folks who find out about it. Thanks once again, and I'll talk to you next week.