71102.pdf

these things, we just notice and accept that they are around.
Many people in the world would say the same about witches
and ghosts. They are around like trees and animals—though
they are far more difficult to understand and control—so it
does not require a particular commitment or faith to notice
their existence and act accordingly. In the course of my
anthropological fieldwork in Africa, I lived and worked with
Fang people, who say that nasty spirits roam the bush and the
villages, attack people, make them fall ill and ruin their crops.
My Fang acquaintances also knew that I was not too worried
[10] about this and that most Europeans were remarkably indiffer-
ent to the powers of spirits and witches. This, for me, could be
expressed as the difference between believing in spirits and not
believing. But that was not the way people saw it over there.
For them, the spirits were indeed around but white people
were immune to their influence, perhaps because God cast
them from a different mold or because Western people could
avail themselves of efficient anti-witchcraft medicine. So what
we often call faith others may well call knowledge.^1

The conclusion from all this is straightforward. If people tell you

"Religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches us how to save our souls by

obeying a wise and eternal Creator of the universe," these people

probably have not traveled or read widely enough. In many cultures

people think that the dead come back to haunt the living, but this is

not universal. In some places people think that some special individu-

als can communicate with gods or dead people, but that idea is not

found everywhere. In some places people assume that people have a

soul that survives after death, but that assumption also is not universal.

When we put forward general explanations of religion, we had better

make sure that they apply outside our parish.

INTELLECTUALSCENARIOS:

THEMINDDEMANDS AN EXPLANATION

Explanations of religion are scenarios. They describe a sequence of

events in people's minds or in human societies, possibly over an

immense span of historical time, that led to religion as we know it.

But narratives are also misleading. In a good story one thing leads to

RELIGION EXPLAINED