Again, these scenarios point to real issues, and a good account of
religion should have something to say about them. For instance, what-
ever we want to say about religious concepts, we must take into
account that they are deeply associated with moral beliefs. Indeed, we
cannot ignore the point, because that is precisely what many schools
of religion insist on. The connection between religious concepts and
political systems is likewise impossible to ignore because it is loudly
proclaimed by many religious believers and religious doctrines.
However, here too we find some difficult problems. Consider this:
In no human society is it considered all right, morally defensible to kill
[24] your siblings in order to have exclusive access to your parents' atten-
tion and resources. In no society is it all right to see other members of
the group in great danger without offering some help. Yet the societies
in question may have vastly different religious concepts. So there is
some suspicion that perhaps the link between religion and morality is
what psychologists and anthropologists call a rationalization, an ad
hoc explanation of moral imperatives that we would have regardless of
religion. The same goes for connections between social order and reli-
gion. All societies have some prescriptive rules that underpin social
organization; but their religious concepts are very diverse. So the con-
nection may not be quite as obvious as it seems. We could brush these
doubts aside and say that what matters is that social groups have some
religion in order to have morality and social order. What matters then
is a set of common premises that we find in most religious notions and
that support social life and morality. But then, what are those common
premises?
The connection between religion and oppression may be more
familiar to Europeans than to other people because the history of
Europe is also the history of long and intense struggles between
Churches and civil societies. But we must be wary of ethnocentric
bias. It is simply not the case that every place on earth has an oppres-
sive social order sanctioned by an official Church. (Indeed, even in
Europe at some points people have found no other resort than the
Church against some oppressive regimes.) More generally, the con-
nection between religious concepts, Church, and State cannot account
for concepts that are found in strikingly similar forms in places where
there are neither States nor Churches. Such concepts have a long
antiquity, dating from periods when such institutions were simply not
there. So, again, we have important suggestions that we must integrate
RELIGION EXPLAINED