Religious Studies in Software Engineering

The handout contains a very much non-exhaustive selection of some 34 definitions of religion. Buddhism is an Eastern tradition and so has had a unique effect on the Western tradition of Religious Studies. Whilst Buddhism is clearly a fully-fledged religion, it is, in stark contrast to mainstream Western religions, godless. So however we define religion, it needs to take this and indeed many other diverse human beliefs and practices from around the world into account. This makes agreeing on one true definition hard if not impossible.

I think we can rightly be suspicious of a field that doesn’t precisely know what it’s actually studying. But for me this has always been one of the most interesting and useful aspects of my training. How do you sincerely and rigorously take something seriously without knowing what it is?

One framing we were taught to approach this with was the Insider/Outsider problem. Those best suited to knowing what a given religion is, are those that practice it, namely insiders. But because of their commitment and investment they are also those most likely to be biased. Whilst outsiders on the other hand can be more objective, they’re also problematic as they’re not directly exposed to the subject of study. Therefore we should strive to consider both perspectives in order to arrive somewhere in the middle. We can do this both academically and individually.

Academically, we can consider both the outsider studies of say, anthropologists and the insider accounts of believers. Individually, as outsiders, we can be curious and think critically, but we can also, more interestingly, allow ourselves to be genuinely moved as sincere visiting insiders to specific responses to questions of ultimate concern. But given religion’s track record over the millennia, this seems dangerous. Why dignify some of the most damaging ideas in human history by letting them into our personal lives? For me this gets to the heart of what Religious Studies is and what I’ve found most valuable about it in my life and career over the last two decades.

Given the fact that religion is not easily defined, we must be prepared to entertain the fact that, whatever the dimensions of religions are, some of those dimensions may be present in worldviews that don’t immediately appear religious. Think of how capitalism puts money above all else to the detriment of social and ecological welfare. Profit may not be a god in the traditional sense, but the way in which it so fundamentally permeates modernity notably echoes the great world religions like Buddhism and Christianity. Whilst it’s perfectly possible for somebody to not profess an ism of any kind, I think Religious Studies shows us that we’re all, to some extent, inevitably inside one ism or another. That’s not to suggest that anybody can speak as if inside any other religion or ism. But rather that Religious Studies, in its sincere and holistic approach, neither demotes religiousness to a mere object of scientific dissection, nor promotes it to a source of unverifiable truth. I always have been and still am, deeply sceptical of religion. But I don’t get to smugly point at it from my high horse thinking I’m a “clean” outsider untainted by insider-ism.

One of the fathers of Religious Studies, Ninian Smart, had this to say about the Philosophy Of Religion, an adjacent discipline focussed on religious truth claims2:

The fabled Martian arriving on the planet and inspecting among other things our intellectual resources might also be struck by a strange thing. Journals he would note, devoted to the philosophy of religion. The more advanced essays therein might discuss the question of truth as between religions. But over Cambodia he would not look down to perceive Christians struggling spiritually with Buddhists: he would find Marxist rural anarchosyndicalism destroying temples and monks. In Tibet he would see the clash of ancient religion and Maoism. In Romania he would note subversive Baptists. In Sweden he would see Christianity softly overwhelmed by social democracy. In brief, he would think that as far as rivalry goes […] religions and ideologies were tugging against each other, and that really from a practical point of view it was odd that such a struggle was rarely depicted in the journals of the philosophers of religion. […]

He might be further puzzled at how blithely men could come to put religion in a sort of ghetto, considering so many professed not to be able to clearly define it.

To a Martian there is no significant difference between religion and ideology. What’s paramount and starkly obvious is that, whatever its name, and however it’s defined, it’s one of the defining aspects of the earthly life to which we all belong.

My father died from alcoholism during my final year at university. I am forever grateful for how immensely supportive my tutors were during that time. Just a few weeks after his death our final exams started. For my Buddhism exam I chose to answer the question, “Why Do Buddhists Meditate?”. It was a topic close to my heart as I had myself been meditating daily for 5 years at that point. As I entered the exam hall I unexpectedly saw my ex-girlfriend. I kept my composure, but when I came to write the words, “…as opposed to a belief, meditation as a practice exists beyond statements on the true nature of things…”, I broke down in tears. I was overwhelmed by the convergence of so many things; academic achievement, personal fulfillment, loss and love. My tears softened the paper upon which I was writing such that any ink would run. I started writing again further down, leaving what must have appeared to be a curious empty paragraph.

I wasn’t just an outsider to my degree. It fundamentally shaped who I am. I literally, as in literally literally, submitted tears to my formal academic record.

In that same Buddhism module for which I still carry a handout, we also learnt that before the arrival of Alexander The Great in India during the 4th century BCE, the Buddha wasn’t represented in human form. Rather he was depicted by absence, such as an empty chair or footprints.

Buddhapada (Footprints of the Buddha). Gandhara, South Asia, 2nd century. Schist. Yale University Art Gallery.

There are various interpretations for why this was. My favourite is because it represented the central Buddhist concept of emptiness. Emptiness is often misunderstood as the idea that there exists some fundamentally empty dimension to existence. In fact, it’s just the observation that you can’t point to any one aspect of a thing in order to locate that thing. Typically this is applied to a person: whilst I am made up of my body, thoughts and feelings, I can’t point to any one cell, utterance or emotion and say that that is what I most fundamentally am. This can be applied to anything, even, as we have just seen, the definition of religion itself.

My empty paragraph, like the Buddha’s footprints, showed me that I was really there, that I didn’t just peer at my university experience from the outside. I saw, and still see, the temptation to blithely put religion in a sort of ghetto, to keep it at a safe distance, to believe that I am somehow above and beyond all that fantasy and violence. But questions of ultimate concern don’t leave me unscathed.

Once I’d graduated, I had to find a way to make a living. I’d learnt about software since before I could remember, from my father, the alcoholic. So whilst I already had some fluency in that world, it wasn’t immediately appealing. I wanted a roof over my head, but I wanted fulfillment too. How could the world of computers offer me the same warmth and stimulation as my degree? This is still a question I come back to time and time again, and even though the answers don’t always feel within reach, the tools and perspectives I was taught have time and time again guided me.

Another of my favourite course modules was Religion And Media. My first thought was that this was going to be about mass media, like how religion is represented on TV and the internet. But “media” here was more in the sense of the plural of “medium” of communication. We explored the effects that the four great paradigm shifts in media technology had on religion and culture; orality, literacy, print and digitisation.

It’s funny thinking of speaking as a technology. Did we invent it? It feels more like it was given to us by evolution. But there are nuances to the medium of speech that make its influence more concrete. In Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word3 he considers the power of narrative, rhyme and song. These are clearly our innovations, those ancient and perennially celebrated traditions of poetry and music for example. For millennia these media have been the dominant technologies recording and transmitting human knowledge across time and space. Carefully created stories, with engaging characters, stimulating adventures and performed with pleasing rhymes and melodies, are more easily remembered and more readily heard. Think of those poetic epics like The Odyssey or Ramayana.

Seen from the enormity of today’s digital revolution it’s hard to imagine how linguistic tools as seemingly trivial as song and story precipitated changes in the fundamental structure of human culture. But we can reasonably form an argument that this is where religion’s DNA emerges. Oral technology leads to codification. By preserving a particular representation of the world and events, it inevitably also favours particular views, opinions and indeed beliefs. We can even begin to imagine how it might contribute to social hierarchies: memorisation takes time, time that can’t be used for say manual labour. If the keepers of the stories become sources of truth then they are afforded certain powers over others. This is of course not inevitable but it does sketch out the potential ramifications of what at first seem like inconsequential technologies.

It’s easier to see the relevance of writing on religion. Today we have what are considered to be 6 World Religions, religions that have spread across diverse geographies and cultures; Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism. These are all also religions for whom literature plays a central role. The written word is even more ossifying in its codifications and so even more pronounced in its effects on religion and culture.

Print continues the trajectory, but here it’s interesting to consider how media technology can also promote the opposite of codification, like secularisation for example. Clay Shirky argues that it was the printing press that led to the creation of the nation-state in Europe during the 17th century4. Until then the ultimate power in European states lay with the Church. A large part of that power was mediated via Latin-speaking priests who were the single source of truth for interpreting labouriously hand-written and thus conveniently rare Latin bibles. The printing press made it economically viable to give ordinary people access to canonical Christian texts in their local vernacular languages. This undermined the power of the Church, allowing other forms of political organisation to flourish.

Although digitisation, or let’s just say the internet for convenience’s sake, has obviously had a massive impact on humanity, I’d like to temper its commonly perceived impact. I suspect most of us, and especially myself as a software engineer, are problematically inside the convulsions of this paradigm shift. It’s hard to have an outsider’s perspective. I am after all writing this on, and you are likely reading it from, a digital device. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”5,

This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

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