That sense of duty fits with what Whitehead suggested, a need for building good character, an inner impulse to shape one’s attitude, and therefore also one’s relation to others. In Kant we confront two more considerations: (1) that becoming autonomous, even morally responsible within society, is part and parcel of being “enlightened” or maturing, thinking for oneself, and (2) that although ideas, concepts, and generalization may assist people in finding their moral duty, many may always continue to need rituals, symbols, and beliefs. In Kant’s understanding, if one never reaches the autonomy of willing the good by himself, but does so simply because of some believed external source, one would continue in heteronomy, thereby missing out on the flourishing human life that can exist only within a mutual autonomy of equals. Without a real autonomous sense of moral duty or owning of the social contract, Kant did not think the individual was being responsible, and society could not function if citizens were not autonomous and actively participated in formulating universal laws. So while rationalizing of religion has been around for many millennia, this does not mean it is uniformly utilized by every religion or by every individual belonging to any religion.
To the degree that rationalization of religion necessarily involved morality or ethics, it raises the question of the relation of autonomy to morality. Kohlberg felt that a child could develop moral sensitivity but his conclusions about the more typical adult was that few adults actually arrive at autonomy, even though Kant felt it imperative in order to have a social contract. That presents a huge problem. On the metaphysical side, Kant tried to eliminate the question entirely since he saw all the metaphysics that lacked clear moral value as being only “pseudo-religion.” Yet few Christian groups would accept his ethical interpretation of Christianity, which, among other things, insisted that the moral ideal is not conceivable as embodied.41 So now the question is whether any religious institution would be capable of allowing individual members to have such autonomy, to ignore the “pseudo-religious” aspects of the metaphysics the religion propagates, as well as to have a voice in the determination of a morality that is determined by universalizable principles rather than some telos or even metaphysics? That easily becomes the deeper issue.
Attached to this question is also the issue of how each individual sees his or her freedom. Most adults feel a need to serve as an authority to their children while the latter are immature. But most adults also hope for the day when the children will have matured sufficiently that they can be “on their own,” reasoning, evaluating, deciding what to believe and how to act. On the other hand, this kind of “freedom” or “autonomy,” we will later see in both Eric Hoffer’s True Believer as well as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, seems to be something many people would like to have removed from them. That desire to relinquish one’s freedom is precisely what Kant meant by “self-incurred tutelage,” which was the barrier the “Enlightenment” hoped to eliminate. It seems to me that no one really wants to have such a lobotomy performed on her by the removal of freedom unless the prospects of the choice are exaggerated to the point of being terrorizing. That may explain the situations of “mass movements” attracting converts in Hoffer’s analysis as well as people’s embracing the church during the days of the Inquisition when they viewed the torturous deaths of so many.
But the specter of autonomy also can be foreboding in less extreme scenarios, such as one deciding to become responsible for determining the validity and truth of his or her religion. If one reads Rousseau or is familiar with the far-reaching ramifications of a lifetime of research that would be required, it might be too daunting. If a person felt that she had to spend every waking moment studying ancient texts of one or more religion in its original language, as well as its whole history, so as to make a reasonable choice, or to have to do this for several religions, she might prefer to leave it up to the “authorities.” It was interesting to see this very thing occur after scholar John Dominic Crossan dedicated his entire life to the study of the historical evidence about Jesus. He finally decided that the historical pursuit would go on even without him, but he had come to the conclusion that the meaning of “Incarnation” was anyone opposing systemic injustice, who is thereby an embodiment of God. But he also said that he would leave theological decisions up to the theologians of the church.42 This appeared to oversimplify and intensify the tension between autonomy and heteronomy.
When one hears various religion’s claims of antiquity and sole legitimacy of the only truth, that is almost enough to want to be rid of one’s freedom, so that one would have no responsibility to have to devote one’s entire life to that search. But that is the problem created not by human nature or reason, but by the absolutized competing claims of religions in general, particularly of claims that conflate the visible/invisible, history/myth, or human/divine. Some more reasonable solution must be possible.
Any religion’s stage of rationalization is not something that can be turned back or erased. Individuals are scattered across the spectrum in their levels of understanding and criticism, and their willingness to live heteronomously or mutually autonomously, their progressivism or primitivism, and so forth. The various religions will continue to be questioned, tested, explained, and reinterpreted. For many people, this will be unnecessary since they view religions’ rituals, emotions, and beliefs too dated in their historical garb, and they feel they can live autonomously more ethically without any conflict between the present world understandings and this endeavor if they simply exclude religion from their lives. On the other hand, for those firmly attached to a religion within the changing scientific and historical understandings, there will be a continual need to try to reconcile the ancient rituals, emotions, beliefs, and even earlier examples of rationalization with these present understandings of our world, even if one can somehow justify not spending an equal amount of time and energy trying to understand other religions, since one cannot avoid the obvious question even raised by the Dalai Lama of “which” religion. Otherwise, one either splits one’s psyche into trying to hold together things that appear to be incompatible or one unconsciously distorts the position of either side to make them fit.
Innovation, discoveries, and new insights have not come from any religion’s heteronomous, absolutized metaphysics. Rather, they were stimulated in single human brains, which implies autonomy, even if others later examined the claims and agreed. By the brain’s great ability to combine human words or language, or make unique connections through the various parts of the brain and their modules, then communicated to others, ideas were sampled and put to the test. They either fit the complex schema that was developing within one or more individual mind (brain) and were adopted, or they did not and were rejected, starting with single brains. The “schemas were everything.”43 If that sounds like pragmatism as William James and other pragmatists would see it, in its best sense, it is. Even the apodictic pronouncements of the heteronomous religious institutions did not originate in that form but were once upon a time mere premonitions or sketchy ideas in a person’s mind, rather than thought to be some obvious universal and eternal truth or some divine revelation coming from another world.
These human ideas and expressions were only gradually tested in those particular cultures as temporary fits; some were rejected, others accepted because they were perhaps credible or feasible, and with religions, others were retained eventually simply for authority-sake even though they did not fit. In any