Religion and Theology

Max Webers study of religious experience and religious dogmas as they relate to sociological evolution  is intended to be based in empiricism.  Weber takes as his starting point the concept that religious experience reflects one the one hand an ineffable subjective experience, and on the other, a set of abstractions that encourages a non-empirical perception of nature and of natural processes.  Webers perspective is one of pragmatic inquiry and his main objective in The Sociology of Religion is to embrace the real-world implications of what he believes to be religious abstraction.  The foremost obstacle presented by religious abstraction, according to Weber, is the obfuscation of genuine phenomena.  In other words, abstraction that involves religious or magical ideology places a set of abstract fictions above real-world events.

For example, in so-called primitive religions, the idea of spirits obfuscates and understanding of natural-world phenomena.  In the case of spirits, Weber maintains that At the outset, spirit is neither soul, demon, or god, but something indeterminate, material, yet invisible, nonpersonal, and yet somehow endowed with volition (Weber, 230).  How Weber is able to ascertain the manner in which primitive religions (and ostensibly a diverse selection of religions) view the concept of soul or spirit at the outset is never explained.  Rather, Weber maintains the same type of abstraction that he believes is an integral part of the evolution of religious ideologies to support his contentions.  Weber offers not a shred of evidence to back up his assertions regarding the genesis of the concept of spirit among primitive religions rather, just as the primitive he castigates in his essay, Weber relies on the abstraction of Western history adn Western anthropology as they exist in generic terms to support his ideas.

Similarly, Weber dismisses the idea of magicians, shamans, and other types of religious visionaries out of hand, lumping all of these very different  cultural identities under a common designation of charismatic personalities.  For Weber, religious authority is equitable with personal power and charisma.  It is not prophets and visionaries who experience genuine mystical or magical insight who influence the evolution of religious ideals in any given society rather, according to Weber, the jurisdiction of the divine figures are as fluid as those of the officials of  patrimonial regimes   (Weber, 231).

Another point maintained by Weber is that priests, shamans, magicians, and other religious prophets who work in primitive societies are engaged in a process of self-aggrandizement, and this process ultimately displaces even the Divine power that is supposedly the initiation of religious impulse in the first place.  

When Weber remarks that Whoever possesses the requisite charisma for employing the proper means is stronger, even , the the god (Weber, 231).  In these cases, according to Weber, religious impulse is actually a religious pose that denotes and individual desire for power and authority. For Weber, religions that promote a living sense of magical connection between the Divine and mortal worlds a re merely abstract constructs which enable individual ascension to power within a society.  Weber calls this coercive religion and he maintains that not merely primitive religions, but religions throughout history and throughout myriad cultures, have culminated, not in spiritual truth, but in the aggregation of personal power.  The proliferation of religion as a mask for personal ambition and the conservation of institutional and personal power may strike some observers as specious given the fact that Weber offers little background evidence, historical evidence, or statistical evidence, to reinforce his notion that coercive religion is universally diffused and that the coercive principle exists as the original, though not exclusive, origin of the orgiastic and mimetic components of the religious cult   (Weber, 231).  Such a sweeping assertion, presented without any evidence whatsoever, demonstrates Webers typically loose style of argument.

The purpose of Webers inquiry is to fumigate the conception that religious impulses originate in true supernatural or mystical experience.  Weber views this fumigation as both important adn necessary because he believes that religious thought and dogma throughout human history offer an expedient and observable example of how sociological, rather than metaphysical, conditions promote both the specific articulation of religious ideas and how these ideas are translated into social memes.  Another aspect of Webers visualization of religious experience is that meaningful religious ideas and practices emerge from the human impulse to derive order and stability in a basically disordered universe.  Such a belief on behalf of Weber is taken to exert tremendous sociological and political influence on history.

Prophets of individual cultures and individual religions serve as touchstones for their respective societies and offer a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated and meaningful attitude toward life (Weber, 235).  Of course, the integrated and meaningful view of life offered by prophets and other religious leaders, to Weber, may be partially functional but is till based not in empirical experience, but abstraction.  Therefore such impulses to find unification and order in the cosmos is predicated on the ability for societies and religious groups to project order and meaning on the world and on the cosmos without having derived such order and meaning from experience itself.

Without a doubt, Webers inquiry into the sociological ramifications of religious thought and religious impulse adheres to a  linear and scientific facade however, close examination of Webers assertions and convictions results in an acknowledgment by the alert reader that Weber has failed to provide evidence, whether historical or through comparative art of literature or even religion itself,  to support his largely subjective perspectives on the phenomena of religious belief.