Natural Religion and World Society Reflections on Morality, Belief, and Experience

David Hume's reputation as a 'moral atheist' (Gaskin 1988/ 1998) was based on his distinction between the spheres of everyday morality from the institutionalized dogmasof religion. In discussing morality in the rise of World Society, this paper compares thecontrasting approaches of Hume and Durkheim to morality and religion, the 'science ofman' against the science of the 'sacred' respectively, in order to question theDurkheimian moral concept of the 'Church' as a moralist step too far from Hume'semancipating concept of 'natural religion'. Furthermore, the paper asks if the concept ofthe 'sacred', which is embedded throughout the history of the 'anthropology of religion'in various ways and contexts (see Ruel 1982, Tambiah 1990, Asad 1993), constitutesa Christian fundamentalist way of thinking, ideologically manifested as a kind ofnaturalized enthusiasm. By liberating Durkheim's approach to the sacred from its moralimplications, when associated with the evolution of the morality of purity and pollution(Douglas 1966), the paper expands on the question of morality, on the one hand,looking at moral sense as an intuition, and on the other, as an institutionalized habitus.In doing so, the paper compares anthropological and psychological approaches toBelief, Design, and Experience, in relation to the sacred. In this context, the paperfurther wonders if the Human is naturally a fundamentalist animal, motivated by sacreddelusions, passions, and self-centrism, as manifested in the Dialogues through thecharacters of Philo, Demea, and Cleanthes, whose personal emotions challenge theChristian ideal of transgression and unity expressed in numinous sacred experiences.At the same time though, the author examines if this secularized approach to thesacred is limited in terms of the emotional and subliminal feelings of religious practices.This has implications regarding methodological issues of interpretation in anthropology and ethnography, the gap between theory and practice respectively. In conclusion, thepaper returns to Hume's emancipating concept of 'natural religion' as a kind of pagan, emancipated, universal, and amoral appreciation of the objective natural world (which includes the subjective human mind), finally wondering if at this moment of History, thebirth of a new world religion would instinctively connect humanity in a Kantian processof the formation of a World Society.