Complexifying Religion

This book provides an original and challenging perspective of religions as abstract complex adaptive systems, using an interdisciplinary approach to try to understand what religions are and how they function, two fundamental issues which, despite an intense struggle from several fields, have not yet been resolved. What is the source of religious belief? How do religions work and what are they made of? Why is religion so important for us that it has survived centuries of scientific progress and secularization? Why are people religious even outside religion? The book addresses these questions using an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to untangle the Gordian knot of defining religion. In short, they can be considered entropy-reducing technologies. What differentiates them from other meaning-producing systems is their configuration which employs specific building blocks as tools for mitigating entropy, which are also subsystems and combine in various ways to build a unique configuration: rituals, myths, taboos, supernatural agents, authority, identity, superstitions, moral obligations, afterlife beliefs and the sacred. As a reaction to perturbances or pressure, systems can collapse. Inspired by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it is, in this book, referred to as fragility―the negative reaction of systems to random events, and four parameters can be used to evaluate it in religious systems: monotonicity (the inability to learn from past mistakes), coupling (linking with other systems: such as political or economic), centralization and stress starvation. Several case studies are provided in order to test the theoretical claims made in this book, based on the author's field research in Romania, Japan, North Korea and Mongolia, and offering details that could be of interest to casual readers, students and researchers of religion. Acknowledgements Introduction—A Complex World Contents Abbreviations 1 Religions as Complex Adaptive Systems: Structure and Function 1.1 What Are Complex Adaptive Systems? 1.2 Religions as Complex Adaptive Systems 1.3 Entropy, Complexity and Randomness 1.4 The Building Blocks of Religious Complex Adaptive Systems 2 Why Systems Collapse 2.1 Adapting to Randomness 2.2 Pandemics as Strong Perturbances 2.2.1 The Athenian Plague 2.2.2 The ‘Spanish Flu’ in South Africa 2.2.3 AIDS in Malawi 2.2.4 The Black Death in Europe 2.3 The Pathologies of Religious CAS: Anomie, Terror and Secularization 3 The Fragility of the Romanian Orthodox Church 3.1 The ROC before Communism: Symphonia and Monotonicity 3.2 The Centralization Process of the ROC During the Early years of Communism (1948–1965) 3.3 Coupling and Stress Starvation: The ROC During the Ceausescu Regime (1965–1989) 3.4 Miracles, Persecution and Heresy: The Cult of Arsenie Boca 3.5 The Romanian Orthodoxy After 1990 3.6 Orthodox National Identity and Belonging Without Behaving or Believing 4 The Attempted Murder of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church 4.1 From a Broken Promise to an Underground Church 4.2 The Controversial Case of Sister Ionela: Bloody Stigmas and Premonitory Visions 4.3 The Romanian Greek-Catholic Church After 1989 and the Ongoing Conflict with the ROC 5 Spiritual Wanderers 5.1 From Anomie to Individuo-Globalism 5.2 Chasing the True Self 5.3 The Spiritual Refugees of Sogenji 6 Totalitarian Regimes as Religious CAS 6.1 The Sacred Struggle 6.2 A Journey Through Time 6.3 Jucheism: Worship of a Revolution and Its Leader 6.4 Childhood Memories 6.5 The Father of All Turkmen 6.6 The Voudou ‘President for Life’ 7 Shamanism in Mongolia 7.1 Boo Boonoor Ondoo Boolodog 7.2 Shamanic Encounters 7.3 The Shaman Festival 2023 7.4 Religion and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Mongolia Conclusions Bibliography