It has shown me that Robert Orsi is correct. Religion is fundamentally ambivalent. It is a system that can be used for unprecedented evil. It can also be used for unprecedented good. I can only really speak to Christianity, but it holds true for the other religions as well.

I spend my time with the more deplorable ends of Protestantism. I look at those who mix faith and bigotry and see things like racism as a Christian value. It is hard to come to deal with Christianity when this is the face of Protestantism.

But Christianity--especially Protestantism--is an embattled identity. Protestants are known for their schismatic ways and yelling about what constitutes right belief. And, for the sake of my personal sanity, for every horrific group like the Klan, you have a number of other Christians denouncing these groups. Individuals like Rev. Orange Scott--an abolitionist--were phenomenal voices for radical equality. For Scott, it did not just stop with abolition, but he was concerned with economic inequality and women's rights.

It has made me respect its power and influence a lot more. We take a lot of it for granted.

For example, there is a popular cultural belief that without religion, we would be ahead scientifically. Yet, Mendel was a monk who set up and solved genetic problems with peas. Lemaitre came up with the (possibly recently disproved depending if you believe a certain report) Big Bang. Pasteur was a religious man and made it possible for milk to be delivered en Masse.

Religion has motivation purposes that caused many to question and expand their knowledge. Even if you hate religion (as there is a case to be made for it), you have to respect its power and influence amongst many people, including scientists and historians.

Edit: possibly added to clarify the theory is not mainstream. Also, Big Bang forever. Pluto is a planet, damnit.

For me, learning the process of transmitting ancient texts helped break me out of the fundamentalist, literalist Christianity I was raised in. Learning how ancient texts were produced, preserved, copied, and transmitted, and how modern editions are collated, edited, and annotated pretty much wrecked my capacity to believe in the perfect transmission of the word of God to the present.

Now, in the last 400 years we've gotten very, very good at deducing early versions of a given text when we have a lot of copies (even some conjectures have been confirmed by later papyrus finds), but these only represent the archetype (the earliest manuscript from which we judge the surviving manuscripts descend), not the autograph (the manuscript the author actually wrote) (and it gets a hell of a lot more complicated with things like multiple manuscript traditions - we'll just ignore that for now). The same process was at work for the transmission of the Bible as any other ancient text and there is little reason to think we've done a better job recovering archetypes of the various books of the Bible than anything else. And again, we are very, very good at that but there are still arguments going on about alternate readings of tricky passages and some things that look like complete gibberish. The texts we read now are certainly the product of human scholarship and not a divine miracle.

If you're interested in textual criticism and can read some Greek, I suggest Renehan's Greek Textual Criticism, which is what I learned my text crit from. You do actually have to know Greek because Renehan is a badass enough scholar to expect you to know Greek as well as he does and he won't translate for you (I struggled badly with it). I once saw him threaten to throw a student out of a 4th story classroom window for a bad translation.

Something a little lighter but still pretty serious is Scribes and Scholars. It's a pretty wide-ranging book about basically the preservation of classical texts and the history of the modern field of their study, and is kind enough not to throw Greek at you. It is required reading in the Classics department at my university.

For a very pop introduction to text crit, I suggest Bart Erhman's Misquoting Jesus. It is the simplest, clearest explanation of the basics of text crit I know, relying entirely on fairly familiar passages from the New Testament, so it's very approachable. Some people think Erhman's controversial for reasons I don't understand, but his explanation to the process of textual transmission and the methods of textual criticism I think are the best for complete beginners, regardless of what you think about his religious or political positions.

It made me realize that people dismiss religion at their own peril. It is not just a matter of "well if that's what you believe." It's a cultural system, a social system. It's a way of thinking and life that bonds not only philosophy but also identity. It's as powerful as it is because it's as all-encompassing with the world as non-religious beliefs like nationalism or rationalism. Also, before the late modern era, that distinction between religion and non-religious did not exist.

Religion is just one of many competing ideologies, and the fight is always about power and truth. The truth that will give you power. The power to construct truth. The power to share truth. And especially as history has remained stuck in the "linguistic turn" of itself as a literary narrative, one can not definitively say religion is any "less true."

After all, the conflict over Charlie Hebdo is one about chosen ultimate values. Of Free Speech as one of the highest enshrined values of secular humanism, and of respect for the prophet the same in Islam. The two are irreconcilable at this particular juncture.

And I would point out, is not a virulent defense of free speech not itself a fetish? If one were to claim it as "The value that makes all other things possible," why would that same person not respect that that is how Muslims feel about God and the prophet Muhammad? Or that other values have similar "highest enshrined values that make all others possible?" Of a soldier's belief in strength. Of a romanticist's belief in love. Because it's simpler to attempt to force someone to submit than it is to come to an agreement of contradictions. The difference lying in the weapons of choice for coercion.

There will be no solving of the conflict between religion and its opponents any more than there will be a solving of human conflict period.

Except with perhaps, our extinction.

I think it has made me more pluralistic, less inclined to define something as against the 'spirit' of a religion, but instead I basically assume that if a group calls themselves Christian, then we need to include them in our historical understanding of Christianity. It becomes less about theological prescriptions and more about historical descriptions. This has made me interested in a lot of American sects I hadn't thought much about before and the ways their theology reflects their historical origins.