Religion and pleasure

[Angrboda]

I think you need to be clear about whether you are addressing the relationship between pleasure and religion in general, or pleasure and specific religions in particular. It's a rather common mistake, but in this context it is fatal, as you are making general statements about religion based on the particulars of one religion. That makes your conclusions about religion faulty and essentially non sequiturs.

A Buddhist's understanding and attitudes toward pleasure are mediated through their beliefs about dukkha (disturbance), dependent origination and so on, and arguments about why Christianity or Judaism have the specific relation to pleasure that they do is likely going to be irrelevant to the question of why Buddhists have certain attitudes towards pleasure.

And as a Hindu who has followed various paths, I can assure you that the relationship between pleasure and Hindu beliefs, practices, and traditions will likely be yet another thing entirely. And I can also tell you that the relationship between Taoism and pleasure is yet something else.

So, you're attempting to draw lessons about universal aspects of human behavior by making arguments that address only a small, narrow spectrum of the behavior in question. I don't think you're likely to succeed at either end of the spectrum, as if you address your arguments toward Judeo-Christian practices specifically, you've not only failed to identify anything essential to religion, you've bankrupted any claim that it is even a general truth about that particular religion, as it's no longer a feature of Judeo-Christianity as a religion, but rather a claim about the behaviors of a specific group of people whose behaviors in relation to pleasure may or may not be on account of it being a religion. To be sure, as I suggested earlier, the attitudes you are describing are as much specifically western as they are religious.

As I'm thinking about this, I'm reminded of statements the Dalai Lama has made regarding "defilement" through homosexual practices and masturbation. While the Dalai Lama is certainly a religious figure, I think it's sensible to regard such statements as stemming as much from his human nature as stemming from his religious nature. Attitudes toward human sexual behavior are far from the sole province of religion. So you're missing the goalpost to the left and to the right, by not addressing religion itself, and by mixing in attitudes which may be purely secular or a result of our evolved psychology, and labeling it a religious attitude.

For example, the Jews are known for having strict dietary laws regarding eating pork. Nobody knows for certain why, but several secular theories have emerged. One is that ingestion of pork posed a health hazard as a consequence of the parasite that causes trichinosis and other aspects of the pig's habits and biology. Thus, it is suggested that the dietary restriction evolved because those who adopted it were healthier and more successful as a result. Another theory is that it was used as a way to distinguish the Jews from the greater Canaanite population. In particular, it's been noted that the Jews and the Philistines occupied different geographical spaces in the Levant, one being concentrated in the lowlands and urban areas, the other in the highlands. Since the husbandry of pigs is also geographically stratified in this way, there may have been both cultural and economic reasons for not eating pork, along the lines of not giving comfort and aid to the enemy. And note that this is specific to the Jews and Canaanites as distinct ethnic groups, as much as on account of religious differences. There are other theories about the dietary restrictions, but the point is clear, you can't simply assume that because a specific group of people adopt a practice or attitude, and those people are also religious, that the practice is necessarily a consequence of the nature of either that religion specifically, or religion in general.

(For those of you playing the home game, that's one of Meylis Delano Lawrence's favorite fallacies which he cited in his "Top Logical Fallacies Used By Religion" thread, aka cum hoc ergo propter hoc.)

I'm going to close by attempting to tag a point on my way out, without going into a lot of detail. Humans are, by their nature, fallible. Neither religious nor non-religious are immune to the phenomena of failing to live up to what they hoped to do. Humans misbehave. We sacrifice long term goals for the achievement of short term ones, and so on. Humans have developed both social and psychological means of addressing this problem. We have instincts which help guide us away from acts of stupidity. We have the ability to hypothesize ethical situations and evaluate them by making moral judgements. We have the ability to form social hierarchies with provisions for encouraging and enforcing correct behavior. And we've developed culture that includes both religious ideas as well as secular philosophies, geared toward helping us live right. In a strange way, this thread is an example of the same phenomena, including a lot of knee jerk reactions that seem to imply that denying pleasure and gratification is, if not uniformly wrong, at least worthy of suspicion. This ignores that human psychological and social mechanisms which address the relationship between desire and behavior also serve beneficial roles. You don't have to be religious to hope your child learns to delay gratification and attends to his homework first, and the videogame afterward.