Kołakowski on religion

All functional approaches to the investigation of myths – in terms of their social, cognitive or emotional values – have arguably a common epistemological foundation. They all imply, if they do not explicitly assume, that the language of myth is translatable into a “normal” language – which means, into one which is understandable within the semantic rules the researcher himself is employing. The various conceptual frameworks of anthropological inquiry work, so to speak, as codes or as dictionaries which are used to transpose the ready-made mythological material into a language which is accessible and clear to contemporary minds.… First, it is assumed that myths, as they are explicitly told and believed, have a latent meaning behind the ostensible one and that this meaning not only is not in fact perceived by those sharing a given creed, but that of necessity it cannot be perceived. Secondly, it is implied that this latent meaning which is accessible only to the outsider anthropologist, is the meaning par excellence, whereas the ostensible one, i.e., the myth as it is understood by the believers, has the function of concealing the former; this ostensible meaning appears then as a product of inescapable self-deception, of an ideological mystification or simply of ignorance.

– Kołakowski, Religion (15)

The history of Exile, one of the most powerful symbols through which people in various civilizations have tried to grasp, and to make sense of, their lot and their misery, is not a “historical explanation” of the facts of life. It is the acknowledgment of our own guilt: in the myth of Exile we admit that evil is within us; it was not introduced by the first parents and then incomprehensibly imputed to us. If people had really been taught that Adam and Eve were responsible for all the horrors of human history, that unfortunate couple would surely have been cursed and hated throughout the history of Christianity; in fact their image in folklore has always been rather benign and sympathetic and their offense easily understandable: for who is permanently above temptation? Instead of devolving the responsibility for our misfortunes on a pair of ancestral figures we admit, through the symbol of our Exile, that we are cut out of warped wood (to use Kant’s metaphor) and that we do not deserve to lead a carefree, happy and idle life; an admission that does not strike one as absurd. (50–51)

[At the end of an excursus on Nietzsche] Absurd as it might have been to denounce envy and resentment as the roots of Christianity – the entire text of the Gospels is and irrefutable argument against this indictment – it was not at all absurd to see in it a confession of irreparable human infirmity. It does not take, however, a clever philosopher to unmask this side of Christianity, for this is what it says about itself. Sickness is the natural state of a Christian, Pascal wrote to his sister, Madame Perrier. Christianity may be viewed as an expression of what in human misery is incurable by human efforts; an expression, rather than a philosophical or psychological description. Thereby it is a cry for help. By making people acutely aware of their contingency and the finitude of life, of the corruptibility of the body, of the limitations of reason and language, of the power of evil in us, and by concentrating this awareness in the doctrine of original sin, Christianity clearly defied the Promethean side of the Enlightenment and was to be inevitably castigated for its “anti-humanist” bias. To what extent this accusation is justified – and indeed in what sense it amounts to an accusation – depends on the meaning of the word “humanism”, and all the known definitions of it are heavily loaded with ideological content. If “humanism” means a doctrine implying either that there are no limits whatever to human self-perfectibility or that people are entirely free in stating the criteria of good and evil, Christianity is certainly opposed to humanism…. Recent history seems rather to suggest that attempts, in traditionally Christian societies, to achieve a perfect “liberation” from what radical humanists believed was man’s bondage under God’s imaginary tyranny, were to threaten mankind with a more sinister slavery than Christianity has ever encouraged. (200–01)