The cognitive impact of religious “rationality”: On forgiveness and the sacrificial mind

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to applymany of the tools and insights developed alongside this book on twomajor issues in which religion plays a crucial role: namely sacrifice (in particular self-sacrifice) and forgiveness. Sacrifice will be analyzed from a chiefly epistemological and pragmatic perspective, whereas I will adopt with forgiveness a frame relating to evolutionary studies and social cognition. The interest connecting those two fields is that they both, in different ways, partake of the topics of violence and irrationality: it is therefore extremely interesting to read them within the eco-cognitive perspective that has characterized this book since the beginning. As I did for the genesis of supernatural beliefs, I will attempt at problematizing the perceived irrationality of a given trait, or behavior, in order to understand how it can be traced back to another pattern of rationality: when, as in the case of the sacrifice of intellect, an “irrational” point will be located, it will be my aim to circumscribe it as fittingly as possible. Therefore, my intention is to analyze two central aspects of religious behavior relying on the notion of violence (for sacrifice) and its retention (for forgiveness), thus using violence as a kind of eco-cognitive prism. Following the philosophical orientation indicated by Magnani’s Understanding Violence (Magnani 2011), I will argue in favor of the epistemic and pragmatic/heuristic roles of violence (and of its retention). In the first section, in fact, I will contend that the religious sacrificial mindset fascinatingly weaves together a theoretical non-understanding (in the form of an “epistemic” violence tracing back to the sacrificium intellectus) with a pragmatic understanding, in order to achieve the further possibility for an ecocognitive acting. In the second and final one, conversely, I will challenge forgiveness as a heuristic violence committed against a norm, part of a set of rules enabling the functioning of a the cognitive niche, for the sake of the functioning of the cognitive niche itself. In sum, my final contention will be that violence and irrationality are, paradoxically, the necessary and strictly linked counterweights that are able to make religion (as I have analyzed it in this part) livable and even profitable from the perspective of an eco-cognitive rationality.