The new A J Jacobs book, The Year Of Living Biblically, is creating quite a stir.  It is the story of a self-described “agnostic Jew” who decided to spend a year of his life following all of the rules in Jewish scripture.  (Given practical restrictions, Jacobs eschewed certain rules, like stoning adulterers in the street.)  It is being discussed as a commentary on a religious life.

But, is it really?  Jacobs remains agnostic, even though he claims (somewhat absurdly) that parts of the biblical legal traditions, like rituals and the Sabbath, can be “sacred.”  What this seems to mean for Jacobs, in the absence of a belief in God, is that they provide psychologically therapeutic benefits; wearing biblically-mandated all-white outer garments, for example, lightened his mood.

This sort of reduction of religion’s role to psychotherapy is no more legitimately “religious” than the way Creationists often reduce religion to natural history.  If religion is to be anything, then it has to be something on its own terms, not just an amateur version of psychology, sociology, history, legal theory, or moral philosophy. Continue reading →