The Renewal of Religion -- John Michael Greer
Created by : John Michael Greer View profile
Oct. 9, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- The new religious sensibility I’ve sketched out here in several posts already, and will be discussing in more detail as we proceed, has implications that go well beyond the sphere assigned to religion in most contemporary industrial societies.
One of the most significant of those implications is precisely the idea that religion, in any sense, will have an important impact on the future in the first place.
One of the standard tropes of the contemporary faith in progress, after all, insists that religion is an outworn relic sure to be tipped into history’s compost heap sometime very soon.
By “religion,” of course, those who make this claim inevitably mean “theist religion,” or more precisely “any religion other than mine” -- the civil religion of progress is of course supposed to be exempt from that fate, since its believers insist that it’s not a religion at all.
This sort of insistence is actually quite common in religious life. C.S. Lewis notes in one of his books that really devout people rarely talk about religion as such; instead, they talk about Go.
To ordinary, sincere, unreflective believers, “religion” means the odd things that other people believe; in their eyes, their own beliefs are simply the truth, obvious to anyone with plain common sense.
It’s for this reason that many languages have no word for religion as such, even though they’re fully stocked with terms for deities, prayers, rituals, temples, and the other paraphernalia of what we in the West call religion; it’s by and large only those societies that have had to confront religious pluralism repeatedly in its most challenging forms that have, or need, a label for the overall category to which these things belong.
The imminent disappearance of all (other) religion that has featured so heavily in rationalist rhetoric for the last century and a half or so thus fills roughly the same role in their faith as the Second Coming in Christianity: the point at which the Church Militant morphs into the Church Triumphant.
So far, at least to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the atheist scene has yet proclaimed the date by which Reason will triumph over Superstition -- the initial capitals, again, tell you when an abstraction has turned into a mythic figure -- but it’s probably just a matter of time before some rationalist equivalent of Harold Camping gladdens the heart of the faithful by giving them a date on which to pin their hopes.
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