Book contents
10 - Understanding religions
IV Religions and imagination; communities of shared exploration and discovery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2015
Summary
This book began with angry condemnations of religion, from the anger of Marx and Engels at the suffering implicit in statistics and explicit in what they saw around them, to the anger of more recent critics at what religions (or at least some of those who belong to religions) believe, say and do.
There is no doubt that much of the anger against religions is justified. But in this book it has been argued that it is only one part of the story. The paradox of religions explored in this book is that religions can indeed be extremely bad news, but only because they have been and can still be very good news. To believers they matter too much to be left to chance. The internalisation of constraints derived from particular religions can produce terror and violence, but it can produce lives of extraordinary beauty and goodness: the achievements of religions include their explorations into a more profound understanding of ourselves as individuals who live in social organisation, and of the universe.
In order, therefore, to understand religions we have to recognise the truth of both sides of the paradox. When Christopher Hitchens launched his ‘case against religion’, God Is Not Great, he regarded as his most damaging criticism his claim that religion is man-made.
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- Why Religions Matter , pp. 273 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015