Fifteen Eighty Four

The world is in a mess – wars, famines, storms, floods, and massacres – human existence so often seems, as Thomas Hobbes thought, nasty, brutish, and short. Karl Marx thought that religion was ‘the heart of a heartless world’, offering an escape, albeit an illusory one, from the world’s ills. But some recent writers see religion as itself part of the problem, even as ‘the root of all evil’, as Richard Dawkins put it.

In much of the Western world, religion has come to seem infantile, oppressive, and harmful. Churches are emptying, and societies are becoming more secular. Yet in the world as a whole, religions are expanding rapidly, and are powerful motivators of social action. Relations between different cultures are intertwined with religious beliefs and practices, and international relations cannot ignore religious concerns.

Religions, and the relations between them, are of fundamental importance in the modern world. That is not really surprising, because religions concern questions about the values and purposes of human life, and such questions, whether the answers to them are religious or not, cannot ignore what religions have said about them.

I have been an academic teacher of philosophy all my working life, and have been a professor of philosophy, of religious studies, and of theology at various times, mostly in the UK, in Universities including London and Oxford.  I am also ordained as an Episcopal priest, so I do have some specific religious beliefs. It is not surprising, then, that my main interest has been in what various religions think and do, and in how they relate to each other. Are they harmful and ignorant, or do they have things to say that are perhaps of ultimate importance for human beings, even matters of eternal life or death?

It may come as a surprise that one person in recent times who thought that religions are a bad thing was one of the greatest modern theologians, and a Christian pastor, Kal Barth. He wrote that religions just invent ‘arbitrarily devised images of God’, and are mainly concerned with trying to justify their own power and privileges. This includes Christianity. Yet within the Christian churches (especially the Protestant reformed ones) there is a ‘true religion’, which is the one he happens to believe in.

This is a prime example of what I would call a ‘closed’ view of religion (John Hick called it an ‘exclusive’ view). All religions but one are false, and are just human inventions, but one is given by God, and contains all the religious truths that humans need to know.