Will Humanity
Survive Religion?
Will Humanity
Survive Religion?
Beyond Divisive Absolutes
W. Royce Clark
LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-9787-0855-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-9787-0856-3 (electronic)
For Dessie
For 60 years of Your Love and Wisdom
Contents
Preliminary Considerations: The “Camel” Burdened with a Metaphysical Absolute
1 Religion’s Divisive Burden as Absolutism in a Scientific and Pluralistic Age
2 The Absolute’s Divisive Burden in Segregating Humanity
3 Inflexible Faith in the Absolute: The Burden of the Loss of Self
4 The Absolute and Its Burden of Miracles, Mystery, and Authority
5 Fantasy versus Reality: The Burden of Reason’s Limits
6 Inhumane Faith: The Burden of Death as Evil or as Divine Punishment
7 The Burden of Religion’s Historical/Mythical Claims and the Slippage of Categories
8 The “Ugly Ditch”: The Burden of Historical Data’s Dead End
9 That Same “Ditch”: The Dead End of the Historical/Mythological
10 The Greatest Burden “After Auschwitz”: The Dead End of God as a Historical Liberator
11 Conclusion and Challenges
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
The title of this volume may seem absurd to some people. Why would anyone ever think religion would be a threat to humanity? Is not religion the very fertile ground whose potency sponsors life and humanity? A similar objection might have been raised against the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Of course, one can go home again! Is not “home” the one place you can always return to or feel welcome, even when or if the world at large turns its back on you? Or . . . as unthinkable as it seems, could religion actually be a threat to the survival of humanity? Could it really become impossible for one to go home again? The answer to the question or assertion really depends upon the circumstances and relationships involved. That is, what elements within religion might possibly threaten the survival of humanity, or what sorts of occurrences might make one’s return home impossible?
Ironically, the two seemingly questionable assertions are themselves related. As Wolfe’s character George Webber finally published a novel based on his hometown and many citizens saw themselves in the novel, he could not return home again. Later, when he published his second novel and gained fame, upon his return from Germany, he also realized he had finally to break off with his friend and editor, Fox Edwards, after so many years. Webber experienced a sense of a “new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back—but that you can’t go home again.” This phrase meant many things to Webber, such as wanting to return to one’s childhood, or to go back home to romantic love, or to a father one had lost, or “back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”1 But “you can’t go home again.”
Religion itself has often been experienced as that “dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged” that continually “pulls one back,” insists on one returning to the “old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting,” but now are understood as continually changing. So long as one feels pulled to this eternal Absolute, a cognitive dissonance occurs with the recognition of real change. As Webber knew, real life demanded that he allow the change, admit its necessity, and abandon the pseudo-safety or nostalgia of thinking of some fantastic “going home again” to that imaginative but now fictitious everlasting security.
When I began teaching religion at the college level in 1961, I had no idea of how much my life and views would change in the subsequent decades. But change is a fact of life; it is what education is all about. When I began this book and subsequent manuscripts in London in the winter of 2000, I knew the challenges of piecing together years of reading and weighing ideas, but the end result was not a return “home” but an ever new and exciting venture. The works of Rubenstein, Scharlemann, Tillich, Schleiermacher, and Nietzsche were probably the great intellectual stimulants for me, with my aim of making it possible for any intelligent reader to understand their profound works that are read primarily only by professors or theologians.
I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been married to a supportive, happy, and extremely wise wife for more than sixty years now. Dessie has always been a greater mentor and guide for me than she will ever admit. Her humility and steadfast
