Religion

=John Hick on the Institutional Balance Sheet of Religion

By Ulrich Mohrhoff, citing John Hick in his book The New Frontier:

"- On the one hand the religions have been instruments of social cohesion, maintaining the unity of a tribe or a nation by providing communal rituals and shared identity-defining stories handed down from generation to generation. These stories, sagas and myths refer to specific strands of history but constitute for each community an allencompassing “grand narrative” which binds society and generations together, providing frameworks of meaning for the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The religions have also challenged their members with moral ideals, and have supported and comforted them in the sufferings and amid the anxieties and vicissitudes of life’s recurrent personal and social crises. Further, the religions have constituted the foundation of civilisations and been instrumental in the development of language, education and science. They have been responsible for the creation of hospitals and universities, and have inspired literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. So there is a great deal on the positive side of the balance sheet.

But on the other side they have not only been instruments of social cohesion but also of social control by a dominant class. . . . Again, while the religions have produced and nourished a succession of great philosophers and theologians, the monotheisms have also restricted the search for truth and new understanding by threatening and punishing thinkers who failed to conform to accepted ideas. . . . However, if we try to arrive at a “bottom line” in this complex profit-and-loss account, we find that the goods and evils flowing from religion are of such different kinds as generally to be incommensurable, so that it is not really possible to reach any straightforward verdict. We can only paint the mixed black-and-white picture which history displays. The world religions all teach love and compassion, each has its own formulation of the Golden Rule, each includes great examples of self-giving love for others, and yet each has been used to validate and justify large-scale violence and merciless atrocities. (pp. 8–11)

When it comes to the “scientific” study of religion, Hick is more outspoken:

- Religion as institution is the subject-matter of the academic study of religion. The historians of religion, and the anthropologists and sociologists who study religion, necessarily focus on its outer and visible aspects. Emile Durkheim, for example, studying Australian aboriginal societies in the late nineteenth century, concluded that its totem functioned as a symbol both for its god and for the tribe itself as a reality greater than and having authority over the individual, and concluded that god was society in the guise of the sacred totem. His analysis of the religion of a particular primal tribal society is convincing but he, and many others after him, made the mistake of generalising it to explain religion as such: the overarching authority and power of society have been projected by the religious imagination as the idea of God. However, this theory does not explain either such non-theistic and basically individualistic faiths as Buddhism or the important element of prophetic challenge to society among both them and the monotheisms. Such oversimplifying generalisation is indeed characteristic of all the various reductionist sociological and psychological theories. They have a valid insight into some one particular aspect of religion and then uncritically assume that they have thereby discovered the essential nature of all religion." (pp. 11–12)

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/3-3-hick_review.pdf)