An Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion (Intelligent Person's Guides)
You have 33 highlighted passages
You have 31 notes
Last annotated on August 2, 2016
This book is a contribution to the discussion of the place of religion in human life.Read more at location 30
Religion engages our intelligence at two levels. First, with questions of particular and immediate religious truth, meaning, feeling and practice. Second, with more general and abstract issues about the truth of religion and the significance of religious hope and fear.Read more at location 35
In a short novel, A Corner of the Veil (1999), Laurence Cosse imagines that a member of the French province of a religious order, the ‘Casuists’ (Jesuits?), receives a short manuscript containing a clear and incontrovertible demonstration of the existence of God.Read more at location 45
It is, however, interesting to speculate how, if the issues of God’s existence and of the meaning of life were to be demonstrated beyond doubt, this would impact on human existence.Read more at location 59
There is no such thing as ‘religion in general’, any more than there is any such creature as an ‘animal in general’.Read more at location 81
It is said that there are over 20,000 different Christian denominations alone, and for all I know it may well be that half of these are represented in California.Read more at location 87
No doubt such wide-ranging travels broaden the mind, but it does not follow that they produce any deeper appreciation of the meaning and value of religion than would be achieved by staying within a single faith tradition,Read more at location 107
That the claims of religion to explain the existence and character of the world are undermined by science is now a common idea, owing principally to (certain interpretations of) advances in physics and biology.Read more at location 119
That the role of religion as a source of moral guidance has been subverted is also a familiar notion thanks to psychology, sociology and the emergence of secular ethics.Read more at location 121
Older dictionary definitions of religion, fashioned in less culturally pluralistic times, typically refer to ‘a belief in, and worship of, a god or gods’.Read more at location 127
These specifications fail in the first respect. Recent writers aware of the large array of ‘belief systems’ sometimes favour definitions couched in terms of ‘a commitment to a perspective of ultimate and universal value’, but this is clearly too broad – if not, indeed, quaintly vacuous.Read more at location 128
in the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that religion is ‘what the individual does with his own solitude’ and the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s dictum that religion ‘is an eminently collective thing’.Read more at location 132
To the extent that a general definition seems called for, religion is best characterised as a system of beliefs and practices directed towards a transcendent reality in relation to which persons seek solutions to the observed facts of moral and physical evil, limitation and vulnerability, particularly and especially death.Read more at location 135
Theism is the belief in a single, all-knowing, all-good, all-present and all-powerful, eternally existing God who created and sustains the universe.Read more at location 144
More specifically I shall have in mind the so-called ‘Abrahamic faiths’ or ‘religions of the book’: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.Read more at location 145
