In the West, the age of the parish priest preaching submission to the Lord and to the factory owner is gone. Religious resilience would be impossible without a pretension and some credibility to embody a community, on a much deeper level than what is given by family, work, neighbourhood, culture, sport or even politics. No Church develops without exploiting a lack of having and a lack of being. Religion is the idealism of a materialistic society.
“Not every believer is a social conformist. Their independence of mind, their resistance (to war, for example) or rebellion can outdo those of many atheists. Yet religion is tantamount to social acceptation, because its very principle separates a here below from a hereafter which created the here below and is necessarily superior to it. Religious thought (and therefore behaviour) is dualist: it is based on the division between body and soul, matter and spirit, and this divide can only favour the latter over the former. Whatever the believer does to change this world, for them there will always be another world of a higher order. History, life as we daily experience it here and now matter less that what is beyond, outside the everyday world. Therefore, when they fight inequality, exploitation and oppression, the religious person deals with realities that belong to a minor level of reality. They can only (and indeed they must) treat the history of humanity as a subplot within a much larger story that exceeds people, because that story relates to and depends upon something outside all people of all times.”
About the book:
Author: Giles Dauve and Karl Nesic
Publisher: Active Distribution
ISBN: 9781909798649
Published: (originally 2006) – this edition 2019
Format: Pamphlet
Size: 4.1 x 5.8
Page count: 72
Subjects: Religion, Atheism
