The Task of Religion

A short note distinguishing the purposes of religion from those of science.

                                                                            Prague, 5 January 2013

Making sense for the human spirit

The task of religion is to make sense of the world for the human spirit. This making sense is not limited to making what might be called primitive scientific conjectures, although a lot of what we see in ancient myths can be seen to carry implicit ideas of a scientific kind. Rather, the function of religion was and is to give a moral and emotional meaning to the world, and not to explain it as such. Religion binds a community located in space and time, making our place in creation into something we can recognise as our land and our home. Religion is about our sense of belonging in the world and so inevitably sees the world in human terms and through human relationships, however exotic the detail. Thus to homo religionis knowing the world is not just abut amassing factual information, or even habitual familiarity, it is part and parcel of having a living relationship with where, how, and with whom we live and die.

Anthropologists date these feelings back to early hunter-gatherer tendencies which we now call animistic; the belief that all things have spirits – are animate - and it is these spirits that move them to action, be they animal, mineral or vegetable. Animism can be seen to answer questions that today we would treat as physics, bio-chemistry and psychology, but this fact does nothing to explain the reason for this system of belief. Religious experience is not simply about explaining why things move and why they don’t, it is about who and what is out there, what our relationship is to them (or it) and how we should behave in their (or its) company. It is about the reality of living in the world with the Other, or as Martin Buber had it, about “I and Thou”.

It bears reminding ourselves that the scientific view is now almost completely divorced from this, and that to the atheist the universe, however awe-inspiring, is amoral, without feelings of humanity or purpose, and though Oriental religious traditions found their way to similarly impersonal conclusions, they drew profoundly personal moral lessons along the way. True, science has shown us so much more than we ever believed we could see. Things otherwise completely invisible to us have been revealed in glorious detail. Literally new worlds are revealed on a daily basis. But in a profound sense, we have come not one step further on.

To make sense of the world in scientific terms means to show what we can see and explain how it functions. That is not the purpose of religion or of myth. The task of religion is to establish the terms of our relationship with the world, a far deeper, more essential and more significant task for humanity to achieve. This task is as significant for man as is the establishment of any inter-human relationship, including the relationship we have with ourselves. Throughout history these three tasks have been deeply intertwined, and in essence, one and the same.

© Mícheál úa Séaghdha, Praha 2013