Religion


I grew up in England at a time when, if you weren't anything else, you were Anglican. I sometimes went to Sunday school and I was confirmed in the Anglican Church. There was a religious service, broadly Protestant in character, each morning at school. The Catholic and Jewish boys were allowed to opt out of this, but everyone else was expected to attend. Personally, I enjoyed the hymn singing and so I did not mind.

However, I never got religion. Being a child, I assumed that the grown-ups understood what it was about and that when I reached adulthood, I would too. The things we were being taught must be true, I reasoned. But when I was a teenager, I began to realize that a lot of adults didn't get it either.

Nevertheless, as a young adult I went to church and sang in a church choir for a while. For fourteen years I read the Bible daily using Scripture Union notes, but I realized that I had achieved no greater understanding during that time, and so I tried a different angle. SU reckoned that with their notes you would read pretty well the entire Bible in five years. So I decided to spend the next five years reading the Bible from cover to cover.

This stategy produced a remarkable effect. Without the filter of the SU notes, I discovered that the Bible was a motley collection of disparate writings, composed at different times for different purposes. Some were inconsistent with others, so the notion that the Bible was the repository of all truth went out of the window. The five-year exercise could have turned me into an atheist, but I chose instead to become a true agnostic. Some of the best people I know are sincerely religious and I sometimes think they might have discovered something which has escaped me.

I received an insight into why I do not feel a need for religious belief when we were studying Paradise Lost at school. Satan says that he prefers life in Hell to total annihilation. I realized that I had no desire for eternal life and no horror of annihilation. I lose consciousness each night and regain it in the morning. One day I shall lose consciousness and never regain it. This does not bother me, although it would be quite a shock if I discovered that I did have eternal life!

I am inclined to the view that religion is hard-wired in most humans in much the same way as language and music are. However, it seems that a good proportion of white Europeans do not have this hard-wiring. Whether or not the theory is correct, it is nevertheless irrelevant to the question of whether the truths which religious people perceive are real or illusory. I am ready to accept that there may be a real basis for the religious beliefs which have held sway for so long.


Posted 7/11




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