How do religions die?
Do they waste away, or get conquered by something better? Perhaps it is easier to think in terms of gods dying, rather than religions
Religion under attack: Hernan Cortez with 200 Spaniards and 5,000 Indians defeats a larger Aztec force in 1520. Illustration:Archivo Iconografico/Corbis
Andrew Brown
theguardian.com, Monday 30 September 2013 04.59 EDT
If religions are born, they must also be able to die. How does this happen? I think we can discount at once the idea that it happens because people realise that science is better. It's obvious that the more people try to replace religion with science, the more they reproduce the worst features of organised religion.
On the other hand, societies might be reconfigured in such a way that the idea of religion made no sense. Interestingly, the reverse process seems to have happened in Japan in the 19th century, after American gunboats broke the country's isolation. According to a recent book from Chicago University Press, there had been until then no concept of "religion" in Japanese society; afterwards, as part of the modernisation, some social practices and beliefs had to be carved out as "religious" while others were classified as "non-religious". I don't know how this account might apply to the spread of Christianity in the 17th century, and then the murderous suppression over generations; I'll have to wait for the book to arrive. But the process seems a plausible one, and something like it may be under way in the "secularising" parts of the world today.
But what is happening there is less of an abandonment of doctrine as a withdrawal of assent from things formerly considered sacred. This is a process as general and impersonal as language change. Nor is it any more driven by rationality. Considered in themselves, there is nothing more "religious" about a teddy bear left out in the rain by the roadside than there is about a man wearing a white lace-trimmed frock. Yet the teddy bear at the site of a road crash is recognised as a meaningful symbol of our horror at mortality, while the young man in a cotta is no longer a priest linking us to the heart of our civilisation but callow and pretentious.
One hundred years ago, the situation would have been completely absurd, a reversal of the natural order of the universe. It's certainly impossible to describe it as progress. It is simply change – evolution, if you like.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/30/how-do-religions-die
= new reply since forum marked as read
"The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."
Dover Beach, of course.
