“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.”
―
Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
I couldn't agree more! It'll take several pages more to unpack the implications of that quote.
Indeed, no one has ever been able to refute religion; to be human is to
be religious (
homo religiosus). The religious feeling, the sense of the divine, the experience of transcendence, is universal; there has never been a society in the history of our species that has not given expression to some form of religion.
It's inevitable that religion is institutionalised—and that's when the troubles start. Religious traditions—scriptures, creeds, rituals, etc.—are necessary to preserve the memory of religious experiences; but over time, if we lose sight of the purpose they're meant to serve, they can become irrelevant.
Think of religious traditions and institutions as a finger pointing to the moon, to use an old Buddhist dictum. If you fix your gaze on the finger rather than on what the finger is pointing to, you miss all that heavenly glory. Similarly, religion loses its power when we forget what it points to (the infinite God, and how we should live) and instead give more attention to those things—creed, discipline, authority, whether that of scripture (Protestantism), of tradition (Orthodoxy) or of magisterium (Catholicism)—which are supposed to be aids to the religious life.
