From an editorial in the London Telegraph entitled "God isn't big enough for some people", Umberto Eco writes that we are "religious animals" and needing to justify our existence, find values and deal with our mortality we turn to religion.
He writes that in post-Christian Europe/UK :
The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols...
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity...
The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.
1 comment:
Excellent post!
That's the trouble isn't it? People believing they're larger than GOD himself. What did Dostoevsky say? Was it "Bother's Karamazov" or "Crime and Punishment"?
"If you don't believe in GOD, then anything is permissible."
Post a Comment