Volume 7, Issue 2, November 1997


COSMIC RELIGION

The statesman and orator Edmund Burke said, "Man is constitutionally a religious animal." Note that word "constitutionally". Burke used language with precision. He presumably meant that religion is not an optional extra in human nature like the ability to carry a tune or ride a bicycle. It is bred into our bone. Or as someone else has said, human beings are incurably religious.

It is unfashionable to speak well of religion these days. Yet as a matter of elementary justice, it needs to be pointed out again and again how impoverished human life would be if it were possible to wipe every vestige of religion off the face of the earth. It has encouraged humans to aspire to a satisfying view of existence as a whole, to be haunted by a vision of the divinely beautiful, to revere a moral ideal which towers above custom and convention. And it is not just the elite -the scholars and artists and saints - who have been touched by religion's magic. It has woven a spell over the minds of ordinary people who know little of theological ideas or ecclesiastical subtleties. The strange yet uplifting truths of religion have become the property of the humblest and simplest, just as surely as they sometimes by-pass the worldly-wise and sophisticated, working a transformation in social values - making the ordinary person feel extraordinary and the extraordinary person feel ordinary.

(from, "Start Your Own Religion," by Colin Morris, BBC Enterprises Limited, London, 1992).

Search Articles by Keyword

 


Back to Issue Summary || Issue Index || Home

"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.