Religion – Can We Do Without It?
(Extracted from Education, Life, Discovery by W.Roy Niblett)

But if this is so, is there any hope that the direction in which we are going can be altered? Where is the guidance to come from for the painful changes which may be needed – guidance powerful enough, commanding enough, to compel?

One tentative source might conceivably be for us to look again to traditional codes, codes incorporating rules that have served our ancestors well or at least reasonably well. These do, however, seem dated and one-dimensional when what we need is guidance that is multi-dimensional, imaginative, forward-looking, which takes into account modern technology and market forces The guidance offered by straightforward, reasoned argument also seems likely to prove ineffective – for most of us far too weak in its impact. It might conceivably be that intellectuals would attend to its counsels, but few people are intellectuals anyway and even intellectuals are by no means always consistently reasonable beings.

So it may well be the case that more hope is to be found in experiences which have come to us feelingly. Joy, suffering, failure, beauty, a death, may bring us face to face with truths which matter. They can reach us embodied in music, great poetry, majestic mountains. Their reception however may require from us a certain passiveness, difficult of access in a technologically dominated world, but which we may for a few moments be compelled into almost against our will. Whether though such truths, even if realised, will be lasting in their effects and able to ensure changes in the direction of our outlook depends upon not only our receptivity on the one hand and their genuineness on the other but whether we can recognise their authority, see and feel them not merely as compelling but as reasonable, too. And whether we are willing to submit to change as a result of them.

Facts, scientific theories, technical accomplishments, though they must certainly be taken grippingly hold of, deal in two dimensions only: there are other dimensions to our lives than they reckon with:The sun has burst the sky

Because I love you
And the river its banks
Far down the river ships sound their hooters
Crazy with joy because I love you.66

Both facts and experiences are essential ingredients to vitality, to any confident understanding that there is meaning in things. Such a discovery, if it comes, will have involved a certain humility on our part, a willingness to enter into things, even if temporarily, more deeply. Our determination to go on examining them from the outside, with objectivity and detachment, is entirely right. But that is not all. To be able to experience them from the inside as it were, is inseparable from a delight in music or art or poetry, even to knowing what they are about. They are not mere arrangements, however pretty, of words or paint or notes, but records of their creator’s experience and invitations to share it.

Now I would contend that it is in this field that religion operates, particularly the one I know best, Christianity. The things which are important in the Biblical narrative are often, in fact usually, the outcome of experiences which have come to this prophet or that, to Hosea, to Job, to a psalmist, to Jesus, to Peter, to Paul – though their meaning, however creative the guidance it gives, is by no means always immediately clear to their recipient. And one suspects that their effect could be evanescent unless added to a body of beliefs already held, whether unconsciously or not, within the mind of the one receiving them.
Experiences are organic in their nature, begotten not made, having, if they are deep, the potential to energise and re-orientate the recipient whether it be an individual or a whole society. But this may only be, provided that they are able to put that individual or society intimately into touch with a warm tradition of belief, capacious and profound enough to be able to incorporate them. (As Wittgenstein pointed out in his Culture and Value, wisdom is cold: you can no more use it for setting life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.)

But traditions of the kind of which I have been speaking will not, if they are vital, be closed-up bodies of once-upon-a-time truths but able to grow, now slowly, now faster, fed century after century by the insights and experiences of living beings. In the past, many have contributed tellingly to such inheritances, not always in ways limited by creeds externally imposed. So in the case of Christianity have thinkers and doers from Paul onwards, some of them not even members of a church. Today we live at a time when an evolution in the Christian tradition may be needed, creative incorporations made within it so that newly perceived truths by a society more and more expertly equipped technically can be included – truths both about the universe and about human beings.

Who knows whether the churches will be adequate to create in our society a sufficient responsiveness to so ongoing a tradition? Or that a more responsive society will succeed in gaining from a vital Christianity in evolution the guidance and direction it so imperatively needs? If a Christian faith is to remain acceptable and personal it must be one which takes into account everything science can find out about how things work, the outcomes as they become available of many of the new probes and instruments for our use with which science provides us. But it must also draw daily upon the joys, the sufferings, the hopes, the loves, the fears our lives actually bring us. Without hope and love children shrivel; but so do adults, so do societies. I wonder whether, over the generations, we can continue to be, and develop as, human beings without the unconquered stability which faith in something far greater than ourselves makes possible.

When belief in a religion – or faith in God – reaches a low ebb the civilisation of which it formed a part comes under threat. A vital dimension has been removed from it. Can a substitute equal in its permeating power be found? Is there any way in which the disintegration of the culture once penetratingly informed by religious belief can be prevented when that belief has been lost? Can its unity be preserved? its sense of long-term purpose? its hierarchy of values?
It may be argued with point that in past centuries there was a good deal of merely exterior conformity even if religious adherences were so widespread – and much less real and interior belief than appeared. And this is surely probable: it seems unlikely that there was for instance among the majority any great understanding of the doctrines encapsulated in the creeds they obediently repeated if and when they went to church. But this does not mean that a high proportion were without faith implicit somewhere deep within them that God existed, that Christian values were right ones, that a life after death was probable. In other words a religious dimension was embedded in the mind, even if often at a sub-conscious rather than a fully conscious level.

And to have such a dimension removed, even if gradually, seems bound to have consequences – a subtle deprivation of confidence; a search for other dependencies – success in world marketing, the lottery, sex, escape through drugs or the adoption of a new religion instead of the old.

There can, I would argue, be no adequate replacement for a profound religious faith intelligently and comprehendingly held. And if a change in the social climate threatens such a faith with disintegration, what is essential is not its abandonment but an evolution in understanding of its meaning and potential. For some Christians this may entail the sacrifice of items in a creed which they are reluctant to part with; giving up membership of a church whose services have lost their potency. It may involve following unafraid the leading given to them by some of their moments of insight – though this will still need testing by common sense. What it will certainly not entail is ceasing to love one’s fellows whatever their own loss of religious faith; or imagining that an analytical frame of mind by itself is ever going to yield answers that satisfy.

If this is a Christian faith, entering into it so as to discover something of the central permanencies within it will be a sine qua non if it is to go on bearing fruit either for individuals or societies. The guidance it can offer will involve sharing in at least some of its essential tenets and perceptions – among them those of a God who has standards and the immensely creative power of love and forgiveness. It may indeed well be that the mental probity and the control over our social future which are so necessary to us are only compatible with Christian beliefs if there is a continuing evolution in our understanding of all three.
The central message of Christianity itself is that God, creator of the universe and all things, shares in their life from the inside. He lives within all human beings, did so long before the coming of Christ and will go on doing it. In the life and death of Jesus, so Christians believe, He was manifest with a directness that is unique.

To accept this to be true asks for an outlook unusual in our time. It does not, however, require us to credit Jesus and his disciples with the kinds of knowledge, factual, medical, geographical, which the limitations of their time and culture would have precluded – as the limitations of our own prevent in ourselves but which we readily accept, hardly even noticing. Jesus was, after all, a Jew living 2,000 years ago, not aware that the earth was a ball circling its sun, not aware of the very existence of Buddhism already five centuries old, taking for granted a number of the theories of his day regarding demons and evil spirits and maybe believing that the earth itself would soon be coming to an end.

His divinity lies elsewhere: in the knowledge which his own faith, holiness and dedication gave him and which eventually brought him to the realisation of his identity with the God he worshipped. So that his death on the cross became not merely the sacrifice of his life as an individual, but a revelation of God’s own suffering and self-sacrifice on behalf of all humanity. There is an ultimacy about such a perception.

Humility and a certain silence can help us to accept our human finitude; to accept’ too, that Christianity itself is not a rigid, complete or completed system of doctrines to be held on to. A faith that there is much beyond human limitations of mind and sense, beyond human knowledge, will help to bring us hope; to bring stability and confidence into our lives – and into the life of 21st century Britain. It could bring meaning too, a growing conviction that we are in God’s hands and that we do not need to have all the answers.

Reliance upon where market forces will take us is not enough. Nor even by themselves the impulses driving us ahead in one direction or another given us by scientific exploration, music, our daily experiences of love or failure. The stability, forward-looking, directed guidance we need must spring from a deeper level which makes use of the others. And that, it seems to me, will essentially be one that is both enlightened and religious.