BY TOM WOODMAN
Published by Tom Woodman
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was the result of ‘religion’. Later, July 7th was to make the
British people very aware that support for the Iraq War had
made this country a specific target. At the same time the Neo-
conservative Bush regime, widely supported by American
‘born-again’ Christians, became very unpopular here, and there
was a growing consciousness of the unfortunate influence of
that strand of American Christianity. Dawkins’ book The God
Delusion became a remarkable best-seller in 2006, and he
became a cult celebrity, appearing as himself in Doctor Who,
for example. Facebook reveals a wide network of fans who call
him ‘better than Jesus’ or say that he would be their God if they
believed in God! His aggression and prestige have emboldened
other critics, and atheism in some circles has become militant
and evangelical, with the London bus campaign ‘There’s
probably no God’ (January 2009), and various controversies
about faith schools and religion in the public sphere.
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be revealing to see how he would get on if he were quizzed on
purely factual matters such as the history of religion and what
the world religions actually teach.
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or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by
difference in opinion, especially if it be in things
indifferent. (Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4, Chapter 5)
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fundamentalism is not exactly the same kind of phenomenon as
Islamic fundamentalism, although it has some things in common
with it. Most fundamentalism is not violent and dangerous, even
though we might well quarrel with it intellectually. Much of it
is the product of narrow education and cultural isolation, but to
condemn all religion on this basis is like condemning science on
the grounds of the general public’s grasp of scientific concepts.
The Amish in the United States are clearly fundamentalists and
they refuse to use modern technology. Yet they have a long
tradition of pacifism and conscientious objection and represent
no danger to anyone at all. Islamic fundamentalism itself is
much wider than terrorism and must not be identified with
it. Terrorism exploits and abuses religious fundamentalism,
but is not in any simple sense caused by it. An MI5 survey in
this country identified actual religious practice as a contra-
indication to terrorism (7th October 2007, Daily Telegraph). As
the political thinker John Gray has pointed out, most terrorism
actually has secular roots such as Marxist-Leninism.2
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Martin Luther King were religiously-inspired men of peace. If
we take the notorious example of Northern Ireland we see that
religion became intertwined with nationalism and a sense of
oppression but that religious people were also in the forefront
of the peace movement. Can we have any doubt which impulse
most truly represents the spirit of religion? It is a terrible slander
on many believers in the world not to recognise that they
live peaceable lives and want to continue to do so, and this is
because of their religion not in spite of it.
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found difficult and left untried’.3 Or to put it less extremely, there
is a real distinction to be made between ‘faith’ and ‘religion’: the
former a living and personal encounter; the latter the necessary
but often very imperfect institutional forms to which many
believers adhere with what may be very limited understanding
and very conventional practice.
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simplistic believers do (and with much less excuse).
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Where is the Evidence?
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inadequate.) Yet Pope Benedict was very insistent in his recent
Westminster Hall address that religion needs reason to guard it
against various errors and dangers of the kind already discussed
here.
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what ‘evidence’ is. That is not how we conduct our lives in
other respects. In a well known article about religious language
Ian Ramsey refers to its validity in terms of a comparison with
the experience of trustworthiness in personal relationships
of friendship and love.6 Can we scientifically prove the
trustworthiness of our mother, our spouse, our friend? No, but
we empirically experience it if we are fortunate by a series of
repeated events that in the end convince us beyond reasonable
doubt.
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voices and so on. Naturally enough from his perspective he
regards them as hallucinations and illusions. He does not seem
to realise that all mainstream religions and all the best known
mystics caution against placing trust in them. Even, for example,
the dramatic events at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal, which
Dawkins discusses, are not so much affirmed directly by the
Catholic Church as allowed by it, said not to be in conflict with
it.
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day communities of belief. This process of checking one against
another amounts to an ‘empirical testing of the worthwhileness
…of the public formulations which summarize past Christian
experience and events’.8
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Faith in the Community
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embodied his presence. A famous statement attributed to St.
Theresa of Avila (1512-1582) says that ‘Christ has no body
now but yours’. In and through the community of today we
are able to encounter Jesus, as energy flows from the original
source through the historical communities and into each of us
in the present. Another well known spiritual guide, the French
Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751), writes: ‘Jesus Christ
has lived in the past and still lives in the present; he began in
himself and continues in his saints a life that will never finish…
O life which is initiating new operations at every moment!’12
Or in the strikingly contemporary terms in which I heard a
missionary nun put it, ‘it is still possible to access Christ today’.
At the same time we also realise that such an encounter is not a
purely subjective experience, any more than our experience of
any other person is. It is validated by the other members of the
current community and by comparing the reported experience of
the original foundational community with our own.
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in which he now lives in the world, but Jesus is seen as the
new Adam, the new representative human being. It is because
of this that his life, death and resurrection affects everyone,
whether they are believers or not. For believers, however, it is
by our experience in the community that we can approach this
belief of the early Church’s in the special, representative and
central quality of Jesus. We come to grasp a whole new sense of
meaning, even a new sense of identity, in recognising in him all
the fullness of what it means to be human, an experience which
‘extends the whole range of meaning and understanding of each
other we had before and modifies it pervasively’. 13
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gift. So we come to find it necessary to maintain that in Jesus,
fullness and significance, ultimate meaning, seeks us in grace
and revelation. God is the one who validates Jesus Christ and
perpetuates his life in the life of the community. God is the one
who takes the initiative. We find ultimate meaning. Those who
properly undergo the experience of that meaning could only
fail to affirm it by denying their own integrity. In one way they
have a choice, but not if they wish to be true to themselves and
to what they have experienced.
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significance that lasts in some way that is humanly recognisable
to us, an ‘inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade’ (I
Peter 1:4) rather than being simply made meaningless in the
annihilation of death?
These are some of the questions which the figure of Jesus and
the Christian community’s experience of him lead us to. They
are certainly not irrational ones, and there is an abundance of
evidence of various kinds that can help to provide answers to
them.
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Footnotes
1. This estimate is for 2009 and is taken from the website www.
adherents.com./Religions_By_Adherents. It is confirmed in a
variety of other sources both online and in print although very
precise figures are not likely to be possible. For the view that
the demographic evidence points to the global future belonging
with Christianity and Islam see Philip Jenkins, The Next
Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, New York,
2007.
5. P.R. Baelz, ‘Is God Real?’ Faith, Fact and Fantasy edited
C.F.D. Moule, London, 1964, p.77.
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Further Reading:
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Many people, especially young people, have been impressed
by the arguments of Professor Richard Dawkins and
Christopher Hitchens against religion. More generally
there is a fear of links between religion and violence. This
pamphlet provides a brief and balanced survey of these
controversies. It goes on to offer a contemporary answer
to the frequently-asked question, where is the evidence
for faith?
ISBN is 978--0--9568645--0--5