Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith
This book makes the case that the next great accomplishments of humankind will be on getting along with each other. Here is text from the first two pages of Chapter One.
"Wherever people live, whenever they live, they find themselves faced with three inescapable problems:
- how to win food and shelter from their natural environment (the problem nature poses),
- how to get along with one another (the social problem), and
- how to relate themselves to the total scheme of things (the religious problem).
The three problems are obvious, but they become interesting when we align them with the three major periods in human history:
- the traditional period (which extended from human beginnings up to the rise of modern science),
- the modern period (which took over from there and continued through the first half of the twentieth century), and
- postmodernism (which Nietzsche anticipated, but which waited for the second half of the twentieth century to take hold).
Each of these periods poured more of its energies into, and did better by, one of life's inescapable problems than did the other two. Specifically, modernity gave us our view of nature -- it continues to be refined, but because modernity laid the foundations for the scientific understanding of it, it deserves credit for the discovery.
Postmodernism is tackling social injustices more resolutely than people previously did.
Later, the author gives the following examples "of some changes that have occurred in a single lifetime that make it clear that social injustices are being recognized and addressed more earnestly today than they were by our ancestors:
- In 1919 the Brooklyn Zoo exhibited an African American caged alongside chimpanzees and gorillas. Today such an act would be met with outrage anywhere in the world.
- The civil rights movement of the 1960's accomplished its major objectives. In the United States and even in South Africa today, people of different races mix where they never could before -- on beaches, in airline cabin crews, everywhere.
- In the 1930's, if a streetcar in San Francisco approached a stop where only Chinese Americans were waiting to board, it would routinely pass them by. By contrast, when (fifty years later) I retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, my highly respected chancellor was a Chinese American who spoke English with a Chinese accent.
- No war has ever been as vigorously protested as was the war in Vietnam by United States citizens. When things were going so badly that military leaders advised President Nixon to use nuclear weapons, he declined because (as he said) if he did that, he would face a nation that had taken to the streets.
- The women's movement is only a blink in the eyes of history, but it has already scored impressive victories. Until long after the Civil War, American women really had no civil rights, no legal rights, and no property rights. Not until 1918 did Texas alter its law that everyone had the right to vote except "idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane, and women."
- Arguably, the most important theological development of the latter twentieth century was the emergence of the theology of liberation ("liberation theology"), with its Latin American and feminist versions in the vanguard.
- In an unprecedented move, in March 2000 the pope prayed to God to forgive the sins his church had committed against the people of Israel, against love, peace, and respect for cultures and religions, against the dignity of women and the unity of the human race, and against the fundamental rights of persons. Two months later, two hundred thousand Australians marched across Sydney Harbor Bridge to apologize for their treatment of the aborigines while the skywritten word SORRY floated above the Sydney Opera House."
The book continues describing the social shortcomings of the traditional and modern periods.
(the following material has been taken from the Amazon.com website, click here to buy the book.)
Why Religion Matters : The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief
by Huston Smith
Hardcover - (December 2000) 290 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Why Religion Matters is
a passionate, accessible, ambitious manifesto written by one of the very
few people qualified to address its titular topic. Huston Smith is the
grand old man of religious scholarship. Raised by missionary parents in
China, Smith went on to teach at M.I.T. and U.C. Berkeley, among others,
and his
World's Religions has long been the standard introductory textbook for
college religion courses. The subject of Why Religion Matters,
Smith writes, "is the importance of the religious dimension of human
life--in individuals, in societies, and in civilizations." Smith believes
that the religious dimension of human life has been devalued by the rise
of modern science: we have now reached a point at which "modern Westerners
. . . forsaking clear thinking, have allowed ourselves to become so
obsessed with life's material underpinnings that we have written science a
blank check ... concerning what constitutes knowledge and justified
belief." In candid, direct style, Smith describes the evolution of
intellectual history from pre-modern to postmodern times, and the
spiritual sensibilities that have been shunted "by our misreading
of modern science." In the book's final sections, Smith avoids the folly
of predicting the future, instead focusing on "features of the religious
landscape that are invariant" and therefore may serve as "a map that can
orient us, wherever the future may bring." This book is fresh, insightful,
and important. It may prove to be as influential in shifting readers'
terms of religious understanding as any of Smith's previous writings.
--Paul Power
From
Booklist
Smith, the dean of comparative religion studies in America,
divides history into three periods, each dominated by its distinctive
worldview--traditional, modern, and postmodern. Now is the postmodern
period, but Smith believes the future should belong to tradition.
Modernity has put the soul in a dark tunnel, from which postmodernity
doesn't want to extract it, by insisting that reality is single and
material and that the transcendent realities of spirit, creation, and
meaning are illusory. Science, the instrumentality of modernity, can't
answer or extinguish humanity's burning existential questions, exemplified
by the title of Gauguin's painting Who Are We? Where Did We Come
From? Where Are We Going? The traditional worldview, which is religious,
can and does answer them. Smith's exposition of this argument, which first
describes "Modernity's Tunnel" and then the light at its end, is as
enlightening as Wendell Berry's similar Life Is a Miracle [BKL My
15 00], whose bete noire, E. O. Wilson's Consilience (1998), also
irks Smith. As welcome as enlightening is Smith's cogent explanation of
antireligious media bias. Ray Olson
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Library Association. All rights reserved
(this material has been taken from the Amazon.com website, click here to buy the book.)
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