Do We Still Need Religion? —Your Response

Last month I ran a four-part series titled, “Do we still need religion?” I invited responses, and did I get them! In addition to the usual raft of appreciative remarks—for which I am always thankful, forty of you took the trouble to offer your thoughtful opinions. As I might have predicted, they were all over the religious map.

Clearly there are increasing numbers of readers willing to say out loud that religion is not only unnecessary, but that we would all be better off without it. “Jesus yes, God yes, religion No!”

" Like a baby that no longer crawls or hitches to get around … society is rapidly evolving to no longer need religion …Thank God Almighty, free at last!”

“…Without religion we would have a peace we have not known for 6,000years.”

At the other end of the opinion spectrum were those who not only defended religion but were committed to its continued value found in the Judeo-Christian faith, and were worried that I had reduced it to ethics.

“Your statement shares this weakness … it skirts around the … truth that God exists … and we are dependent on God in every way.”

“A simple religious factor is the … love of God … with its transforming grace … I respect the Unitarians but I find the Lord’s supper holds essential meaning for me.”

Then there was this thoughtful affirmation: “Religion affirms the value of human life. Science does not. Values cannot be obtained from empirical facts or scientific laws.

The value of human life is the basic value from which all others flow and without which human existence is brutish, futile and meaningless.”

“While many see only the dark side of religion ‘God hates queers,’ ‘all Muslims are sub-human’ … in religion there is a common core of compassion essential to all of life.”

In between were those whose responses mirrored this one, “I am a Muslim but my religion is human rights.” Included was the story of a Muslim who has a clinic for the 60 abandoned infant girls left to die each month on the streets in Karachi. “Religious conservatives often attack him for being un-Islamic because he cares for infidels.”

One writer suggested society’s need to get beyond the “isms” that often identify religion, and pay more attention to the persons whose lives reflect the goodness and

compassion found in all religions.

For most of the responders, the core value in religion is not in its various doctrinal positions but in its elevation of ethics, both personal and social, which would be crippled if religion became obsolete. So it seemed to be the ethic that undergirds religion and which flows from belief in the goodness of ‘God’ and the value of life that made up the bulk of your responses. Nobody had an affirming word to say about any sort of fundamentalism in which believers claimed that their religion was the only one, guaranteeing some variety of salvation either in this world or any other.

Somebody cited a bumper sticker produced by the American Humanist Association which read, “I believe in GOOD.”

One final reflection. In my last column on this subject I suggested that one of the values of religion was its support and comfort for all those caught in some personal tragedy, a terminal illness, the devastation of some unexpected event, the diminishment that comes with our final years. For many people religion and its supportive communities have held life together. It has often been faith in ‘the everlasting arms’ which sustain us when all else has been washed away. A hospice chaplain whose ministry is caring for the dying responded, “the only way I could connect with the dying and help them through this final process … was to learn about their FAITHS.”

I deeply appreciated all the responses, those I cited and all the others. My initial four columns only raised the question. In fairness I now need to offer my answer, and I will do so beginning next week.