To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (742922 ) 9/30/2013 10:49:15 PM From: bentway Respond to How do religions die?rawstory.com How to believe: Do they waste away, or get conquered by something better? Perhaps it is easier to think in terms of gods dying, rather than religions religions are born , they must also be able to die. How does this happen? I think we can discount at once the idea that it happens because people realise that science is better. It’s obvious that the more people try to replace religion with science, the more they reproduce the worst features of organised religion.a recent book from Chicago University Press , there had been until then no concept of “religion” in Japanese society; afterwards, as part of the modernisation, some social practices and beliefs had to be carved out as “religious” while others were classified as “non-religious”. I don’t know how this account might apply to the spread of Christianity in the 17th century, and then the murderous suppression over generations; I’ll have to wait for the book to arrive. But the process seems a plausible one, and something like it may be under way in the “secularising” parts of the world today.the religion of the Aztecs is dead with their gods, along with hundreds of thousands of others we can no longer reconstruct, and all the pre-literate ones whose existence we remain quite unaware of. Robert Bellah has a nice passage on this “Perhaps the end of Mesopotamian Civilization was marked, not by the last cuneiform document to be produced, but by the last prayer to be uttered to Marduk or Assur, but of that we have no record.”Small Gods , where there is a desert full of shrivelled starving deities who will vanish altogether if they cannot find someone to believe in them. I once preached a kind of anti-sermon based on that book to a shocked evangelical congregation in an Oxford college. In any case, the Gods here are kept alive entirely by the fervency and numbers of their believers. Pratchett, being a child of English Anglicanism, underestimates the importance of ritual and overestimates belief, but it does seem clear that deities die when no one prays to them. That’s something subtly but importantly different to believing in them. There is a sense in which I can believe in Thor without this for a moment meaning what it would to a believer. So blasphemy can kill off deities, and the measure of its success is that it comes not to be blasphemous at all.
