Introduction

It seems likely that some meaningful discussion about religion and religious beliefs could help to supply a need in to-day’s Ireland. Any meaningful discussion should be meaningful to the ordinary person who has become unsure about traditional beliefs, outlooks and assumptions but who has no ready way of articulating his/her concerns or of getting answers that do not already, and frustratingly, presuppose the very beliefs and outlooks that have come to look uncertain.

This book seeks to do something towards supplying the need, but there is a problem. The uncertainties that are now appearing do not concern (relatively) minor matters or the details of this or that. They concern the very nature of religious authority, whether it exists at all, and the ground or grounds on which any moral code whatever might be based or should be based. To say that may be to exaggerate somewhat, but the boat is rocking as Ireland at last meets the modern wave. Probably the boat won’t sink. However, quite a number of people could be hurting badly enough because what is happening is rather unusual: a fairly sudden and fairly substantial loss of confidence in received views about religion and also in the hitherto-accepted forms of leadership or supposed leadership, ecclesiastical or otherwise. To the degree that traditional views were in Ireland more or less unquestioned (in public, at least) until recently, the passing away of the old order may raise potential for rather larger swathes of confusion and disruption than is yet apparent. We can no longer sleep-walk our way through what the rest of Western Europe has been learning to cope with for most of the past two centuries and the process of catching up could be stressful enough. In one or two areas the amount of catching up to be done is obvious: even the hardly-learned practical lesson of the Reformation that different people may hold irreconcilably different views and must yet go on living beside and tolerating one another for the sake of some kind of law and order – is a lesson that has yet to be fully learned in Ireland.

In the case of some uncertain number of people in the West it does look as though the baby got thrown out with the bathwater and that religious and cultural toleration came at the price of religious indifference. Will that happen in Ireland? We are given no guarantees that people elsewhere were not given. A root-and-branch rethink of religious questions might, just might, be a contribution towards the amelioration of what, again for some uncertain number of people, really is a difficult situation, but this is where the problem lies. Any discussion that seeks to begin at the very beginning and with the very basics, that tries to take nothing for granted and to work towards the truth, whatever the truth may turn out to be, can hardly be other than heavy going at times. For those not of a rather ‘philosophical’ cast of mind it may simply be a turn-off. Yet to fail to face up to the fundamental questions would eviscerate the discussion. The questions are there, and they need answers, but there is no easy way to those answers that is at all obvious.

It may be that there is no satisfactory solution to the problem. Or, if there is, this writer has not found it. What has been done here is to try to separate, to a degree, the abstract and rather difficult argumentation from the discussion of practical concerns. It could perhaps be more accurate to say ‘religious concerns’ than ‘practical concerns’. But the expression ‘religious concerns’ is, again, and nowadays, something of a turn-off, and the concerns are practical enough: does ‘right conduct’ or ‘wrong conduct’ really matter so far as affects the individual’s own welfare, and if so why? What happens when you die, and is there any way of coming upon informative answers about this? Why should belief (in something or other) matter, and what is ‘belief’ anyhow?

These questions are dealt with (necessarily fairly briefly, as is everything else in a book of this size) in the last three Chapters, and scarcely at all until then, because the God-question towers over all other questions and there is no reasonable way of engaging with our really important concerns unless and until that question has been settled. Does God exist, and who or what is ‘God’? If he/it exists, what is his/its significance for us humans? Does ‘God’ lay ‘duties’ on us, and what happens if you skip on them? And of course these questions have been debated since debate began, and among the outcomes have been uncertainty, controversy and worse than controversy. And now we are to get the same again?

Well, not quite. One problem, among others, that is tackled here is that of arriving at, examining and elucidating a realistic idea of ‘God’ in place of what (in some cases, anyhow) was taken to be a rather threatening old man who lives in the sky. A well-grounded and convincing idea of God that matches the outlook of the times (so far as we humans can take in that idea at all) might well meet a significant need in to-day’s Ireland.

It may seem unlikely to be a reliable claim, but the claim is made here: God-argument can nowadays be grounded even more firmly than it could have been in an earlier age, on foot of advances in human knowledge during the past couple of centuries. So can discussion of the post-mortem human condition. So can discussion of moral conduct, and of why moral conduct matters. God-argument is not to everybody’s taste, and it can be hard work anyhow. Those who prefer to pass it by (to start with, at least) and to go straight to the more immediate concerns may do so in the assurance that they are being asked to take nothing on trust and that the first five Chapters herein provide the back-up for the practical answers that are offered.

What is set out here is not quite a personal view, and if it were no more than that it would be pretty useless. It draws on some very old ideas as well as seeking to tease out the implications of some new ones. It is an attempt to combine quite a number of views, about different subjects, into one pattern or picture that makes sense and that may help us to see, a little more clearly, where we are, where we are going and, above all, why.

Chris McAllister

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