Abstract
The non-realist end of the Buddhist spectrum connects with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century non-realist western construal of religious language. This is not to be confused with traditional atheism (exemplified today by such philosophers as A. J. Ayer, Paul Edwards, Anthony Flew and Kai Nielsen). In contrast to this, non-realist interpretations of religious language are part of the wide overlapping family covered by the umbrella term ‘religion’. Their ‘atheism’ must be described as a religious atheism and their ‘humanism’ as a religious humanism which find deep significance and important guidance for life in the religious symbols, myths, stories and rituals cherished by the great traditions.
Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves.
(Feuerbach [1841] 1957, 204)
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Notes
For example, Feuerbach maintained that human consciousness, in contrast to that of the other animals, involves an awareness of infinity. (He may perhaps have meant that in being aware of ourselves as individually finite we are implicitly using by contrast the concept of infinity.) He then, ignoring a logical gap, identified this awareness of infinity with awareness of the infinity of our own generic human nature. For ‘The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature’ ([1841] 1957, 2–3). This is a variation of Hegel’s elision of finite and infinite consciousness, the human mind and Absolute Spirit. But in Feuerbach it is not so much an argument as an assertion. However it enables him to identify God with our own infinite nature, which we then in imagination project upon the heavens as the unlimited person. (Feuerbach’s doctoral dissertation at Erlangen had been on the infinity, unity and community of reason, and expressed a conception of the infinite character of human nature that had its roots in a good deal of nineteenth-century thought which has since perished except as a chapter of intellectual history.)
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© 2004 John Hick
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Hick, J. (2004). Contemporary Non-Realist Religion. In: An Interpretation of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510678_12
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