Random Reading

While my wife and I were housesitting, I flipped to random pages in several books to find something interesting to read. Here’s sections of a passage hot from my mind…

“During certain periods in the existence of all human societies, a time has come when religion has first strayed from its basic meaning, and then digressed further and further until it has lost track of this meaning and eventually ossified in the already established forms, at which point it has come to have less and less influence on people’s lives.

At these times the educated minority, no longer believing in the existing religious teaching, simply pretend to believe in it because they find it necessary for the purpose of holding the masses to the established order of life. Although the masses might cling to the established religious forms through inertia, their lives are no longer guided by religious demands, but simply by popular custom and state regulations.

This has occurred many times in various human societies. But…never before have the educated minoriy, those with the most influence on the masses, not only had no belief in the existing religion, but seemed convinced that today’s world no longer has any need of one. Rather than persuading those who doubt the truth of the professed religion that there is a more rational and lucid doctrine than the existing one, they persuade them that on the whole religion has outlived itself and become not just useless, but a harmful organ of social life…These sorts of people do not understand religion as something known to us through inner experience, but as an external phenomenon, like an illness, that happens to overwhelm certain people, and which we can only investigate through external symptoms.

[The educated minority] believe in science, a science that embraces every aspect of human knowledge, harmoniously united, assessed according to its degree of importance and in command of such methods that the data obtained is indisputably true. But since there is really no such science (and what is referred to as science is a collection of incidental, totally disconnected items of knowledge which are often completely useless, and not only fail to present the indisputable truth but very often present the most crude delusions, displayed as the truth today and refuted tomorrow) it is obvious that the thing which [the educated minority] claims must replace religion does not exist. [Their] assertion is entirely arbitrary and based on a completely unjustified belief in the infallibility of science, a belief quite similar to faith in the infallibility of the Church [or other religious institution].”
- A Confession, Leo Tolstoy
(emphases added)