Conclusion

Meaning theories in synthesising the insights of intellectualist, emotionalist and sociological approaches have at least in part transcended the problems of each of them. Intellectualist approaches neglect the emotional dimension of religiosity. Emotionalist approaches throw out the baby with the bath water in dispensing with the explanatory role of religious belief. Religion is, among other things, an attempt to understand but this desire to understand is not, as far as religious belief is concerned, motivated wholly by intellectual puzzlement or curiosity about the world, nor necessarily by a need to manipulate material reality the better to deal with it and to survive and prosper within it. The need to understand stems from emotional sources and may in certain circumstances reach a high degree of intensity. Not to understand is to be bewildered, confused and threatened. The human psyche is such that uncertainty, feelings of unfamiliarity and a sense of the alien are deeply disquieting and discomforting. We do not just seek to understand our world and our place in it out of mere interest and curiosity; we need to know who and what we are and what place we occupy within the

world. Religion seeks answers to existential questions which go to the heart of our sense of identity, worth and purpose. Such things are of vital significance to us. As Berger (1973) states, we are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality. Whether we are congenitally so compelled or whether it is possible to live without such a sense of order, it is certainly the case that many or most members of almost all known societies have sought such a sense of order and often with such energy and compulsion that it is difficult to deny that it must stem from emotional drives and needs which seem deeply rooted in the human condition. While it may be admitted that some may not feel the force of this need or feel it to a lesser extent than others, and perhaps this is increasingly the case in contemporary society, many seem unable to live without it being met in some way. Even in contemporary industrial society, one suspects that while the unacceptability and implausibility of traditional religious messages, not to mention the competing attractions that modern affluence and a relatively secure existence provide, preclude many people from giving much attention to such questions, they lurk, nevertheless, in the background like unwelcome guests at the party. The however distant but nagging spectre of death, for example, can never be entirely dispelled. The inevitability of death is, of course, something that most theories of religion point to. Death may not so much be feared because it is the unknown or because it brings an end to the individual, but rather because it threatens to make the life the individual does have and live pointless and senseless while living it. To know why we live and why we die is not just intellectually satisfying but allays that potential inner disquiet that otherwise comes from the awful realisation that our individual existence may be quite without any point or purpose. Not that religion is solely about providing meaning, however. We should not forget that, as often as it claims to be able to explain and make things seem meaningful, it claims also to be able to do things for us. It may, for example, offer us eternal life and, in some sense or other, the vanquishing of death. To the extent that rational choice theory is also very much a synthesis of theoretical perspectives that have gone before it is, perhaps, this emphasis upon what religion is perceived to be able to deliver that is one of its strongest points.