ABSTRACT
There is a dominant myth that religion is in decline in the UK and that, in so far as it thrives elsewhere in the world, this is a sign of social backwardness. For instance, Richard Dawkins (1997, pp. 64-9), the public advocate for better understanding of science, wastes few opportunities to belittle religion as inheritor of pre-scientific beliefs which will not bear sustained rational scrutiny. Or again, commentators on world development attribute to Hinduism a major responsibility for slow economic growth in India, and dismiss it accordingly (see Siegel, 1986, ch. 8). Such judgements are commonplace in the western world view which inducts us into Marxist and Freudian ways of thinking. Religion belongs in our childhood, both as individuals and, more collectively, as the human race. Whether in the form of some all powerful, parent-like, protective power or a back-to-the-womb mysticism it is there as consolation in the face of misfortune and as promise of alternative compensation in some future world beyond the present. Accordingly, how can it be other than patently false? It has no more credibility than the self-projected belief in Father Christmas, or the fleeting internal glow induced by one or other of the socially accepted drugs, contemporary opiates of the people.
