ABSTRACT
In the Preface I pointed out that virtually every society has its own religion, and that religions have weathered rational criticism, internecine strife and political suppression. To what are we to ascribe their resilience? Why do religions persist when the truth-value of the dogma has been undermined, when the rituals are abandoned by many and when the moral precepts they purvey are frequently disregarded? In this chapter I search for an explanation for this persistence. Does it lie in the institutional bases of religions? Or in the properties of the several components of religion? Or is it because of their consequences for individuals or societies? I raise these issues not because the longevity of a religious system is any indication of the need to preserve it, but because the bases of continuity must be understood if we are to have a world that does not involve conflict arising from disparate beliefs in improbable entities. I use the term ‘persistence’ here in an overall descriptive sense, but it will
be apparent from the preceding chapters that, when one starts to look at the processes involved, ‘persistence’ can be a misleading term. We have to do with a continuing dialectic between individuals and their social environments, constrained by pan-cultural human propensities in such a way that religious systems have been reconstructed in more or less the same way in the minds of successive generations.
