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World Religions and World Orders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Stephen R. L. Clark
Stephen R. L. Clark
Affiliation:
Universily of Liverpool, England
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Extract

There are good reasons for being suspicious of the very concept of ‘a religion’, let alone a ‘world religion’. It may be useful for a hospital administrator to know a patient's ‘religion’ – as Protestant or Church of England or Catholic or Buddhist – but such labels clearly do little more than identify the most suitable chaplain, and connote groupings in the vast and confusing region of ‘religious thought and practice’ that are of very different ranks. By any rational, genealogical taxonomy ‘Protestant’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Catholic’ connote species, genera or families within Christianity, which is in turn a taxon within the multivariant tradition traced back to Abraham. ‘Buddhism’ includes as many variants as would ‘Abrahamism’. Most Abrahamists, traditionally, have been theists, but it is difficult not to suspect that Marxist socialism is an atypical (and probably non-viable) variant which has inherited a linear view of time, a contest between the chosen agents of justice and the doomed powers-that-be, and the prospect of a future in which ‘there shall be no more sea’.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 43 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Modern biologists distinguish species (and higher taxa) not by any essential attributes but by common descent. The dodo, once extinct, will never reappear, even if birds indistinguishible from dodos someday evolve. And dogs are still dogs even though they are by now very unlike their wild ancestors. See Sober, E. ‘Evolution, population thinking and essentialism’, Philosophy of Science XLVII (1980), 350–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 Hocking, op. cit. p. 19.

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8 Cooper, B., ‘A Imperio usque ad Imperium’, George Grant in Process, ed. Schmidt, L. (Toronto: 1978), pp. 22–39, 35.Google Scholar George Grant's thought is grievously neglected outside Canada.

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10 Revelation 13.

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14 Hocking, op. cit. p. 234.

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