Do We Need Religion?

The author of the essay argues that religion is not necessarily a bad thing and can be beneficial to people. He contrasts the thinking of some leading religious thinkers of today with his own idea of faith being an opening up of ways of experiencing self. He also discusses the current debates around human rights and universal human dignity and how they relate to his idea of faith.

The old assumption that modernization leads to secularization is outdated. Yet the certainty that religion is an anthropological universal that can only be suppressed by governments is also dead. Thus it is now a favorable moment for a new perspective on religion. This book takes human experiences of self-transcendence as its point of departure. Religious faith is seen as an attempt to articulate and interpret such experiences. Faith then is neither useful nor a symptom of weakness or misery, but an opening up of ways of experience. This book develops this basic idea, contrasts it with the thinking of some leading religious thinkers of our time, and relates it to the current debates about human rights and universal human dignity.