becoming more human by becoming more godlike 349dards, criticizing institutions and practices in the light of the prescrip-
tive conceptions of human association that they are held to embody, and
then reinterpreting these conceptions in the light of our actual or imag-
ined experiments in their reform. It follows, with regard to thought and
to science, that our methods of argument and standards of justifi cation
are always both contestable and revisable and lack the authority and the
power to contain discovery and to limit insight into either ourselves or
the world; what we fi nd out we may only retrospectively justify.
Our comprehensive conceptions of our identity, viewed in relation
to our place in nature, are not, in this account, to be understood as
merely or chiefl y conjectures about a natural phenomenon, as if human
nature were a thing. Th ey do not resemble the thinking that produced
the standard model of particle physics or the periodic table. Th ey are
prophecies, indeed imperfectly self- fulfi lling prophecies, as I have ar-
gued in my defense of the concept of religion.
Nevertheless, they are prophecies, embedded in, or connected with,
at least two sets of empirical conjectures. One set of conjectures address
how far we can go in changing ourselves (which is to say, changing what
we are like now). When, for example, the found ers of the three orienta-
tions to existence considered earlier in this book called for the substitu-
tion of an ethos of proud and unforgiving self- assertion by one of sacri-
fi cial benevolence, in frontal confl ict with dominant experience as
well as with prevailing ideas, they made a claim about what we might
become. A second set of conjectures deals with the comparative power
and endurance of our contradictory desires. It formed part of the
teaching of some of those same prophets (but not of others) that ac-
cep tance is better than triumph; that love, whether given or received,
counts for more than altruism; and that no fl ourishing in the world
can be reconciled with the enhancement of life if it is predicated on
failure to recognize and respect our longing for the infi nite and the
unconditional.
Th e self- transformation sought by the program of the religion of the
future has our human constitution as its subject matter. It proceeds from
a view of who we are, as embodied and situated, but also of the forces
within and around us that undermine and corrupt the affi rmation of our
identity. It wants us to become who we are, if only we could understand