beyond wishful thinking 35Th e fi rst theme is the relation between our ac cep tance of death,
groundlessness, and insatiability and our rejection of belittlement, for
each of us and for all mankind, as both an individual and a collective
task, a moral and a po liti cal endeavor.
Th e second theme is the nature and direction of a religion of the fu-
ture. Th e religion of the future (if, for the reasons I later invoke, we may
call it a religion) is to be created through a series of innovations diff er-
ent in method as well as in content from those that generated the world
religions of today, themselves the products of religious revolutions that
spread through the world over a thousand- year period, long ago. It is
also a religion about the future. It concerns the bearing of the future on
the present. It calls us to live for the future as a way of living in the pres-
ent, as beings uncontained by the circumstances of our existence.
Th e statement and enactment of such an orientation to life off er our
best hope of overcoming belittlement without deceiving ourselves
about death, groundlessness, and insatiability. Th e two themes of the
book are two sides of the same reality.
Religion and the fl aws in human life
With respect to these fl aws in the basic circumstance of existence, ev-
erything will never be all right. A simple way of understanding what
religion has been in the past and what it can become in the future is to
plot its position with respect to this fact.
Imagine three moments. In a fi rst moment, the irremediable defects
of our existence do not even come into view. People are concerned
chiefl y to contend with their dependence on nature, which threatens at
each moment to crush them. Th e point is to defl ect the threat and to tell
a story about the world that instructs us in the execution of this task.
Th e frightening fundamentals of our existence seem less pressing than
the need to do something about the imbalance between the power that
nature exercises over us and our power to protect ourselves from na-
ture and to use it to our benefi t.
In a second moment, when we have achieved some mea sure of free-
dom from complete dependence on nature and developed further the