beyond wishful thinking 37spiritual orientations to the world, prominent over the last two and a
half thousand years, assure us that, appearances notwithstanding, ev-
erything will indeed be all right. We shall be able to redress the fl aws
in our existence— our mortality, our groundlessness, our insatiability,
and our susceptibility to belittlement— or, at least, to rob them of their
terrors. Without some such faith, it may seem, life, our life, would re-
main both an enigma and a torment, and could cease to be a torment
only insofar as we contrived to forget the enigma. Nothing could at-
tenuate the suff erings of these wounds other than our absorption in life
in our connections and engagements.
Th e chief point of religion, it may seem, is to prevent such a result. In
religion we would fi nd a rescue on the basis of a vision, a reason for
hope, achieved through an appeal to realities that counterbalance and
override the force of those evils.
Th e trouble is that the antidotes supplied by the historical religions
may all be fanciful: wishful thinking dressed up as a view of the world
and of our place within it, consolation in place of truth. Th e religion of
the future should be one that dispenses with consolation. It should nev-
ertheless off er a response to the defective character of our existence: not
just a set of ideas but an orientation to the life of the individual and the
history of society. It should show us to what hopes we are entitled once
we have lost the beliefs in which we once found reassurance. Th e dispo-
sition to acknowledge our situation for what it is would signal a change
in the history of religion.
A simple criterion of advance in the history of religion is that our
future religion would cease to take as its maxim the attempt to make
the irremediable defects in our existence seem less real and less fright-
ening than they in fact are. To mark the path of a religious evolution
defi ned by this standard is one of the goals of this book.
Th is criterion of progress in religious beliefs is, however, far too
vague to mark a defi nite trajectory. It needs to be supplemented by a
view of the religious revolutions that took place in the past and of the
religious revolution that can and should take place in the future. I ad-
dress the nature of the contrast between the past and the future reli-
gious revolutions in greater detail later in this book. Something of the
contrast should be stated right now, the better to make clear the intent
of my argument.