REALITY193comprehensive religious doctrine, but
he believed that law-making should be
essentially secular.
READING. Reading, for us, tends to
be understood as one component of the
technical skill of literacy. On this under-
standing, the reader interprets or decodes
a written text, ordinarily in silence and
alone, without intermediary or audience.
The verb “to read” is, for us, used univo-
cally of what we do with the Bible or
Torah or Qur’an, and of what we do with
the newspaper, a blog, or the airline time-
table. Most contemporary nations aspire
to make all their citizens capable of this
technical skill, but none has achieved it,
and recent evidence shows that literacy
rates are in decline in the post-industrial
nations of the West.
Before the sixteenth century, the activ-
ity of reading and responding to written
texts was understood very differently.
Sharing and absorbing knowledge was
mostly through listening, and by people
who could not decode graphs—which is
to say written symbols. The text would be
read aloud, heard, and stored in the mem-
ory (literacy, as Plato long ago predicted,
is a memory-destroyer), later to be rumi-
nated. Even by those who could decode
graphs, doing so ordinarily meant vocal-
izing. Silent reading was, before the inven-
tion of printing, rare and worthy of
remark. To know a text—to have read it—
meant, therefore, to have heard it in such
a way as to have it at memorial recall,
whether verbatim or digested. Well-read
pre-modern Christians, Jews, Muslims,
Buddhists, and Hindus were, therefore,
often illiterate, and yet they were pro-
foundly and communally intimate with
large bodies of text. Their ways of using
texts made it possible for them to be tex-
tualized—overwritten by their texts—in
ways effectively impossible for us.REAL, THE. A term John Hick uses to
refer to the ultimate reality that is beyond
the God or the sacred as conceived of
in different religions. The God of theism,
for example, is the Real as it is perceived
through a theistic lens or from a theistic
point of view.REALISM. The thesis that there are true
and false propositions and beliefs about
reality and that these are not simply or
entirely a matter of social convention. For
most realists, truth is not a matter that
is essentially linked to language. Hence,
most realists think there were truths
before language-speaking evolved.REALITY. Some philosophers treat
the concept of reality in a way that is
independent of mind. On this view, often
called realism, what is real does not
depend upon and is not constituted by
beliefs. Realism can allow, in principle, a
radical form of skepticism, according to
which no human persons may claim to