A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an OptimistRussell, T. Baron
Philosophy
A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist
Russell, T. Baron
Forecasting; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
also, and can be cancelled only by the act of divine mercy which we
shall still call man's redemption. We begin to know something of the
mind's independence of the body where (in phenomena of which evidence
seems to be accumulating) mind can speak to mind by other means than
the senses: and everything which points that way cuts fresh ground
from under the notion that bodily death is the end of us. Although
the philosophical theory of immortality does not need this evidence,
faith is assisted by it. On the great ideas which are the support and
justification of religion there seems no reason to suppose that the
discoveries of the next hundred years are likely to throw discredit.
To sum up, then, I believe that the effect of improved education
will be to conserve rather than to destroy religion; but I do not
believe that religion will be a historical so much as a philosophical
conception. The present great obstacle to religious feeling in
non-Catholic countries, namely the pretence of the State to "teach
religion" as if it were a science or an art, will have been removed
some while before this time next century, and individual effort will
be cultivated in this, as in certain other respects, instead of being
repressed. The Bible will be read for its morals, its poetry, its
literature; and the aspiration to conceive the Divine will continue
to take the shape of some kind of public worship probably much unlike
anything which we now practise, and totally divorced from any faith
in miracles and verbal inspiration. In religion men will seek their
consolation against the buffeting and injustice of destiny, and in a
more reasoned notion of immortality dry their eyes before the poignant
spectacle of Death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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