Some apologetics for this week of off-beat fare:
One of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's more clever and sinister characters (Peter Verkhovensky in The Demons) says of religion:
The worse off a man is, the more downtrodden, the poorer–the more stubbornly he clings to the idea that it will all be made up to him in paradise, especially with a hundred thousand priests busily working on his salvation, bolstering his beliefs, and making their living out of it.
This suspicion accosts many religious persons at one time or another. Indeed, everyday experiences bear it out: The successful and cultivated people in society often have no use for religion–but the pews are packed with simple men and women with mundane jobs and mundane lives. The persons with the most going for them reject religion; the persons with the least cling to it.
But this does not disprove religion. The highest religions embody transcendental truth; they “de-divinize” the earth, removing God from rocks and trees, showing God is more concerned with souls than with material betterment. Such beliefs necessarily appeal to those with little on earth. They do not appeal to those with the most on earth. Things are so good for them here, they want it to contain their final calling.
So even if it were true that some of the downtrodden yearn for a transcendental god because they have nothing down here, it is just as true that some of the “rich and famous” strive against a transcendental god because they have nothing up there.
