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Friday, June 8, 2012

A tricky question: Who is the custodian of a religion?, Islamic Ideology, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Ideology
A tricky question: Who is the custodian of a religion?
Oct 10, 2008
What passes off as religious language has little to do with the traditional functions of religious ideas: as a medium of self-knowledge, a way of endowing the world with meaning as an unbroken totality, as a way of responding to the dissonances of existence, and unravelling the mysteries of value. Rather, there is a complex process by which religion has become ethnicised. It has become a code by which tribalistic boundaries are being drawn around groups to determine who is in and who is out. This question more than anything else, begins to colonise religious consciousness. The fervour of identity displaces the question of meaning, and increasingly religion appears simultaneously assertive and spiritually redundant. What forms of religiosity can rescue us from the pathologies of collective narcissism, will be an important question for our times?

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