Are the World’s Religions Near Their End?

BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN SWEDEN

DOES this title make you wonder: ‘How can that be? Are not the world’s religions quite vigorous and influential throughout the earth today?’

Yes, despite passing through a sea of troubles, they seem to be. In this 20th century, religion has been called into question and exposed more than ever before in human history. Astronomers have scanned the universe with their giant telescopes, and astronauts have crisscrossed space; and as a Soviet cosmonaut expressed it, they have seen “no God or angels.” Physicists have split matter into smaller and smaller particles without discovering any divine igniting spark. Biologists and paleontologists claim to have reconstructed life’s long evolutionary chain, from amoeba to man, without finding the tiniest link of creative intervention anywhere along that chain.

However, secular wisdom and materialistic philosophy have failed to blot out religious sentiment from this planet, and atheistic political powers and philosophies have been no more successful. For over 70 years, totalitarian, atheistic Communism branded religion as superstition and “the opium of the people,” removed religious leaders from office and banned their activities, destroyed or looted churches and temples, and brainwashed and murdered worshipers. Yet, such actions did not eliminate religious sentiment. As soon as those governments toppled, religion rose out of the dust with seemingly renewed vigor. In lands formerly Communist, people are again rallying to their old temples, kneeling down in devout worship as their ancestors did before them.

Religious sentiment is still aflame in other parts of the world. Every year the city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, hosts millions of Muslim pilgrims from throughout the earth. St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican is frequently crowded beyond capacity by Catholic believers seeking a glimpse of the pope and hoping to receive his blessing. Millions of Hindu devotees continue to stream to the hundreds of places of pilgrimage on the banks of “holy” rivers in India. Pious Jews flock to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem to pray and leave their written prayers in the crevices of the wall.

Yes, it seems to be impossible to eradicate religion from mankind. “Man is by his constitution a religious animal,” said the Irish-born statesman Edmund Burke. Statistically, 5 out of 6 individuals on earth are more or less associated with some religion. According to recent figures, there are about 4.7 billion adherents of established religion in the world, while there are just over one billion nonreligious and atheistic people.a

With this in view, is it reasonable to believe that the world’s religions are near their end? And if they are, when and how will they experience it? Will there be any religion left? Let us consider these questions in the next two articles.

[Footnote]

[Picture on page 3]

St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City