inspired by Gianni Vattimo
Would the world be better off with weak religion?
I don’t know.
I’m just asking.
I think so.
Weak religion would not claim to know everything,
to have all the answers,
provide the single solution to multiple woes of humankind.
Weak religion would not want to conquer nations or competitors
or highly suggestible regions of the human mind.
Weak religion would not need to make enemies out of
friends who see the world through a dissimilar lens.
Weak religion would pride itself on not taking hostages,
a.k.a. Stockholm Syndrome converts who
fall in love with zealous theocratic captors.
Weak religions would not try to tame the entire woman or man,
just enough to make them humbly better
but not so much as to make them fanatically worse.
Weak religion would not clog people’s pores
with the latex of fanciful belief, stories no one would believe
unless some authority told them it was true: a parent, a pope.
Weak religion would not confuse believing with knowing,
nor pretend faith was evidence,
nor fill in what we don’t know with a God-of-the-gaps.
nor build a wall between human and nature,
nor blow a skeptical smoke screen over the obvious.
Weak religion would be strong enough to criticize itself.
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Gianni Vattimo (1936) a postmodernist Italian philosopher coined the term “pensiero debole” “weak thought’ as a way of seeing the value of uncertainty as we construct systems of meaning surrounded as we are by a diversity of views.