Religion of Being

By Don Cupitt

Explores what a religion, focussed around Heidegger's concept of being, might be like, especially as a means of liberation from western religion's traditional obsession with power and social control.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0334027314
• ISBN13: 9780334027317
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.0" x 0.1" x 0.1"

Customer Reviews

Being? Who can say?

Don Cupitt is a Senior Fellow of Emmanuel College in Cambridge. In this excellent book, he grapples with the relationship between language and non-language, and along the way, he somehow manages to get to a spiritual approach to human existence. Cupitt proposes that we have "created vast protective ideologies of denial, as if we have found the obvious truth of our own situation quite unbearable, and have been willing to buy absolutely anything that promises to deliver us from it." This understanding has caused me to re-think my own situation and how I am protective of "my world view" and how I fit into the scheme of things. By understanding that the language model to which I pay attention shapes that world view, it becomes obvious that "being" cannot be until I shed, or at least live in an experience as much outside that model as possible.Of course, all this reminded me of my Taoist studies and how that Tao which can be named is not the real Tao. And that we create opposites and limit the experience when we name things. There can be no "good" without "evil," etc. These concepts are very difficult to understand, and certainly they are not easily explained in the very language which we are want to leave behind! Perhaps the dilemma set up in the very last of the book is best to explain the difficulty in getting this all in orderly thought: "To the philosophy of the future, and to the religion of the future we offer the formula: non-language is Being. And Being - what's that? Answer: Nobody can say, but this book was meant to be a sort of poem in praise of it." To which I say, great poetry, indeed.