- PARIS (AFP) - The secular forces of nationalism and scentific rationalism
that have assailed the world's religions over the past century are themselves
under fire from new forms of religious feeling on the eve of the third
millennium.
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- While the organised churches in the West
have collapsed dramatically since 1900, a widespread reaction to the impersonal
forces of economic and technological change, allied to the growth of multi-culturalism,
has given rise to a tangled thicket of hybrid doctrines drawing on a variety
of new and traditional belief systems.
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- The main religions in 1900, the World
Christian Encyclopedia relates, were Christianity, into which some 490
million people had been baptised, Hinduism and Islam, with about 200 million
believers each, and Buddhism, with some 130 million believers.
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- A century later, in a world whose population
has almost quadrupled, the figures were approximately 1.6 billion Christians,
1.0 billion Moslems, 800 million Hindus and 350 million Buddhists.
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- At the same time the number of agnostics
and atheists has soared to around 1.5 billion.
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- The mainstream religions have meanwhile
had to contend with a burgeoning of sects and movements embodying a pick-and-mix
"New Age" approach to belief, combining Christianity with a belief
in reincarnation, for example, or Buddhism with astrology, or neo-Gnosticism
with yoga and alien abductions.
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- Moreover the heartlands of the two biggest
religions have been displaced: where previously the world's leading Catholic
countries were France, Italy and Germany, they are now Brazil, Mexico,
the United States and the Philippines.
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- Today the biggest Moslem countries, Indonesia,
Pakistan and Bangladesh, are all situated east of the Indus.
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- The deep inroads into faith made by science
in the 19th century were broadened as developments in physics and biology
cast ever more light on the mysteries of life, and the traditional churches
lost further support to the secular religions of nationalism and communism.
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- Where under colonialism religion had
frequently served as a vector of culture and identity, the leaders of newly
independent states such as Jawaharlal Nehru in India set about securing
their authority by banishing the clergy to the margins.
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- With the Russian Revolution, one sixth
of the world's landmass adopted atheism, allied to a belief in reason and
progress, as the official religion.
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- The decline in traditional religion accelerated
after 1945, with empty churches and chapels a common sight in many countries.
In Canada's Roman Catholic province of Quebec, in the 1960's alone attendance
at mass fell from 80 percent to 20 percent.
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- Despite its attempts to modernise, notably
with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) where it dealt with issues such
as human rights and the clergy's role in politics, the Catholic church's
moral authority over the faithful, particularly over women with their demands
for birth control and divorce, continued to weaken.
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- Elsewhere religion became a mass political
force, notably under the banner of Liberation Theology with which a fraction
of the Catholic clergy opposed the conservative hierarchies in Latin America,
but particularly in the Islamic world from the 1970's onwards.
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- The Iranian revolution of 1979 was the
first to be waged and won in the cause of a theocracy. Its success inspired
fundamentalist movements throughout the Islamic world, inspiring a brutally-suppressed
revolt in Syria and a presidential assassination in Egypt.
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- In Afghanistan, the vacuum left by the
collapse of a pro-Soviet regime was rapidly filled by a student-led Islamic
militia known as Taliban that advocated extremist practices such as the
complete seclusion of women, while in Algeria, the refusal of a military-backed
secular regime to acknowledge defeat in parliamentary elections plunged
the country into a horrendous civil war in which the direst atrocities
were attributed to both sides.
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- The numerous conflicts around the rim
of the former Soviet bloc pitting nominally Christian against nominally
Moslem communities (Bosnia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan) evoked memories of long-forgotten
wars of religion, but the religious labels were no more than markers of
identity.
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- Thus doctrinal considerations were as
absent from the Bosnian conflict, where only one of the parties involved,
the government side, was defined in terms of its faith, as from the conflict
in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, more strictly defined
as between loyalists and nationalists.
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- The most striking feature of religious
belief at the century's end is its sheer diversity, frequently bordering
on oddity. Late 20th century trends have tended to confirm G.K. Chesterton's
dictum that when faith dies, people do not believe in nothing, they believe
in anything.
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- While the Christian churches seek to
draw comfort from the anniversary of their founder's birth, the search
for life's meaning takes on ever more exotic -- and occasionally virulent
-- forms, and the promise of science to provide answers to the eternal
mysteries is held over into the indefinite future.
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