The subject of religion can induce a range of responses from love, compassion and goodwill, to fear, loathing, and xenophobia. If you could only truly know the depth of God’s love, you would have nothing to fear. A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life.

Elsewhere, Hägglund defines “the religious aspiration to eternity” as part of any ideal that promises us that we will be “absolved from the pain of loss.” Defining the religious ideal in this way enables him to characterize, however unfairly, Stoicism, Buddhism’s Nirvana (a detachment from everything that is finite), and even Spinoza’s “pure contemplation as the highest good” as essentially religious. The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it-Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. Read this 2015 study by Erik Duhaime, who found that when Moroccan shopkeepers heard the call to prayer, they were more likely to give more money to charity.

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 3. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” – Commonly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.

There is very little in the Old Testament that does not follow the types of religious literatures in the older Middle East: psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types. He says the vibrant panoply of religious rituals and beliefs we see today – including the popular belief in a punishing God – emerged in different societies at different times as mechanisms to help us survive as a species. This combination of a reliance on localism and the strengthening of the Ministry of Religious Endowments’ authority underlines that the regime is seeking a less hierarchical and centralized religious field, but also one that maintains Damascus firmly at the center of all developments. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings-the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky-Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence. In a majority of the 34 countries surveyed, those ages 50 and older are significantly more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to think that belief in God is necessary for morality.