Abstract

This article is far less a position paper or a descriptive analysis than an attempt to illuminate the lines that connect commonly recognized realities of human life: unfamiliar others in the form of strangers, interpersonal feelings in the form of trust, and organized belief systems in the form of religion. Its epistemological and even ontological conclusion may be sketched as follows: where belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in its mission to enhance life. When fear overtakes wonder, individuals fail in the promise of their aliveness. In particular, when belief overtakes wonder, religion fails in the sense of constraining or even shutting the individual off from investigation and exploration of the unknown or unfamiliar, or from what is not sanctioned as proper. When fear overtakes simple curiosity and the desire to know, the individual fails in the sense of simply reacting, prejudging a situation or a person as threatening or dangerous in advance of actual experience. When belief and fear together take over, human experience is shackled and crippled. It remains ideologically tethered and affectively maimed. The effect of this tethering and maiming has moral consequences having to do with a recognition or non-recognition of the foundational common humanness of humans.