Religion, Language, Narrative and the Search for Meaning

Book excerpt: This is a book about religion from a secular standpoint which nevertheless takes its subject seriously. Anthony Campbell is a medical doctor who has long been interested in religion and spirituality and has written several books about it in the last 30-odd years, including the first detailed examination of the philosophical ideas underlying Transcendental Meditation (Seven States of Consciousness, published in 1973). He has also made a study of the Persian heretical Islamic sect known in the West as the Assassins (The Assassins of Alamut, available from Lulu). In 2008 he published a personal account, in Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination, also available from Lulu, of his own gradual abandonment of the search for religiouatruth. The present book looks at a number of attempts to explain the existence of religious belief and concludes that religion will probablyalways appear naturally in human consciousness because of the way in which our minds have evolved.