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What is the real religious issue?

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No doubt, from the standpoint of superstition, any theological position seems indistinguishable from atheism -- even atheism—even if a soft atheism. This is because it has so completely surrendered beliefs that superstition holds to be unsurrenderable as precisely -- superstitionprecisely—superstition. Thus superstition holds, for example, that belief in God essentially entails beliefs in God's special providential, miraculous, interventions; God's securing the indefinite continuation of our lives as active subjects beyond the putative limit of death (of the species as well as of individuals); and God's rewarding virtue and punishing vice, if not already in this life, then in the next.

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As for how, or why, exactly, true religion and superstition are different, one of Wittgenstein's aphorisms clearly suggests the answer: "Religiöser Glaube und Aberglaube sind ganz verschieden. Der eine entspringt aus Furcht und ist eine Art falscher Wissenschaft. Der andre ist ein VertaunVertraun" (Vermischte BemerkullgenBemerkungen: 136).

8 October 1996; rev. 18 September 2002; 13 June 2009