Abstract

Recently religion has entered the public agenda in Western countries to such a degree and in such ways that the very conditions for public discourse have once more become an issue of critical importance. Taking my point of departure in the so-called ‘cartoon-crisis’, I will address, in a philosophical approach to religion, the question: what is at stake in this situation? The questions we face point back to key issues in philosophy of religion, issues that we should be challenged to rethink. One example is the question: how is re-introducing taboos in a public discussion possible? This leads us back a pivotal question in philosophy of religion: what does it mean that something is holy? On closer reflection, this issue shows that a religion is not something monolithic. How the holy is to be understood is at issue within religion itself. Thus, the question is not simply how to deal with religion in public discourse, but also how religions themselves deal with the world which we as humans more or less share. In a sense, religions are themselves about sharing or not sharing a world. In religion, humans can re-situate themselves in the world in which they are already situated. The question then is: in the optics of religion, how do we as humans come to see the world of humans?The main part of my article will discuss the issue of religion and humanity, arguing that religion, as a human enterprise, bears witness to human ambiguities, but also that in religion, human ambiguities can be articulated and turned into a question of human self-understanding. That is in a sense what humanity is about: acknowledging human ambiguities, the problem of humans in being human. The article argues for a double approach to religion: in religion humans are interpreting what the holy means, but this does not imply that the holy simply is what humans take it to be. We should distinguish between the fact of interpretation and the character of interpretation. Religions are human enterprises: humans interpreting what the holy means , but religions are concerned interpretations in the sense that in religion, humans interpret what concerns them as humans, in dealing with limits to being human . The article concludes by reviewing the relation between religion and public discourse, arguing both that religion can point to interiority that is a condition for public discourse and that a critique of religion that seeks to do justice to the complex human character of religion is needed