Who has never been puzzled by teachers and colleagues who spend five days a week in the laboratory, professionally committed to the enterprise of unravelling the mysteries of nature in the most purely secular terms, and who then spend Sunday on their knees praising a deity who is explicitly said to operate in mysterious ways and to work by miraculous intervention? Are they mad? Are they schizophrenic? It would be stretching words to say so; their characters may generally seem to be models of integration. And yet they live in two different universes, and operate with two incompatible belief systems. If one person can do so, how much more a whole society.
Nobody ever suggested that Japanese pilots or gunners in the second world war were systematically incompetent; but many of them anyway were professed believers in the divinity of their emperor. Quite what they believed may be somewhat inscrutable—though no more so than the beliefs of the Christian who believes in the Trinity or in transsubstantiation—but whatever it is exactly, it seems entirely consistent with being able to master a gunnery manual.
Still, this only suggests that religious commitments of one sort and another can continue to survive the growth of industry and the modernisation of, say, law, banking and the like. The more damaging thought is that as fast as one version of religion gets eroded, new versions spring up—that contrary to Marx, Mill, Durkheim, F'reud, and almost all and any rationalist of the past two centuries, there is no general pressure towards secularisation. It's not merely that Northern Ireland somehow contrives to carry on fighting battles that made sense in 1690 and we've simply not yet found a way to stop; it's rather that societies of no matter how "modern" a sort will continue to create the kind of stresses and generate the needs which religious commitment alone can satisfy.
In one form or another, it's this view which animates writers like Weber or Edward Shils—and which perhaps accounts for the worried overtones in Daniel Bell's reflections on the end of ideology and the subsequent end of the end of ideology. However hard we try to live life from day to day, content to teach our pupils, kiss our children, buy our consumer durables and plug into our personal stereos, we can't help wondering what the point of the whole business is; philosophers may groan when students think philosophy ought to tell them what the meaning of life is; we all shriek with laughter when The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy tells us that the meaning of life is "42." Nonetheless, the everyday round needs something beyond itself to justify it, to provide us with the emotional energy to go on with it.
(Alan Ryan, "The Opium of the Marxists," New Society 62 [23, 30 December 1982]: vii-x, at ix-x [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 