If the religious impulse stresses the absolute otherness and self-sufficiency of the divine, it will also emphasise the limitations and imperfections of the human. The doctrine of original sin is an apt expression of the sense of the chasm between the human and the divine, and an apt way of curbing human presumptuousness. Although such things can hardly be quantified it is not, I think, coincidental that the worst societies people have had to suffer under in this century have been inspired by dreams of the Nietzschean superman and a materialist utopia: that is, by a principled and self-conscious denial of human imperfectibility and ignorance. Religion, in emphasizing human frailty and the distance between all human efforts and the truly good and beautiful should clearly have a benign tendency to curb the pretensions to knowledge and wisdom which lead to political totalitarianism. In this respect, Islam may be seen as religiously inferior to Christianity precisely because it lacks any tradition of a distinction between the two cities, the earthly and the divine, and to those quick to speak of Christianity as a theocratic religion, it is worth pointing out that despite well-publicized lapses, more often than not, Christianity has survived and presented itself as a force distinct from, and often actually opposed, to the earthly city and merely temporal rulers.
(Anthony O'Hear, "Science and Religion," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 [September 1993]: 505-16, at 508)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 