The Pretensions of Religious Fictionalism

Abstract

Abstract There is a tendency to let fictionalism become a procrustean bed for any view that allows the combination of a more or less uncritical participation in a discourse and its practices with resistance to a fully literal construal of its claims. The authors of this chapter consider the tendency problematic, and argue that its faults are found in some influential recent accounts of religious fictionalism. They consider one strand of religious fictionalism that centers on the attitudes of users of religious discourse rather than the discourse itself, and argue that such an approach makes it too easy to be a religious fictionalist. On the other hand, they claim that a religious fictionalism that focuses on the secular (e.g., moral) benefits of engagement in the discourse of religion is susceptible to collapse, and thus makes it too hard to be a religious fictionalist.