It is a fact though that neither Winston Smith nor the Ancient Mariner exist and yet their portrayal in literature: along with the likes of Holden Caulfield, Tom Joad, Ebenezeer Scrooge and a host of others - and then there is poetry - is considered meaningful by readers and worthy of serious academic study.
So, while I don't buy into the divine being in any sense 'real' I do think that theology has its cultural, literary and historical merits even if it has its limitations: in some ways just like the academic study of fictional literature.
A thesis I've often seen advanced, by some atheists and some liberal-minded believers alike, is that a feeling for religion is akin to an appreciation for art in much the way you suggest here, Gordon.
It always comes from deeply well-meaning people who show every sign of completely having failed to follow this idea through to its logical conclusion. This stems from overlooking, accidentally or deliberately, a rather salient fact: religions - especially "organised" and monotheistic ones - seek to control people's behaviour. They attempt to dictate what they do, what they wear, what they eat and when they eat it, who is a permissible sexual partner, all this and a thousand and one other attempts at making people act, even think in a certain way. This would be less objectionable - no less ridiculous, but less objectionable - if they attempted to do this only within their own ranks, but they don't. As sure as my arse points downwards, each and every time a religion thinks that it can control the behaviour of those outwith its own group, it will try to do so. Only three or four years ago, the established state church in England (not to mention all the other religious groupings sticking their snouts in likewise) was exerting pressure to prevent same-sex couples from getting married, even though this was a wholly secular, civil affair which had absolutely nothing whatever to do with them at all. Despite this, the staunch conviction of some that their entirely brain-bound idea of deity disapproved of equal marriage led them to attempt to scupper the government's plans to make it a reality. Thank goodness they failed - but that didn't stop them trying, because of their conviction that their idea of a god's likes and dislikes trumps anything as mundane as equal civil rights. Many, many other places in the world are not nearly as fortunate.
If religion really were in any way comparable to art this wouldn't be the case. It would be recognised that these are subjective matters hanging upon individual taste and inclination; I like this, you like that, we can discuss why I like this and why you don't, and come to an opposite but amicable conclusion to the matter. For the most part each side leaves each other alone: admirers of traditionalist representational art tend not to come to blows with votaries of abstract art, for example, or vice versa. I'm willing to listen to any evidence but I think I'm on firm ground in saying that nobody, anywhere, ever has put someone else's feet to the flames for liking Pound's
Pisan Cantos over Pam Ayres. Religions rarely get to this stage, and if they do, it's after a very very long period of having their teeth pulled by increasing secularism. Religions can't have it both ways, though needless to say they will try at any and every opportunity. Either they dictate how people behave based on a belief in external, objective deities and their assumed likes and dislikes, or it's more like an opinion on the value of formalist poetry over
vers libre. It's either "You should/shouldn't do this because this or that interpretation of a supposedly immaterial entity that I think exists - but can never demonstrate - says so", or it's "Well, whatever floats your potatoes, man", essentially, thereby giving up all and any pretensions of controlling people's behaviour. One or the other: it can't be both.
Fictional characters in literature doing fictional things in fictional settings are indeed worthy of serious academic study;
but there's a consensus that they're fictional characters which doesn't exist in the same arena when it comes to religion. No doubt there are exceptions, but theologians presumably think that their endless lucubrations actually have some referent to some real state of affairs somewhere and somehow (though they're notably silent when it comes to explaining how this is supposed to work). There's not the same agreement that what is being discussed is imaginary and imaginative as there is in literature. I will be the first one to applaud when religionists come to that self-same conclusion.
And we'll have a damned sight more peaceful a world for it as well.
