Evolution will drive Most Religions to Extinction |
Everything is evolving, including religion. So which religions will survive - and if they do survive, what will they evolve into? Or will they all become extinct? Who will still be here in 100 years, or 1000 years or 100,000 years from now? Will people still be praising Jesus in the year 102,005? (Assuming we make it through the Y100K computer meltdown where all the software using 5 digit dates all crash)
As with any evolutionary process, when the environment changes, the organisms have to adapt. This is true not only for living organisms but for social and religious organisms as well. During the Dark Ages religion was stable for very long periods of time. But those days are gone and the human race is in the middle of a huge evolutionary jump. New technology is changing how we understand things and how we process information. The Internet, which we call the Sacred Router, is causing an acceleration of knowledge. Information from around the world can be researched in seconds allowing people who discover new things to associate with like-minded people everywhere. If not for the Sacred Router the Church of Reality would not exist.
What effect will the Internet have on religions? No matter what religion you are a member of, there is at least an implied assumption that what you believe in is actually real. There may be some exceptions but if you ask most people if what they believe in is real, they would say, "Yes it is!" And there is some presumption that if they became convinced it were not real, then they would (eventually) stop believing in it. What is different today, as compared to centuries ago, is that you have a lot more information and tools available to test and see if what you believe in is real. And more and more people are putting their faith to the reality test.
For example, the Jesus story. I never believed it. But I did assume that it was at least based on some guy who actually did live around that time. As it turn out, I was wrong. I now know that Jesus to be 100% fictional and to have never existed in any real form whatsoever. I found that out by researching on the Internet and discovering things that I didn't know. These are things that I probably would never have found in the pre-Internet days. I found out that there were dozens of fictional figures who predated the Jesus story that had all the same elements of the life of Christ. They already had a God as father, virgin mother, mass slaying of children, miraculous healings, raising people from the dead, being crucified, and rising from the dead on the third day. The writers who made up the Jesus story didn't even make it original. They plagiarized the fiction of the times.
With this kind of information becoming more available, it puts pressure on fiction-based religions to explain themselves and raises doubts about if the underlying narratives are in fact true. If Christians, for example, figured out that Jesus wasn't real, would they still believe in him? I would hope that most of them would not. Thus, if a religion is based on fiction then this information age becomes a threat to their religious foundation. I would think that if Jesus goes away then Christianity goes away with it.
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