Clarified Butter wrote:
Flagpole wrote:
..religion as we know it will disappear.
Quite an ambiguous statement. Care to clarify?
Well, I have done so already, but I will do so again.
Religion through the ages has changed greatly as we become more and more aware of our world and universe. We don't have organized religions that pray to Zeus anymore or a Sun God for example. As strongly as some religious people today feel that their religion is the RIGHT one, so too did people from the past. It is ridiculous to believe it will not continue to change, and as I have already mentioned, we see changes even in short blocks of time (United Methodists moving from a very liberal denomination worldwide to a more and more fundamentalist view in just the last 20 years).
A lot of religion is borne out of a need to explain what they didn't understand at the time...plagues of locusts, a big flood, why sometimes it isn't good to eat shellfish, etc. Today, although we know a lot more about how things work than in biblical times for example, Christians will say...well, how was the universe created, and if you believe in the Big Bang, what created that? And they pose other like questions. My answer to that is that just because we might not have all the answers, that doesn't mean that THE answer is that there is an omnipotent God in the sky overseeing all.
As more and more people are accepting of science over magic and fairy tales, (and they will be) religion as we know it will eventually disappear. We have already seen a rise in Unitarian Universalism, an extremely liberal "church" that asserts no magical God. This kind of thing will continue.
Do not take my view as a condemnation of religious people, because it isn't. Being "religious" also has its own meaning to each individual person, some who believe in magic and the fairy tales and some who don't but yet ascribe to the teachings of Jesus for example as something good to follow, understanding that he was a mortal man.
So, back to my comment that you asked about - "religion as we know it will disappear." Evidence of past religions disappearing shows this is highly likely, and anyone who believes religion WON'T change as we know it, has a screw loose.