Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.
So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
As for what I think religion is going to look like in the future, I think it’s very tough to predict what AI is going to do and how it will shape people’s religious experiences. I’m loath to make an attempt at prediction just yet.
What I’d like future religion to look like, once the hyper-advanced one-world technocracy takes over, is a paradigm that leaves room for both a High Religion and a Low Religion. The High Religion would be highly centralized, universalized, and cosmopolitan, filling a similar social role to medieval Catholicism. It’d be the religion of the State, a hierarchical and orderly religion with grand cathedrals, inspiring awe.
I’d like this to look, theologically and aesthetically, something like Zoroastrianism, or, for a fictional example, the Faith Of The Seven in A Song Of Ice And Fire. There is a central overarching godhead, but it is split into multiple personae/sub-identities which act as intermediaries between its incomprehensible hyperintelligence and mankind. Those personae don’t all share the same motivations and intentions, which can explain why so much of the world seems chaotic and not guided by some grand unified “master plan”.
The Low Religion would look more like Shinto or Proto-Indo-European religion, centered around ancestor worship and personal tutelary deities. Guardian angels, the spirits of specific locations or families, nature spirits, etc. It would allow for a far more eclectic and personalized range of worship practices rooted in specific communities, and could be theologically integrated in some way with the High Religion such that they are understood not to be in inherent tension.
As for my personal spirituality, I’m very much still trying to figure that out. Like you, I’m trying to balance the competing demands of, on the one hand, attempting to locate a worldview which intuitively seems true and meaningful, and on the other hand trying to make sure my religious practices can integrate me into a larger cultural and communal framework that isn’t a total weirdo LARP. If there was a thriving modern Hellenist community in the United States today I would probably join it in a heartbeat, but there isn’t, so I have to try and figure out what actually-existing thing works for me. I’ve been reading into Hermeticism and esotericism more generally, in the hope that it will allow me to engage in an existing religious tradition on a level beyond the literal/exoteric.
So you want Catholicism without sexual morality? You want grand cathedrals and theological dissertations and angelic hierarchies and patron saints and guardian angels. You want angry superintelligences running amok(yes, God is much more powerful than demons but is far less interventionist). You want mysteries and establishment hierarchy. You want private devotions, sodalities, archconfraternities.
I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.
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