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I agree, and frankly I think that a formal religion with space exploration and/or artificially intelligence as key parts of the doctrine has a good chance to rise up in the relatively near future. As @DaseindustriesLtd has mentioned occasionally, Russian Cosmism is an interest blend of techno-optimism and Christianity.
I somewhat doubt that we can build a new religion entirely from scratch to fit the industrial times, however. The modern equivalent already exists, and it's called Therapy/Psychology. The goal of religion has almost always been to help us understand ourselves and let humans cooperate at a community level, at least from a darwinian perspective. Psychology tries to do this but is extremely committed to 'scientific' atheist materialism, and so is doomed to failure.
Sadly the vast majority, even if they claim to be religious, are actually rationalists/materialists when really pushed. "Well, I'm not sure if Christ actually came back from the dead, it's a metaphor..." and such.
It's a shame how easily Newtonian mechanics destroyed our entire conception of the sacred.
What?! No, I'm pretty sure that disqualifies you from calling yourself a Christian.
You'd think, but heresy has a long history, and the modern versions tend to lean heavily on the "well back in the primitive times when people didn't Know Science and had no idea about how the physical world worked, naturally they literally believed in miracles and stuff, but we are smart modern people who Know Science so we can't believe that stuff". Then they go for the metaphors and the Resurrection didn't literally happen but what did was the 'Christ Event' was the warm fuzzy feeling the followers of Jesus got from remembering Him when He was alive, and they started out to convince others that they too could have the warm fuzzy feeling if they just learned about and decided they liked Jesus.
Poor Teilhard de Chardin, God rest the man, got tangled up in his notions of the Omega Point and got into a lot of trouble over it, and modern thinkers in the same vein blend up a mix of old Gnosticism with a coat of pseudo-science painted over it. Bishop Spong was infamous for this, but there are a lot still going - we can't believe in the literal Jesus being divine, so we must separate out the idea of the human man from the Cosmic Christ which is more of an idea than a transcendent being.
This links to what I call the lineage problem, which is where the concern is any adjustments to the core creed have a dilution effect that risks effective transmission of the ideas over time and may even give rise to enough drift in the tradition that ideas entirely counter to the original spirit arise.
Buddhism in the West is a good example. Various long-standing traditions were imported into the West and over time things deemed superfluous or esoteric were abandoned. It's an oversimplification but this has culminated in the McMindfulness approach you see now.
The trouble is, traditions also lock in a bunch of stuff that genuinely does seem to be superfluous, and traditions also need to change.
I'm actually a moderniser type of guy- it seems pertinent to me having the belief system of Christianity doesn't necessarily bear any relation to the behaviour of the Christian, and I think theism in the modern age has become a victim of the Cartesian split.
Hah, I love this term! Definitely stealing it.
I absolutely agree with the Buddhism point, and it's something I want to do an effortpost on at some point.
I disagree with this. If you look at the Bible, for instance, every line has been pored over and it has been pruned over and over throughout the years. These texts also typically evolved in an oral setting, where multiple different versions were told and only the ones found the most impactful/useful were kept.
If you read something in a religious text and you don't understand it, odds are you're missing some context or you aren't thinking hard enough. I don't think almost anything in these texts is superfluous, it only seems that way because we moderns seem to think knowledge and wisdom can only be atomized, packaged rational 'facts,' and that fiction or stories can't carry genuinely important truth.
Ah can't claim the McMindfulness so use at will, there's an established critique around this.
I accept that there may be pearls that once the mud is cleaned off are seen as vitally relevant but there's also the epistemic authority problem of interpretation. One particular creed will take X from a story, the other Y. Is it all vital? I'm not convinced there isn't a lot of contingent dross smuggled in from time and place. Perhaps it's not easy to know so you keep it all.
I come at religion from a Jordan Peterson kind of place (pre his official conversion), ie a largely metaphoric journey through our prehistory of what is effective/insightful of the human condition. I think Christianity is vitally relevant here but also appreciate the insights of other traditions.
Has Dr. Peterson officially converted?
I was going by a podcast title a while back that seemed to suggest so, though that might have been click bait.
Must have been. Googling around about it now all I get are the same articles I've seen about him ever since his rise to fame: "Is Dr. Peterson a Christian?" "Has Jordan Peterson Converted?" And, true to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer is always "I don't know" and "no" respectively.
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