Discussion Question: Where is Religion Headed?
I have been an atheist all my life. My mother is a devout
Catholic and my father (oddly enough) is a Zen Buddhist. My mother did not
share her faith with her children and my father did his best to explain his
philosophy to his children, some of which I incorporated into my life. That
being said I never heard of God until I was about 10. I was introduced to the
concept by a teacher who was trying to explain to me who/what God was. At 10
years old I found the concept of it laughable and could not relate.
Most people that I
know are not religious in any sense, especially younger people. At most they
would count themselves as “spiritual” which I believe infers that they believe
is some sort of supernatural being or entities. This popularity of this spirituality
movement is on the rise as people become more educated at an early age in the
sciences and cannot rationalize the creationism of the Bible or any of the
stories that recall miracles. Even as early as the Enlightenment period people
began to believe less in the Bible and more spiritual. Thomas Jefferson himself
was a Deist. Believing in a powerful God, but not anything related to the
church or even in the Bible. Spiritualism in many cases is the revitalization
of Deism. It is no coincidence that Deism came out of a time when education was
popular. I believe that the future of religious thought/belief will be a form
of Deism. As it is not bound in the origin of everything/anything or
explanation and is easily mixed with scientific explanation and thought.
I've been trying to reclaim "spiritual" as a naturalistic concept for a long time. In my "Atheism & Philosophy" course we read Comte-Sponville's "Atheist Spirituality," where he writes:
ReplyDelete"The universe is our home; the celestial vault is our horizon; eternity is here and now. This moves me far more than the Bible or the Koran. It astonishes me far more than miracles (if I believed in them). Compared to the universe, walking on water is a cinch!
Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices."
http://books.google.com/books?id=k98AlkT_ZysC&printsec=frontcover&dq=comte-sponville+atheist+spirituality&hl=en&ei=Gb8DT6mKIo2ntgeH4MyKDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q=comte-sponville%20atheist%20spirituality&f=false