- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
What do you envision the Church looking like at the next millenium? I know it’s hard to say for sure, and this will probably give rise to a few jokes, but I was reflecting on this myself. Presuming the second coming doesn’t interrupt the Church’s progress (I’m being a bit tongue in cheek on that one). You are assuming it would even exist by then. If we progress at the rate we are as humans and assuming we do not blow ourselves up I see little need for religion in another 1000 years. Religion needs to add value to the average persons life. If we could get to the point that we can accomplish things on our own as a society then religion has no inherent value to people. As we can explain more and more about the universe then Gods place in it becomes smaller and smaller. Just my opinion of course.
I see the face of religion changing shape over the next thousand years much the same way it has over the last few hundred years. I think it will still exist, but modified. I don’t see people losing the need for spirituality, though the grip of authoritative control and exclusiveness may loosen. I sincerely hope people will take the core message of Jesus a little more seriously – and love even their enemies, show more mercy and understanding, etc. I hope the “holy wars” will die and the “pure religion” will flourish.
I don’t believe the human race will exist a thousand years from now. If it does, it shall either be unrecognisable, and have regressed to complete barbarity. Quote:As we can explain more and more about the universe then Gods place in it becomes smaller and smaller.
I disagree. Mystery has beauty, and science is just too darn cold when it comes to these things. It understands the volume and air vibrations, and the bits of wood and string, but it doesn’t understand the beauty of a string quartet.
Quote:I don’t believe the human race will exist a thousand years from now. If it does, it shall either be unrecognisable, and have regressed to complete barbarity.
Maybe it will be like the movie, The Book of Eli
Quote:Thirty years after a nuclear apocalypse,[4] Eli (Denzel Washington) travels on foot toward the west coast of the United States. Along the way, he demonstrates uncanny survival and fighting skills, hunting wildlife and swiftly defeating a group of highway bandits who try to ambush him. Searching for a source of water, he arrives in a ramshackle town built and overseen by Carnegie (Gary Oldman).
Carnegie dreams of building more towns and controlling the people by using the power of a certain book. His henchmen scour the desolate landscape daily in search of it, but to no avail.In the local town bar, Eli is set upon by a gang of bikers and he kills them all. Realizing Eli is a literate man like himself, Carnegie asks Eli to stay, although it is made clear the offer is non-negotiable. After Carnegie’s blind concubine Claudia (Jennifer Beals) gives Eli some food and water, Carnegie asks Claudia’s daughter Solara (Mila Kunis) to seduce Eli. Eli turns her down,
but she discovers he has a book in his possession. Eli pacifies her with stern words, but offers to share his food with her. Before they eat, though, he has her pray with him. The following day, Solara prays with her mother. Carnegie overhears them and realizes Solara’s words were likely from the contents of the book he has been seeking. Through violence, he forces Solara to tell him Eli was reading a book. When he asks what kind, she says she does not know but forms a cross with her two index fingers. Carnegie realizes Eli has a copy of the Bible, the book he has been seeking.… Solara picks Eli up and they continue west until they reach the Golden Gate Bridge. They then row to Alcatraz, where they find a group of survivors. Eli tells the guards that he has a copy of the King James version of the Bible, and they are allowed in. Once inside, they are introduced to Lombardi (Malcolm McDowell), the curator. Eli, who is revealed to be blind, begins to dictate the Bible from memory…. he dies, presumably from his wounds, shortly thereafter. The printing press at Alcatraz begins printing the new King James Bible, after which Lombardi places a copy on the bookshelf between copies of the Torah and Qur’an…
— Wikipeidia
Quote:Lombardi places a copy on the bookshelf between copies of the Torah and Qur’an…
Wot no Book of Mormon?
😆 SamBee wrote:Quote:Lombardi places a copy on the bookshelf between copies of the Torah and Qur’an…
Wot no Book of Mormon?
😆 Yeah. Ironic isn’t it.
🙂 Counter to the predictions we will grow out of religion and not need it anymore, I will put down money to bet that it still exists 1,000 years in the future. I believe religion in some form is so integral to the human mind, that it would be like saying we won’t have sex anymore in the year 3,000 because science will have replaced the need to grow babies in a womb. Of course there’s no way to know or to prove this, but I would point to the Dune book series by Frank Herbert. He paints a believable portrait of the importance of religion in a multi-galactic civilization that is something like 10,000 years in the future. In his universe, religion is still one of the main driving forces for civilization, and is understood on as many levels as it is today (from true-believing literalits to cynical political manipulators). That didn’t change in his imagined future. Regardless of scientific advances, there are still unanswerable mysteries.
Science creates more questions as it progresses than it answers.
Now Mormonism: I think it is about to go through another major cycle of change. Religion is about ideas, and ideas can not stay static during an information revolution. Just like other major revolutions such as writing, steel, the printing press and hydrocarbons (oil), the information age will be just as changing if not more on religion. Mormonism MUST MUST MUST adapt and continue to change or it will become irrelevant and of no use. If a religion does not provide a useful and meaningful explanation for the world around us, and a system of morality that makes sense to help us relate to others, it fails.
Change and adapt or die. That is the rule for life.
What Brian said. We (I) tend to look at science and assume that we’re really knowledgable. I disagree. There exist things like dark matter that, frankly, we don’t even know what it is and it comprises most of the universe. I submit that science is in it’s infancy and there may come a time that science and religion come together.
If this question were to be asked, and I’m sure it was, 1000 years ago…there would have been many intellectual types that would have predicted that we would have no religion today.
There does seem to be something inherent in all of us that wants to believe in life after death. Religious folks would probably say that this is some sort of “God consciousness”. Others would say that we have evolved a mind that cannot concieve of it’s own non-existance.
Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s going to be bred out of us, or that critical thinking is going to squelch it in just 1000 years.
I don’t know about a corporate church, but I’ll bet the gospel will be around and doing well.
I agree with Brian in general — that religion will never go away. So long as man is in ignorance about what happens to him after death, forcing a reliance on faith without sure knowledge at the outset, the questions about our eternal destiny will remain. And people will fill that void with compelling ideas known as religion. However, history has shown that religion’s ability to help with practical challenges in life has a big impact on people’s affinity for religion, and their willingness to adopt new philosophies. A case in point is The Black Plague. About 1/3 of the population in Europe died from it, and the Catholic Church provided little in the way of solutions to the problem at the time. So, new factions came to the fore, and many people left the Catholic Church in favor of these sub-groups. I can’t remember their name, but there was one group which walked from town to town whipping themselves hoping this would change God’s mind and stop the plague. Many people latched on to these subgroups, leaving the Catholic church.
So, I think the way the Church handles any large, chronic calamaties that occur in the future will have a big impact on its strength and longevity. We have the example of the Book of Mormon where peoiple were subject to extended famines and hardship, and consistently, they were delivered from these circumstances as a result of righteousness. If similar calamaties hit us in the future, and the people turn righteous, and there is no improvement in our circumstances, I suspect this will be damaging to our faith.
Also, I watched a documentary on the history of Christianity, and the documentary described how the Catholic Church underwent a severe decline with its claims to infallibility etcetera, went through a period of liberality, and then retrenched itself in the infallibility claims. I don’t know the impact on its membership growth – -but it would be interesting to see how it has fared as a result of wild claims like this.
Also, we are seeing strong opposition within the Church to certain values we could all name having to do with same-sex orientation. Given the traditional values the Church holds, I believe that if they cling to them too long, and the will of society moves counter, we’ll see a longer term reduction in membership. In fact, I’ve heard that Church growth even now is much slower than the growth in other parts of the world. Is this a leading indicator of the future?
SilentDawning wrote:Also, we are seeing strong opposition within the Church to certain values we could all name having to do with same-sex orientation. Given the traditional values the Church holds, I believe that if they cling to them too long, and the will of society moves counter, we’ll see a longer term reduction in membership. In fact, I’ve heard that Church growth even now is much slower than the growth in other parts of the world. Is this a leading indicator of the future?
Yes – I think the church was able to survive and even flourish during the polygamy years, EVEN THOUGH they were at odds with 99.9999 of the population, because the very practice guaranteed that the church would grow at a fast pace, and the whole cultural “big family” mentality that was pushed. That’s not going to keep the church afloat this century. LDS families are adapted and getting smaller and smaller. With the way the church is going, IMO, stressing authoritarians, obedience, and these very unpopular stances like anti-gay and WoW etc, I don’t think their record of baptisms is going to keep up with the number of member deaths and “inactivity.” I just don’t see how that is going to work. If the church does not evolve and adapt…
Of course, this entire conversation is all nonsense, because the church is perfect and is the kingdom of god on earth and led by a prophet so people will continue to flock to it regardless of it’s positions, and will be a great stone rolling and gathering momentum until the second coming, and will never be taken from the earth again…
🙂 You are all depressing me with the notion that mankind will forever rely on mythology to help them through their lives.That we will continue to expend large sums of money and effort on religion in general. I was hoping for a more optimistic future where we can move beyond that. Where religion can serve as maybe a community organization to assist in helping people temporarily. But we do not need to turn to it to explain the un explainable. That we realize humans have the capacity to grow and develop on our own and we do not need to be begging to an unknowable or unseen God for our very existence, and to solve our problems. That maybe just maybe we realize it is up to us to clean up the mess in the world and stop waiting for God to come and do it. I am going to credit this next comment to Jared Anderson. In some recent conversations we were having while producing that MS podcast, he made an observation I thought was wonderfully insightful. I think this will give you hope Cadence. He predicted/observed that the next century and the information revolution will be the death of fundamentalism. It may not be the death of religion in the broad sense, but it will put more and more pressure on that particular segment of religion that sees their myths and narratives as literal and dogmatic (beyond question or examination).
When I declare that religion will not die at the hands of science and rational thought, I speak of it in the broad sense of a Joseph Campbell perspective. Religion deals particularly well with the very real existence of the irrational, the senseless random aspects of the universe, the unknown and that which inspires awe. It is THE tool to access and shape these parts of our human experience.
So perhaps science and “progress” will cause most people to question a literal global flood 5,000 years ago (the Noah’s Ark story). But we still can’t escape the existential crisis of knowing we will die, that those we love and care about the most will cease to exist at some point, and that we will be forgotten in a matter of decades after we shrug off this mortal coil.
Again, I refer back to the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert. He explores the impact of science/progress creating a possibility of living nearly forever, and even the terrible consequences of individuals having limited ability to know the future with certainty (prescience). These topics are central themes of the books, and he shows how they just create new questions and existential problems. They don’t eliminate them.
Cadence — for you, I think hope lies in science. If science can prove whether we continue to exist after death, and we find that achieving a positive state of affairs after this life is not dependent on God or religion, or that its controlled by principles independent beyond religion or myth, then I think we will see religion die away, or at least, be replaced with some other form of guidance. However, there will always be limits on our knowledge that others will rush to fill with philosophy and theory — just as we do in all areas of academic study/research today. Problem is, experiments to determine what happes to us after death are very hard to test and control, and they definitely raise legal and ethical questions. Therefore, all we have to go on are the supposed out-of-body experiences of people who believe they were taken to the other side and came back, or the reports of people who claim to have seen loved ones. And these are hard to replicate….so, I have very little hope.
Brian Johnston wrote:
Again, I refer back to the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert. He explores the impact of science/progress creating a possibility of living nearly forever, and even the terrible consequences of individuals having limited ability to know the future with certainty (prescience). These topics are central themes of the books, and he shows how they just create new questions and existential problems. They don’t eliminate them.Yes, as a Frank Herbert fan, I think that is a good example. I agree with it.
It’s interesting, that MANY of our most famous SF authors and story lines, ARE based on religious themes in the future where technology has progressed to the point where spirituality and religion can be more fully explained. Even Star Wars (which technically happened a long long time a ago
🙂 ) is completely based on religion and the spiritual realms intermixed with science and technology. One example, unlike the movies, in the books, each Jedi made his own life-sabar (spelling), that only he could use because it was based and only function on his own personal “spiritual energy” and focus. The Jedi had to “be in tune with the spirit” so to speak.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.