If it is the case that humans by nature appear to need religion, then what possible religion(s) might lead to a better world than the religions that in fact currently exist and influence masses (excuse the pun!) of people today?
The project of secularism, as it has evolved and gained traction during the course of the most recent few centuries, has tried to temper the influence of religion in our culture and to allow for, even promote, atheism; and the ideals and values of humanism and the Enlightenment, not to mention science, have essentially meant challenging, if not eliminating, all forms of dogma, religious and otherwise.
But what if we were to take the approach of not directing our critiques towards religion per se, but rather towards the religions we currently have? Can an argument (not) be made that most of today's most powerful and influential religions in the world are in fact archaic remnants of the past that we have inherited, belief systems that are in fact losing their inherent powers of conviction and are relying more and more only on sheer tradition and loyalty in order to remain alive, and thus are becoming - often dangerously - inappropriate to today’s world?
What if religion itself is not "opium of the people", but rather the type of religions that we have inherited and which we have continued to propagate without adequate re-assessment and critical revision? What (to appeal to yet another metaphor) if the key is not to stop eating and drinking altogether, but rather to replace the bread and wine with another sort of diet and, at the very minimum, the opium with another type of pharmaceutical?
Our proposed activities for this session...
1st half: work in small groups, each group inventing a new religion (using their creativity and imagination alongside critical thinking - no need to stay 100% serious, as long as the exercise remains valid and meaningful! 😄), this new religion having the potential even to become a new world religion (at least in our imaginations 😄) We will then share all our results...
2nd half: an open discussion regarding our "newly-created religions" as well as what we may have learned from the exercise and possible new insights about religion in general. Does religion (not) still have a valuable role to play in world culture as we head into the future?
Our re-invented religion would have to be appropriate to our contemporary age and be valuable in our world today (or at least be a significant improvement over our current ones).
What would be its core beliefs? Its ethical precepts? Which new words/terms might enter the New Religion? Would there be a political hierarchy? A book? This new religion for our times would best embrace (or at the very least not be incompatible with) science, globalism, diversity (even the reality of atheism in the world), do a better job than current religions in facilitating separation of church and state, and aspire towards world peace and prosperity. But it would be a religion, not a science-based or even philosophical model of the universe. And - last but not least - it should do a better job than a global-wide culture of atheism...
This task of re-inventing religion may hopefully also help us and inspire us to identify elements, features, bugs and patterns that show up in some/many/all religions, and to re-evaluate which ingredients we should best keep, which ones we should throw away, and which new ones we would wish to incorporate into any religions that we would want to see existing in the world today.
So to summarize, can/does religion as a human cultural phenomenon continue to carry any inherent value? And if/why/how might religion (not) still play an important role in human culture as we're rapidly heading into the future?
