Quote: (04-29-2018 01:31 PM)Zelcorpion Wrote:
Mankind however will not return to their old pagan roots. The consciousness of human beings is too different for one religion or spiritual path to fit them all. New major paths and religions will rise up incorporating old and new concepts. I don't think that humans will stop to believe in something divine and supernatural.
Too many people here seem to think that me and other Paganism defenders here are advocating a return to exact same practices as our ancestor's did. That is a misconception that is hard to eliminate because no matter how many times I explain it to be wrong some new poster enters this thread and again acts as if we would want to return to human sacrafice and worshiping craved wooden idols and similar.
I also believe that the faith of future will be something new and different from anything that has come before. But there is nothing new under the Sun and everything that is new is built on some elements of something old and in this case it will be built on a lot of pagansim elements. What I think is that with science having progressed much more, the new Faith of tomorrow will be much more focused on humans trying to achieve balance between progress in artifice and our evolutionary adaptation to a more natural world. We will value natural things much more and value their rarity and sanctity and will see the divinity of natural things and the order in nature, thus inspiring much from paganism. Spirituality will mainly focus on learning to control how we apply our technologies and advances so that we control them and not they control us and we will have to learn value of life outside of the never ending rat's race for progress or risk to perish as human beings in some horrible trans-humanist utopia gone wrong.
The scripture based faith's would lose their positions slowly, because we as humanity have earned to appreciate that new truths are discovered at all times that lead as closer to Truth. We now have archeological discoveries proving that no religion came from Divine revelation instantly, all holy scriptures have older half-made versions and even Old Testament is grown from Assyrian paganism. So a fixation on scripture should give way to a more living and personal approach to facing reality, one where we are constantly learning from nature.
I don't see Future Paganism fighting Christianity at all. The true spiritual challenges of future are:
1)Scriptural dictatorship vs. Freedom to act from real world data. Islam will be the champion of Scriptural dictatorship. Christianity cannot win Islam, because it is based on the same thing only milder. People when facing Islam will divide into those who either want a strict system of enforced rules and will accept Islam, including the rule loving Christians, and to those who want a personal experience of something transcendental, something that does not neatly fit under common umbrella - mystics, Yogi's, freethinkers, philosophers - all of them, except transhumanist and communist atheists, I put under a loose common term of "Paganism".
2)Holistic Humanity vs Transhumanism. In future and at some extent already at present we can live a good life as human beings using our advances to provide anything we need in right amounts and moderation including challenge and difficulty. But we are still pushed for a stress inducing progress and may lose our humanity in this process. For the stressed out progressive drones of never ending rat's race - the machine is an ideal. It might come to a point where we would be tempted or forced to turn into machines, first getting chipped, later literally swapping our flesh for cyborg material until total mind uploading into AI after which we might actually kill ourselves and give all power away to the efficient machines. After witnessing the West welcoming immigrants and commiting ethnic suicide - I believe many humans would accept such slow techno-suicide in name of comfort and efficiency. Paganism and veneration of the nature and understanding of human psyche needing both pleasure and pain, the lust for this messy and unpredictable life instead of the sterile death, then is the alternative for those who would want to remain as human beings with all our "irrational and non-progressive" human experiences such as faith and spirituality.