This is a great topic, but I’m hearing mostly lamentations from our new member. I joined a church as an adult in 1993, and that wasn’t just some random point in time. Fundamentalism was gaining power and people all along the spectrum were starting to yell back at them, but meanwhile, there were people like Rabbi Michael Lerner who were talking to them, hearing their pain, which is what the Republicans were doing too, but the difference was, Lerner made a philosophy of better living out of what he heard, while the Republicans used it to manipulate voters. So, that’s 20 years in one sentence.
We kind of know the history after that, so I won’t go over it.
My super-liberal church was pretty much a dead end like any other. Trying to find information on my own was not easy either. I’ll find some talks and links later, ones that were eventually put out by people who took these kinds of questions to universities and did the sociological and historical research to get answers. So, saying that nothing is being done, is not true.
There were some false assumptions, going back to Thomas Jefferson, and more recent predictions from the 60s and 70s about religion in decline. But it’s not denialism.
Excellent thread, and I get your point. By and large people are pretty stupid and not only need, but want to be told what to do, how to think. Honestly I can’t blame them when their circumstances are bad.
But more to your point, I actually wrote a story whereby Jesus returned. And the righties hunted down the scientists who were trying to prove that his return was a hoax. When they storm the laboratory they start insulting the long-hairs at their terminals, etc. Turns out, Jesus was one of them, and they were showing him all the technology, how they’re trying to prove he was a hoax. Jesus was interested, and gives a speech to the preacher who hunted them down. In the speech he basically says to them, it’s time to grow up and put down your silly books. God’s greatest gift is reason, your brain! And yet you throw it away in favor of nothing, i.e. faith.
Main point is, sort of along the lines of your original post…if Christians can embrace science, and the scientific mindset, little by little they’ll realize there is no god as they’ve learned it in church. And that’s how religion begins its slow fading away.
But the secular moral values remain. The recognition of sins and virtues are timeless concepts and not dependent on any religious perspective at all, much as theists like claim their invention.
Right we should make it totally clear that science is not a belief system,
it is a system of rules for how to study nature as objectively as possible.
A method for removing our Ego’s as much as possible from our studies.
After that, science is there to help us learn about and understand those natural systems.
Here again it comes down to the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality conception that’s key to appreciating our place within creation.
Our gods come from within us.
Our observations also have to go through us.
But those observations are of physical entities, that others can also touch and study. They can be objectified.
Whereas our personal relationship with our god, or philosophy of choice, is fundamentally unknowable to others. They are feelings and ideas and that can not be objectified.
I think this is our best hope. Joseph Campbell said we are in a period of history that has happened many times before. The mythologies we have are no longer serving us, just like the old religions of making sacrifices were shown to not make the crops grow, we now know that prayers don’t heal limbs or stop climate disasters. We need a new mythology. So, to a degree, @eupraxsophy100 is on the right track, but the secret part, the “make science a religion” part can’t work.
We can see how it doesn’t work in the way people distrust science. They call it an “ivory tower”. They attack their reasoning, which ironically is what science does, but they don’t use evidence to counter the evidence, they say we should just throw out the system. This will happen to any attempt to emulate religion.
When I say “new mythology”, I mean a story of creation that a child can understand and is based on our best science. As we grow, that story would be added to, but there would never need to be that moment in life where you find out “Santa Claus” is not real. Metaphorically speaking, other myths would exist, they just wouldn’t be supported as true by billions of people.
If we keep words like “The Big Bang”, you would find out it wasn’t actually a bang, but something similar, and your understanding of it would increase, instead of us needing to figure out why there was this myth, and what a “myth” is and how these kinds of lies are different from other lies.