The Fall of Religion and Spirituality

[John Rich]

Based on what we have learned from anthropologists, the origin of religion can be traced  back to pre-religious tribal beliefs including animism, totemism, and ancestor worship.  We can logically deduce that these ideas originated in the human mind.  To conclude any other source other then the human mind is both unprovable and preposterous.  The concept of god or spirit is thus invented and basically fiction.  Over time, tribal beliefs became codified religion and evolved as cultures evolved.  In the 21st Century, religions and spirituality have evolved into complex ideologies.  However, these belief systems are no more true than the primitive beliefs that they evolved from.  Religion may have become a useful tool or past time for homo sapiens, but they are fast becoming irrelevant with the rise of secularism in most advanced Western countries.  The continuing  spread of globalism brings also the continuing spread of secularism.  The acceleration of science and technology also has contributed to the rise of secularism, secular humanism, and atheism.  There may be periods of religious renewal in some countries but the trend toward the secularization of human societies is inevitable.  A scientific world view has already replaced a religious or spiritual world view in most advanced Western countries.  Religions will either become extinct or simply a quaint cultural practice.  The continuing spread of higher education will promote rationality, reason, logic, and critical thinking.  Most humans will demand empirical evidence to support a claim and reject any claims that lack such evidence.  Countries that currently favor a restrictive religious state will either become a pariah, isolationist, or succumb to the pressure of modernization, globalization, and secularization.  Because religions rely on belief without evidence to survive, they will no longer be meaningful or relevant in an increasingly secular world.  This may occur over decades or centuries but will most certainly occur in time.  The trend has begun and religions are feeling the pressure of the coming change.  They attempt to adapt in this secular society, but their world view is in total contradiction to a secular, scientific, material world view based on facts and evidence.

[lawrey]

John,

In you opening sequence you assert: ( "We can logically deduce that these ideas originated in the human mind.") I would suggest a little clarification right there. I am not disagreeing, but my own study showed a total lack of understanding of reality vis-a-vis the effects and causes of nature in the natural world in the early stages of man and their powers to assess and or understand the simple reasons that caused everyday events to happened. Storms, thander, lightening, winds. driughts, floods, illness, death. All manner of things were simply beyond their ken. They eventually reasoned that there must be some superhuman, super-power, unknown, or unshown, that was responsible for these things. It was this total lack of knowledge, as there was a total lack of any initial response, beyond awe that these super-powers could at will, act with devastating effects. Very much later a form of unoganised religion, or perhaps a reverent respect for the unknown. Religion developed very much later, it is all too easy to speculate when or which was the first religion but, Zoroasterism the dominant pre-Islamic religious tradition of the Iranian peoples, was founded by the prophetic reformer Zoroaster in the 6th or 7th century. It could just as easily been some other sect. However the ability of the human mind to learn was not too long in coming along, with a rag-bag and bob-tail of countless conjecture gathered on the way. But one way or another "Human People" had the notion of and invented what is loosely now termed a god.  On that we are in agreement.