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Introducing my new article (all 11k words)

http://www.jaygaskill.com/Renaissance.pdf  

This is about the future of religion in the rest of the 21st Century.  I have predicted a religious renaissance, but that may be a product of my innate optimism. In truth, the outcome is not certain.  The downside could be a bloody Dark Age, one that will make that bloody 20th century appear by contrast like some idyllic cakewalk.

In the 1920’s Albert Schweitzer wrote that “The world presents the ghastly spectacle of a universal will to live divided against itself.” (This was taken from his long out of print book, “The Philosophy of Civilization”, first published in 1923.)

Today we might observe that the modern world presents us with the specter of a universal religious sensibility violently divided against itself.

As we witness on the nightly news those “ghastly spectacles” of the carnage wrought by one religious sect against otherwise innocent “apostates”, we are entitled to a measure of pessimism.

Like the Buddha, Dr. Schweitzer embraced an ethos of comprehensive compassion for all sentient creatures.  His “reverence for life” ethos was based on a core evaluation of unity, the result of the same reality glimpse that has informed mystics for millennia. Schweitzer was appalled at the vision of living, sentient creatures locked in a Darwinian struggle against each other, playing out the same fight to the death over and over again. This is “Nature’s Drama”. It still fascinates and repels schoolchildren watching those predator-prey killing scenarios on the National Geographic or Animal Planet cable channels. I believe that if our species did not have a functioning religion we would have to create one. Without religion – or a good facsimile, daily human life would resemble those brutal scenes on Animal Planet. 

One of the most important developing social conditions in the Twenty First Century is the ongoing weakening of hereditary-based coercion and other social pressures supporting religious affiliation.  A free market in religion has arrived. And not all religions will survive in the new environment.

In my new article (linked below), I identify seven ways that 21st Century religion must earn its keep. By that measure, religion is in danger of flunking out…

But my optimism is based on a new development that is already beginning to change minds.  Am I onto something here?

For the entire article, in PDF format, go to this link ▼

 http://www.jaygaskill.com/Renaissance.pdf   

THE CASE FOR

A 21st CENTURY RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE

And Why Now Would Be a Good Time

By

Jay B. Gaskill

Introduction:

In this article, I address the future of religion in this century. Many of my secular friends are dimly aware of the need to shore up the foundations of the ethical systems that support civilization, what I call “the moral infrastructure,” but they remain clueless as how that can actually happen. 

JBG