fubuki
space and spirituality
if humankind ever makes the leap to a space-faring species, i wonder what will religion be like?
what is the religion of a people born in space? you cant extinguish religion, it fills a gaping maw in the human 'makeup'. we need to feel connected to something deeper, more magnificent than ourselves. religion is the calcified artifact of spirituality. we require religion for a moral bearing, if spirituality is anchoring upon a distant teleological endpoint, be it a perfect unity, a dissolution of the self, a natural path (?), a technological transcendence, religion is the methodology that accretes along that viewpoint. it is structure, ritual, boundaries, seperateness from the without. it is exposition and definition of the 'conception'.
you cannot extinguish religion, it is a consequence, a by-product of us. religosity wanes, however, as competing orthodoxies are dismantled or fall apart under the weight of natural inconsistencies. there is no perfect atheist. their atheism becomes its own structure. the hedonist becomes their own imperfect god.
i would suspect that the spiritual yearning would be greater in a space-faring culture. the wide expanse of null space would trigger a voracious spiritual hunger. the enclosed reality of space-faring would give rise to an intense clanish or communal experience that would feed the construction of a religious structure. no other groups to provide resistance, feedback, or cross-polination of spiritual concepts. no outside restraints. a bacterial culture gone wild .
spirituality (a basic human need for the greater, the more magnificent, the deeper) kicks it off, then religion accretes around it, like a coral reef. religion defines the path to the divine (whether that be a perfect unity, a creative principle, a dissolution of the self (ala siddahartha) or even the myth that science will reveal the natural world - and what is 'outside' the path, the unbelievers, the hells of the weak, ignorant, or irrelevant. eventually religion becomes a moral regulation and a political authority - and the spiritual origin is lost, like flesh from a fossil.
space and spirituality
if humankind ever makes the leap to a space-faring species, i wonder what will religion be like?
what is the religion of a people born in space? you cant extinguish religion, it fills a gaping maw in the human 'makeup'. we need to feel connected to something deeper, more magnificent than ourselves. religion is the calcified artifact of spirituality. we require religion for a moral bearing, if spirituality is anchoring upon a distant teleological endpoint, be it a perfect unity, a dissolution of the self, a natural path (?), a technological transcendence, religion is the methodology that accretes along that viewpoint. it is structure, ritual, boundaries, seperateness from the without. it is exposition and definition of the 'conception'.
you cannot extinguish religion, it is a consequence, a by-product of us. religosity wanes, however, as competing orthodoxies are dismantled or fall apart under the weight of natural inconsistencies. there is no perfect atheist. their atheism becomes its own structure. the hedonist becomes their own imperfect god.
i would suspect that the spiritual yearning would be greater in a space-faring culture. the wide expanse of null space would trigger a voracious spiritual hunger. the enclosed reality of space-faring would give rise to an intense clanish or communal experience that would feed the construction of a religious structure. no other groups to provide resistance, feedback, or cross-polination of spiritual concepts. no outside restraints. a bacterial culture gone wild .
spirituality (a basic human need for the greater, the more magnificent, the deeper) kicks it off, then religion accretes around it, like a coral reef. religion defines the path to the divine (whether that be a perfect unity, a creative principle, a dissolution of the self (ala siddahartha) or even the myth that science will reveal the natural world - and what is 'outside' the path, the unbelievers, the hells of the weak, ignorant, or irrelevant. eventually religion becomes a moral regulation and a political authority - and the spiritual origin is lost, like flesh from a fossil.