The researchers who specialize in new religions tell us that we live in a very fertile time. Many new religions are getting started in various places around the world. Unlike earlier centuries most of these new religions are not started by splitting off from existing streams of faith. Often, they will not (at least initially) even identify themselves as "religion," the preferred term being a "lifestyle." [There is a technical debate on this point among the scholars; when is it a religion and when is it something else? Where do you draw the definitional line?]
One new religion that I have looked at recently is the estimated 25,000 adherents to a Gorean lifestyle and ethics. Their scripture is a series of more than 20 science fiction novels written in the 1960s and early 1970s by Dr. John Lange, now a professor of philosophy at Queens College CUNY under the name John Norman. In those novels he created, as a backdrop for the primary plots, a cultural context with certain vaguely medieval values, including forms of slavery and a code of honor. Although the books have largely gone out of print, in the last decade or so Internet social networking and a variety of organizations have brought together a movement that practices the values suggested in the Gor novels. (Gor is a counter Earth in the science fiction stories, invisible because it is always orbiting on the other side of the sun.) Religion is the best way to describe this movement, which includes more than one cult. It is about a set of beliefs and rules to live by, although it may not speak to all the same philosophical issues that Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths have historically focused on.
In the last couple of days I heard an interview on NPR about a new computer game soon to be released by EA which is called Sporeand allows players to develop "beings" (really icons with meta stories) from single cell existence through an equivalence of humanity to interstellar civilizations. "You mean, you get to play God," the NPR interviewer interjected. This is the kind of game that allows the same kind of spiritual imagination as the Gor novels and many other cultural artifacts of our evolved social context. Prediction: Within a few decades, if this Spore game is at all widely distributed, it will very likely become the holy grail in some new "lifestyle" cult.
Post modernism recognizes the spiritual imagination that God created in human beings, where modernism has always been very skeptical of that natural spirituality. My reference to modern thought here is not restricted to the sciences or related philosophical disciplines. The skepticism has been especially true of modern theology, which is so relentlessly rational that it really is the source of the most of the anti-religious sentiment over the last couple of centuries. That spiritual imagination and passion was necessary to the birth of Christianity and Islam, it is clearly present in the stories of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. It is a hallmark of the moments when God intervenes in a signal way. It can also result in all manner of beliefs and lifestyles. Just open your eyes and ears and watch what is going on in the world around you, outside the confines of conventional, organized religion.
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