Religions of the Future

L

LostInThought7

Registered Senior Member
I am going to write a story about Earth in far future (I don't know, maybe 1000 years from now?) and I was going to go into detail about the religions of the time.

This is where I need your help. After 1000 years, what new religions will come up and what will have changed about the old ones? (This is for fun only, this thread might better belong in the Free Thoughts section, but it does involve religion)


Use your imagination. Create any social/political/natural environments neccesary for your religion to prosper.
 
1000 years are a bit too stretched in future. Earth would be visited by few humans out of its antiquity and nostalgia, if humans have any such feelings at that time. Humans would live in space and other possible planets and satellites. I see what Cris is dreaming of : A collective Super intelligent system of humans rather than individuals. May God destroy humanity before that. Amen and Ameen. :D
 
Ok, then, maybe not 1000 years, but just sometime in the future. What happens to the Jewish religion? Christianity? Paganism? Atheism?
 
Well, if you look at history you can predict one thing for certain: greater polarization. Whether it will be from an event - such as the WTC bombing, a world war, or a natural disaster - there will be people who did not budget (spiritually and emotionally) for such a radical event in their life, and gravitate to those who have.

Unless you want to create an alternative science fiction future, you should take historical events into account and focus on their implications on a global scale if you want to stay believable. Maybe watch Deep Impact or Contact again (but remove the Americanisms).

If I had to write something like this, I would really make an effort to differentiate between spirituality and religion. No matter how little people like organizations or structure while they're free, once that freedom is threatened they will always prefer the security of establishments - whether govenmental or religious. Then there is also the psychology involved; even a person who has always been convinced of his own strength and convictions will look for a shelter greater than himself when it becomes evident that he can't depend only on himself to survive. What that would be depends on his emotional, spiritual and social needs...
 
Religion of the future? Hmmmm....

I ponder in though about this.

It would be nice to see not one religion in the future, this would mean the human race finally evolved and left the crutch, that binds it.

In "PLANET OF THE APES" old version not the new sucky movie.

They prayed to a Nuclear bomb. GW and company are not far from this now.

In (StarTreck), here we not only have many cultures but also many alien cultures with different religious values, Clingons & Volcans religious concepts come to mind.

Religions are evolutionary they evolve by the demands of us all, perhaps in the future there might be (drive-by-churches), confessions would take place like ordering a meal in a fast food rest. and then you drive by and pay!! to receive your pentence. A few hail mary's, whatever. (BTW. They have drive through wedding chappels in Las Vegas already.)

Godless.
 
There are going to be religions in the future? Surely not.
 
Originally posted by Jenyar
Well, if you look at history you can predict one thing for certain: greater polarization.
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I am not so sure.
The trends of cultural and religious differences and their influences on one another seems to wax and wane between polarization and syncretism depending on many different factors.

Lost,
I think, if you want to keep it as realistic and believable as possible, you should look at what political, technological and cultural (micro and macro) changes you forsee in your story and why they occur.
Then, follow those changes backwards to their perspective causes.
Then you can follow those causes and effects forward and see how they interract and influence each other.
With that, you can look back at historical social trends and come up with a plausible timeline of interrelated cause and effect relationships.

Unless, of course you just want to throw together a story for a passing grade in a school assignment.
Then just pull it all out of your ass. :p

What is the story about?
Why are you writing it?
 
I predict there will always be some kind of religions, but the ones based on mythical scripture will die down, or even die off, and ones based on science and reality(ie drlounatarianism:D) will start becoming popular.
People worshipping the universe and the planets and the stars etc, nature. Like the very first religions only now backed by science.
All these magical organised religions were just an embarrassing hiccup in human history and will surely be laughed at in the future rather heartily.
 
For the sake of the novel you're trying to write (And good luck to you, I'm a fellow writer, I can't wait to see you get your work published!) I'd look for the most intriguing of all the possibilities, no matter if there are possibilities more likely.

One thought might be that religion becomes even more a part of our lives, as in the older the document becomes the more people tend to revere it. Another might be that a major occurance has already happened, such as a Christian offshoot has claimed thier profit is the second coming of Jesus, and now they are the major religion.

The trend seems to be that people are pulling away from religons more and more, though, so maybe your future could have no religion. Of course, religion will always have it's fingerprint on society (Laws) but you could, for the sake of argument, depict a future where there is no religious moral code anymore. That would make for an interesting story.

Hope that helps!
JD
 
Thanks for the ideas, everyone.

I'm writing this story just for fun, no publishing, no assignment.

JDawg, that's actually what I was thinking. I was planning on having a new wave of prophets come to instill new doctrine about the "One and Only God".

I was also planning on having more an more religions be like Confucianism, where it was nothing but philosophy.

drlounatarianism. yes of course...:bugeye:
 
If you look at present trends and project a few hundred years into the future, you will see that Christianity will be reduced to a small cult religion, possibly underground as it was in the early days of Rome.

I can see three different scenarios:

1) After the fall of the US Empire, Islam, or versions of it, will dominate within totalitarian states and possibly all other religions will probably be banned or severely restricted.

2) Society at large would be divided into two distinct groups of rich and poor with many sublevels within the two communities. The richer classes will be mainly atheistic but oddly pious, while the others will develop myriad cults and offshoots of existing religions, which some of the richer classes will aspire to, infiltrate and take over.

3) After a nuclear holocaust that wipes out most of mankind and reduces cities to wastelands, the children born in an old school house located next to a shopping mall that both miraculously survived, having lost their parents young and having no knowledge of the written or spoken word, beget more children as they grow older, some of which survive and so forth until, after a few generations, the growing and ignorant population begins to revere the blackboard salvaged from the place that spawned their ancestors. Intrigued by the by now faded chalk marks scrawled across and down it depicting words they could never understand, a message that will eventually be interpreted by future intellectuals as meaning any number of things they choose it to, turning the board into a holy shrine, a symbol of the god that spawned them in that old school house and starting a new religion.

And as they begin to mutate from radiation poisoning, they will revere the old photos and mannequins of beautiful people that had been salvaged from the shopping mall and those images will become their gods and goddesses.
 
I do no think that the effects of technology and biological advances can be ignored, and also the findings from neuroscience.

Computing power is continuing to double every 12 months or so and the once perceived barriers to future growth seem to be being met with some very probable and likely theories. The expected inevitability is that human level AI will arrive within the next 20 years or so and then will advance beyond human level. If this does occur then we will be faced with a realization that humans are not so special and that the idea that we are built in the image of God but that our machines are more intelligent will pose something of a paradoxical dilemma for many. By losing the paramount position as the most dominant species on the planet must mean that God was not so clever after all.

Another major area for concern is anti-aging research which is growing massively around the world. If this problem is solved and inevitable death by old age is eliminated and that human lifetimes can be open-ended then how will that affect concepts like heaven and hell if we never have to go there?

And finally when neuroscience fully understands how the brain operates it will find that either what we call consciousness is an entirely emergent property of the brain or that there is some mystical realm that provides the source of thought etc. At this point everyone either becomes totally religious (the spirit realm has been discovered), or if consciousness is simply an emergent property, then most will realize that there is no such thing as a personal soul/spirit. In which case all religions that depend on such concepts, and that is nearly all of them, will be seen as meaningless and will simply fade away, just like the idea that the Earth is flat faded when truth was revealed.
 
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Trivial note

They have drive through wedding chappels in Las Vegas already
Click to expand...
And they have (had?) drive-through divorce in Salem, Oregon.
 
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