Why did you post this thread to 'Comparative Religion'? It seems to me to just be another of Sciforums' annoying political Stupidthreads that would probably be more appropriate in 'Politics' (aka the cesspool).
Then it's up to the rest of us to keep it within the realm of scholarship, eh?
Why does the subject line contain the word 'spiritual'? Why a "new religion"?
Because that's the way Darth is thinking.
Or at least the way he wants us to believe he's thinking. I admit that when a guy chooses the screen name "Darth Behemoth," which is flippant and tinged with evil, it's not easy to take him seriously about being very spiritual or founding a religion.
Can an individual just wake up and decide to "start a new religion" one day? Is that how it works?
Oh I think it's happened maybe a few times. L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology), for damn sure! How about Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), Joseph Smith (Latter-Day Saints or "Mormons") and George Fox (Society of Friends or "Quakers")? Heck, what about Mohammed???
Baha'ullah? Martin Luther? When you end up with a religion named after you, you probably invented it.
A one-man religion maybe, but what would that offer anyone else? If individuals are all going to be starting their their own new religions, then why wouldn't other people create their own religions for themselves? Why do you imagine that everyone would want to follow yours?
Dictionary definitions of the word "religion" do not rule out the possibility of a religion having only one member. However, Émile Durkheim insists that religion differs from private belief in that it is "something eminently social."
[from Wikipedia]
Indeed, looking back (and sideways) at all the world's religions, it seems that at their core each one contains an imperative to form or build a community, either by evangelism (many Christian and Muslim sects take this to an ugly and violent extreme) or by finding others who share the same beliefs and bonding with them.
Do "religions dedicated to irrationalism" even exist?
Surely none of their members would put it that way, but they are all based on a world view that is centered on irrationality. They're built upon
faith. Their evangelists quickly remind us that science is too, but they carefully avoid distinguishing between the
rational faith of science (the Earth has spun at the rate of one rotation every 24 hours since we've been able to measure it, so it's
rational to assume that it will continue to do so) and the
irrational faith of religion (God deliberately hides from us but we
irrationally believe he's there anyway).
I think Western society, American society in particular, is already deep into decline.
When Mrs. Fraggle was studying Latin American literature for her master's degree 30 years ago, she said, "Mark my words, that region will be the next center of the world economy and culture." She just didn't realize it would happen so fast that we'd live to see it. Brazil is already the world's sixth largest economy, and in a single generation Mexico has changed itself from a banana republic to a middle-class country and is quietly "re-shoring" U.S. manufacturing from those zero-quality slave-plants in China.
But I don't anticipate it ever falling apart into some absolutely individualistic war of all against all. It will just grow more stratified by class and more dictatorial as time goes on. It's already headed down that road. (Today's American politics is increasingly about who tomorrow's ruling elite will be.)
What we're witnessing is the Paradigm Shift from the Industrial Era to the Information Age. It's always scary to live on such a cusp, just see Dickens's observations on the Industrial Revolution. But civilization always emerges stronger, with a multiple-order-of-magnitude increase in GDP courtesy of the paradigm-shifting technology. (The paradigm-shifting technology of the Industrial Revolution was the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuel into the kinetic energy to drive industrial processes, leveraging the productivity of human and animal physical labor to an extent that no one could have dreamed of. The current paradigm shift is leveraging the productivity of our
mental labor.)
One of the key results of the information-based economy is a quantum increase in the individual's knowledge, particularly of what life is like elsewhere. Another is a quantum increase in the affordability of travel, and yet another is the loss of power of the traditional institutions to constrain the behavior of their constituents: governments, churches, the press, schools, even family and community are challenged by what people now know about myriad opportunities to live in some other way. As a result, those institutions are losing power rapidly.
Of course they use any means to slow that loss, including some pretty dishonorable tactics, such as the U.S. government's "War on Drugs" that has killed 30,000 Mexicans but made absolutely no change in drug use. But in the long run they fail. As I've noted before, the U.S. is now about 25% Latino and there are more Muslim religious services in Paris than Catholic.
What you're seeing is the death throes of the traditional institutions. Surely you noticed the implosion of the Soviet Union.
The Chinese were reading their memos and quickly hybridized their brand of communism with a little Confucianism (which teaches people to trust the people in power) and a whole lot of capitalism (which makes them a little less angry as they're watching their brand new TVs). Look at how the labor unions have fallen in the USA, once arguably our mightiest political force. The same is happening to the corporations, which are nothing more than artifacts of the Industrial Era, whose massive projects required more capital than any one family could invest, but are now incapable of competing with small startup firms in places like Estonia.
Information is the new "commodity," but unlike the old commodities, once you've created it you can duplicate it and distribute it for practically no cost. This is going to turn everything we think we know about economics on its head. And as economics goes, so goes government!
If you are anticipating the kind of all-against-all anarchy in which survivalism is a viable alternative, then gun control would probably be the last thing on the agenda. People would need to be arming themselves before it happens, so as to be able to defend themselves.
None of you young people get it. Why does the Old Fart have to explain it to you?
The next war will be fought in cyberspace. Guns are obsolete. Only hoodlums (and wackos like the NRA and Al Qaeda) use them anymore. The death toll from actual traditional explosive-based warfare is dropping with every decade. A battle that kills fifty people is now front-page news. In WWII that would have been considered a slow day and they'd break out the hooch. Thirty thousand Americans are killed by civilian gunfire every year (that includes suicides, which are slightly more than half the total)--and in some years that's probably greater than the world's total war casualties.
No dude, if you want to survive the next war, keep your antivirus software up to date. And lobby the idiots in Congress and the state legislatures to improve the cybersecurity in America's
power grid. The Chinese could probably take it down
right now. They just won't because their economy is a subsidiary of ours. Their hackers are probably working overtime to fix the security holes in all the U.S. networks so the Russians and Iranians can't get in.
But I don't anticipate the military unraveling. It's more likely that the military will just slowly turn into the enforcement arm of the new ruling elites.
The U.S. military is hardly the world's leader in cyberwar and cybersecurity. For that you have to hire the Israelis. Who hacked into Iran's
last nuclear program and shut it down?
That might conceivably be the occasion for a second American Revolution, in the name of popular liberty, and that would probably require some kind of unconventional insurgency (which experience has shown can be quite effective against unpopular conventional armies). Again, that would require that the population have access to arms.
You're still thinking inside the box. The population already has access to the internet. U.S. cybersecurity is so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if the fourteen-year-old geek who lives in the house next to you isn't already trying to hack into our military networks.
No doubt that's one of the reasons why there's so much agitation among the ruling elites right now to restrict the little person's access to firearms out there in 'flyover country'.
Huh? The ruling elites cave in to the NRA once a week. This country is basically run by the gun nuts.
