Religion Changes – Always and Everywhere
 
Religion, like everything else, changes. Believers may tend to view their religion as the embodiment of eternal truths that never change, but the historical study of religion would suggest otherwise.
 
Indeed, all human knowledge changes, or evolves, over time, generally (but not always) in a progressive, expanding direction. This is clear with regard to secular knowledge: 21st century physicians and other health care providers don’t look to the writings of Galen (2nd century) when seeking guidance on how to treat an illness. NASA doesn’t consult Ptolemy (2nd century) for astronomical guidance when planning the complex task of launching a satellite into orbit. If you’re planning on taking a trip to China, you don’t do so based on a map from the time of Marco Polo (13th century).  Clearly, then, human knowledge has evolved over time. What the human species knows about the nature of things and how they work in the 21st century has changed considerably since what was known in pre-modern times. We simply know more today than we knew in times past, in virtually all fields of knowledge: science, medicine, engineering, agriculture, and on and on. At least in certain ways, humans simply do not think the same way that we thought 2000 years ago. Or at least, in most areas we don’t…
 
The progressive evolution of secular knowledge, both sensory-based and abstract, is obvious. And yet, when it comes to religion, there is often a strong tendency to look to the past for truth, seeking wisdom about spiritual matters in books, doctrines, and practices that emerged on the scene 2000 years ago and longer. Why are we so reluctant to consider the possibility that spiritual/religious knowledge, like all forms of human knowledge, evolves and expands over time? When you step back and contemplate this practice of 21st century humans habitually and without hesitation looking to ancient books for knowledge about something that is presumed to be a present-day reality (Spirit/God), the practice might appear to some to be a bit strange!
 
This is not to deny that there is much wisdom in the ancient religious traditions: of course there is, and that accounts for the persistence of these traditions over centuries. The traditional religions do indeed provide us with profound insights into the nature of Spirit/God, human nature, and the relationship between the transcendent and the human. However, we are suggesting that spiritual knowledge should not be understood as being found only in those traditions which originated centuries-ago in the Axial Age and are still with us today. Human consciousness, including our capacity for awareness of the transcendent, spiritual dimension, evolves over time, and we should be receptive to the new expressions of the nature of Spirit that grow out of that ever-evolving spiritual sensibility.
 
To some extent, given the slow, organic pace of the evolution of human spiritual consciousness over very long periods of time, that evolution can be hard to notice, and it might appear to believers at any given fixed point in time to be the case that religion does not change at all, simply due to the slow pace at which it does change. But that perception is incorrect, an error rooted in the inability of humans to temporally contextualize those things that take more than a generation, or century, or millennium to change. Viewed from the more expansive, comprehensive perspective of the approximately 40,000 (or more) year-old human awareness of a spiritual dimension and the 6,000 year-old history of human philosophical and theological speculation on the nature of that spiritual reality, religion does indeed change. 
 
Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg distinguishes between a synchronic and diachronic understanding of religion. A synchronic perspective looks at spiritual truth as fundamentally static and unchanging; a diachronic perspective looks at spiritual truth as something that is constantly changing, like all forms of human awareness, as human consciousness evolves over time. Clearly, we are adopting a diachronic perspective in the blogs on this site.
 
Furthermore, in the context of that long process of slow, organic changes in human awareness of Spirit, things periodically reach a tipping point where there appears to be a dramatic transition to something new that is substantially different from all that proceeded it. We are suggesting that that human spirituality is on the verge of such a tipping point, where the traditional religions that have been with us for over 2000 years have lost much of their credibility and hold on the consciousness of many contemporary humans who have a fully informed 21st century sensibility.
 
But this does not mean that we are headed into a non-religious era.  Rather, it means that we are entering into the early stages of a transition to a religious era that will be characterized by a different way of thinking about and acting toward the transcendent dimension of the Cosmos. Such a tipping point and transition to a different form of spiritual awareness occurred during a period which historians of religion refer to as the Axial Age, which ran from roughly (very roughly – one could extend the dates by a couple centuries in either direction) the 8th to 3rd centuries BCE.  Just as our Axial Age ancestors gradually set aside and rejected the spiritual concepts of pre-Axial religion (animism, polytheism) but still remained religious, albeit in the context of a new Axial Age spirituality (grounded in a more unitary and moral sense of Spirit), so we should feel confident that humanity today can set aside many of the concepts of the Axial Age spirituality which has served humanity well for 2000 years but may have reached the end of its relevance, while we remain “believers,” but believers of a somewhat different sort: believers in what we refer to as post-Axial Age or post-traditional spirituality, which is only in the early stages of emergence from the Axial traditions that it is evolving out of and slowly replacing.
 
The nature of that slowly emerging post-Axial spirituality is the main topic of this website, as well as Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed, as we explore what a religion of the 21st century and beyond might look like.
 

​Thoreau and Evolving Spiritual Awareness

Readers who have followed the posts on this site are likely to be puzzled by the last three short posts, all of which have been based on passages from Henry David Thoreau.* What, might one ask, does an 18th century New England Transcendentalist have to do with the evolving nature of religion, which is the theme of this site?
Thoreau’s many passages describing his experience of the Sacred in the natural world sometimes are reminiscent of what some might call “paganism” (or, to use the far less pejorative label, animistic religions). In turn, some might then argue that this is evidence that religious consciousness doesn’t really evolve at all. If pre-Christian animists and an 18th century American transcendentalist both had a similar spiritual sensitivity to the presence of Spirit in the natural world, what evidence is there of an evolving spiritual consciousness over a span of more than 2000 years?
To that challenge, we would offer two points to consider:
 
1. Evolution and the principle of “Transcend and Include”
To suggest, as we do,  that the evolution of human spiritual awareness demonstrates an ever more expansive and fuller sense of Spirit, is not to imply that earlier spiritual experiential senses of the Sacred were false and should be rejected. Evolution always proceeds according to the pattern of transcend and include, both in the evolution of matter and the evolution of consciousness.
Ken Wilber consistently emphasizes this important insight: while evolution is a process which is constantly leading to entities with increased complexity and new traits that are different from and more complex, functional, and adaptive than what preceded them, those preceding stages are not destroyed or abandoned, but rather maintained as the basis for the newly evolved entities. In the physical realm, the formation of a molecule “transcends”, or is more than, the particles of which the molecule is composed, but the existence of the molecule does not (and cannot) destroy those particles. Similarly, an organ which is composed of a complex arrangement of cells is more than those cells, but it does not in any way negate them. And, of course, a human which is composed of a variety of organs acquires capacities (including consciousness) that are not found in any of those individual organs, but the human entity remains dependent on the organs for its material existence.
With regard to the evolution of spiritual consciousness, the obvious expansion of the human sense of Spirit in no way negates the earlier sense of Spirit, but it does expand the depth and breadth of our awareness of the Sacred. In Thoreau’s case, while he possessed a profound sense of the presence of Spirit in nature, he did so in a manner that was free from the mythic and anthropomorphic projections, as well as the sometimes brutal ethical elements (sacrificial practices of various types, including sentient beings) that are found in earlier expressions of animistic spirituality. In a sense, Thoreau’s spirituality includes the animistic sense of immanent Spirit in the natural world but also transcends it by removing the culturally conditioned mythic and anthropomorphic dimensions and expanding the circle of moral empathy.
 
2. An appropriate sense of temporal contextualization
In looking at evolution in general or spiritual evolution specifically, it is necessary to keep in mind the basic truth that evolution proceeds over vast stretches of time. That humans in the first century c.e. thought about spiritual matters in ways that are similar to how many humans think about such things today is not surprising, given that 2000 years is a very short period of time when we’re looking at evolutionary development. Philosopher J.L. Schellenberg has explored this theme in great depth in his wonderful trilogy on religious faith, where he repeatedly urges us to consider humanity as a fairly new, immature species, that has only recently acquired the capacity to experience and reflect upon the presence of a Transcendent or Spiritual reality.
Of course, some things have changed if we look at the evolution of the human spiritual sensibility from Neolithic pre-Axial cultures to today. A greater sense of the moral quality of Spirit and an ever-expanding sense of moral responsibility beyond the human species to other sentient beings are important evolutionary developments in spiritual awareness, and 3000 years is a relatively short period of time for such a development to occur.
So one should not be surprised to find animistic elements of a nature-based spirituality in Thoreau (and his fellow Transcendentalists), nor should one be surprised that Thoreau’s spiritual awareness is in some ways different from what preceded him. That’s how evolution works. That’s “transcend and include.”
 
All of this leads to the most intriguing question: what happens next?
Yes, it will take centuries or perhaps millennia for the next stage in the evolution of human spirituality to emerge. And yes, that process will be so slow and organic that it likely will go largely unnoticed. And in all likelihood, it will lead to a spiritual awareness that is utterly incomprehensible to 21st century humans, in the same way that non-dual mysticism and the moral duty to all sentient beings would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors from 40,000 years ago when, just yesterday, the religious sensibility appears to have emerged in our species.  How will the slowly evolving capacity of human consciousness to experientially intuit the spiritual element of the Cosmos, following the principle of transcend and include, manifest in new forms of spiritual experience and understanding?
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*It should be noted that Thoreau enthusiastically read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shortly after its publication, although, of course, he did not apply the concept of evolution to consciousness or spiritual experience.