​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 is obvious. And yet, when it comes to religion, there is 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 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 (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 God, human nature, and the relationship between the divine and the human. However, we are suggesting that spiritual knowledge should not be understood as being found only in the existing traditions. Human consciousness, including our capacity for awareness of the 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, 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 6000 year old history of the human civilization and speculation on spiritual reality, to say nothing of the 40,000 years since the first appearance of evidence of human belief in a spiritual dimension, religion does indeed change (and in the next post we will look at the specific ways in which religion has changed over the course of human history). 
 
Canadian philosopher J.L. Schellenberg distinguishes between a synchronic and diachronic understanding of religion. A synchronic perspective looks at religious truth as fundamentally static and unchanging; a diachronic perspective looks at religious 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 of religion on this website.
 
Furthermore, in the context of that long process of slow, organic change 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. This website is devoted to exploring the premise that human spirituality is on the verge of such a tipping point, where the traditional relgiions that have been with us for over 2000 years, having lost 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 spiritual dimension.  As we will explore in the next post, 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 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 sense of Spirit), so we should feel confident that humanity today can set aside many of the concepts of the Axial Age spirituality which have served humanity well for 2000 years but may have reached the end of their relevance, while we remain “believers,” but believers of a somewhat different sort: believers in what will be referring to as post-Axial Age spirituality that 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. 

​This site deals with religion, and since religion commonly deals with God, one might think that material posted here will make frequent use of the word “God.” And yet that will not be the case, so an explanation is in order.
 
In many religions, “God” is indeed the commonly used term to refer to the ultimate being, spiritual entity, or “Something More” (beyond the dimension of time, space, and matter) that is the source, support, and destiny of the totality of all reality, or the Cosmos. In such religions, God is usually understood in some sense as a personal being, who communicates with humanity, is the source of moral law, responds to prayer and worship, guides and intervenes in human affairs, etc. Belief in this type of personal God is often referred to by scholars of religion as theism.
 
In the blog posts on this site, however, we will tend to shy away from using the term “God” to refer to whatever that “Something More” is. As I argue in Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century, many intelligent, good-hearted, spiritually-minded people today, considering themselves to be, or wishing that they could be, believers or “people of faith,” are sometimes reluctant to embrace traditional theism and its designation of “God” as the object of faith.
 
Of course, it’s easy to see why, over the long course of the evolution of humanity’s attempt to better understand the nature of the spiritual dimension, the object of faith would be associated with “personal” qualities such as moral goodness, love, freedom, wisdom, etc. These are uniquely human traits, and they are good and desirable. If there is a spiritual reality that is greater than humans (and everything else), it certainly should be understood to at least contain the best traits of human persons. So in that context it makes sense that, as human religious awareness evolved, the spiritual dimension came to be seen as, in some sense, “personal” and hence referred to as God, the supreme person.
 
But there also are some problems with referring to that Something More as a person. For starters, the theistic God of traditional religions tends to sometimes demonstrate some very unappealing personal or human traits: anger, jealousy, vengefulness, bias, and more. Many would-be believers today look at the God of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) and ask how could God behave in such a morally unworthy manner. Mature humans behave better than God sometimes behaves in the sacred texts of these traditional religions. If you doubt this, see Dan Barker’s God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, an admittedly very biased work which brings to the forefront the many Biblical passages that followers of Christianity and Judaism understandably wish to overlook.
 
In addition, some find the notion of a “personal” God, or a God who is conceived of in human-like terms, to be incredibly limited. To think of that Something More which governs the entire Cosmos in terms based on one particular species (the human) that has only briefly existed on one tiny planet (Earth) at one particular place in the Universe for only a brief moment in cosmic time would seem to be terribly limiting to say the least. God cannot be confined to human terms, they would argue. Perhaps it made sense to think of “God” in such limiting, anthropomorphic terms 2000 years ago, but that is no longer the case. We have outgrown the traditional way of thinking about and conceptualizing “God” that was developed at an earlier stage in the evolution of human spiritual awareness. “God” is so much more than that, and our language should properly reflect that more expansive sense of “God” that exists in the 21st century consciousness.
 
Unfortunately, we are in a transition period from one mode of spirituality to another, and while the old language of traditional theism has lost its usefulness for many people, meaningful new alternatives have not yet emerged. For now, as people of faith at the early stages of the transition to what we will call a post-Axial and post-theistic spirituality (more on this in subsequent posts), we will have to be content with referring to that mysterious, incomprehensible, Something More through the limited language options that are at our disposal.
 
Consequently, on this site we will tend to use terms such as Spirit, the Sacred, Ultimate Reality, Something More, spiritual dimension, and similar words and phrases. This is not to deny the personal quality of Spirit, and indeed, at times where it seems to fit, we will use the traditional word “God” in our remarks. But we want to emphasize that the traditional concept of a personal God who has human-like qualities which include anger, jealousy, vengefulness, etc., is simply not a credible and adequate way to think about Spirit for many 21st century humans. Humanity has outgrown certain aspects of anthropomorphic thinking about Spirit, and our language should be modified accordingly.
 
Developing this new religious language will be an enormous challenge, and in subsequent posts we will explore various aspects of this challenge in the context of what a post-Axial 21st century spirituality might look like.