Religion Changes - Always and Everywhere

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.