Where we are headed- The Second Axial Age and post-Axial Religion, part 3: Empirical Religion

​Let’s continue with our brief look at what a post-Axial religion might look like, with each aspect to be covered in more depth in later posts.
 
Our traditional religions, rooted in Axial Age spirituality, tend to be belief-oriented. That is to say, being religious is understood as primarily a cognitive act of choosing to think that certain propositions as defined in specific creeds, sacred texts, dogmas, theologies, etc., are true. However, the credibility of sacred texts and detailed doctrinal beliefs has been significantly diminished by the epistemological humility which, in the previous post, has been as deriving from a recognition of the cultural and historical contextual nature of all such doctrinal statements.
 
But if the future of religion is not grounded in doctrine, dogma, and reliance on divinely revealed sacred texts, then what will it be based on? What’s left as the basis for religious faith once our confidence in these traditional Axial Age factors has been substantially diminished?
 
We are suggesting that the religion of the future will likely be less rooted in declarative statements, theological arguments, and stories from ancient texts, and more grounded in the everyday awareness of the sacred quality of reality that remains available to people of faith even after the legitimacy of the doctrines and texts of the past have lost much of their credibility.
 
In a sense, this will simply be a return to a meaning of “faith” that brings us back to the origins of religion and that from which the verbal expressions of faith (texts, doctrine, dogma, etc.) derive. Belief in a proposition about a historical event whose veracity must be accepted without evidence, or in “blind faith,” is quite different from belief in a statement about the nature of reality that can be confirmed by one’s own immediate awareness, or experiential faith. In the present era when many of the traditional bases for religious faith are no longer credible for much of the educated population that thinks in 21st century terms, religious experience stands out as the most reliable, substantial, unassailable basis for belief in a spiritual reality.
 
This doesn’t mean that future believers all will be full-blown mystics who walk around in something like altered states of consciousness rooted in intense, prolonged non-dual experiences of the Sacred. Such overwhelming, rapturous nature of a mystical experience is just one type of spiritual experience. Equally valid and compelling is the everyday, ordinary sense of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos, an often vague but also confident sense that there really is “Something More” than a Universe of time, space, matter, and energy. This perception of a Spiritual dimension does not require intensive and difficult spiritual practices leading to a clearly identifiable moment of overwhelming spiritual illumination. Certainly such extraordinary religious experiences happen, and they are profoundly meaningful in the spiritual lives of those who have them. But for the everyday person of faith who has neither the opportunity nor the interest to pursue the rigorous practices that lead to such experiences, there is the simple, humble, easily acquired sense of Something – a Something which is supremely Good and which confers meaning to the Cosmos, even in spite of the daily messes, challenges, and tragedies of normal, everyday human existence. Leaving doctrines and sacred texts aside, each person still has access to those subtle, quiet, yet powerfully meaningful moments when one senses the presence of Spirit, the presence of the indefinable Something More that has never been adequately captured in doctrinal statements or pronouncements in sacred texts.
 
We can already see the emergence of this more experientially-oriented approach to religion in the growth of the “spiritual but not religious” population. Numerous polls have consistently found a steady growth in the number of people who, on the one hand, do not consider themselves to be “religious” in the sense of formally belonging to an existing tradition or accepting the doctrines of a given faith, while on the other hand identifying as “believers” in the sense of affirming the existence of a spiritual reality. In a sense, this trend is the leading edge of what might likely continue to evolve from a fringe movement to the most common expression of religion in the future: experiential, or empirical spirituality.