06-30-2019, 11:56 AM
(06-30-2019, 03:02 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(06-30-2019, 02:48 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(06-28-2019, 06:55 AM)David Horn Wrote: Religion is already tanking in advanced countries, and it's not limited to Christianity either. l agree that transhumanism will finish the job, but it's already started as a contest between science-based and mystical-based thinking. I hope that the less rigorous mystical-based thinking doesn't disappear entirely. There's value there that science, in its rigor, can't duplicate. That said, I'm an atheist.
Civic generations are always uninterested in mystical realms. Their passion is politics, science and engineering. So no doubt that Millennials are religiously apathetic, but something will certainly happen during the 2T.
I was also thinking about the desire for personal immortality. Liberalism and consumerism cannot promise that, so if transhumanism doesn't arrive even Millennials will start looking for God when they are old.
Weren't Civics in America religious in the post war era? Wasn't that when Church membership was through the roof?
Civics loved formal organizations from the PTA to Masonic lodges, the VFW and American Legion... and above all, labor unions! Religion adapted to fit that. This fits the first generation in American history in which Scouting was generally available to youth. Politics, science, and engineering themselves are highly organized in nature. The GI Generation was likely to insist upon rationality in religion so that it would be coherent.
It could be that Millennial young adults will see a depraved and inequitable social order, see something missing, and promote some minimal religion as a means of instilling some morality and economic decency in society. The minimal religion will not have 'believe it or burn' tests of faith such as young-earth creationism or acceptance of the world-wide flood as historical fact. Maybe religion will be one means of giving dignity to people in economic distress while castigating the flamboyant excesses of elite indulgence.
If not Christianity, then it could be an 'Americanized' Islam or Buddhism. Such would be heretical to orthodox Islam or Buddhism, but Civic types are rarely purists unless extremists. Extremism does badly in a 2T, whether Jacobinism, Communism, or the KKK. I can easily see Millennial adults who know what went wrong with Boomers trying to instill the parts of the Bible that they understand (the ethical teachings of the Hebrew prophets, and with that the Sermon on the Mount if Christian) as instruction on how to treat people. That is before I introduce such secular guides as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Millennial adults will not want to raise a generation of Trump-like playboys, even among the elites.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.