The way I look at it, why take a religious belief if it does not tell anything about what is larger than ourselves and what’s left after we die? Religion is about the knowing there is something larger than yourself, greater than your own life, more encompassing and coextensive in space and time, that was here before you were born and will continue after you are gone. It is about looking up, inside to the smallest small and out to the largest large.
In the past men got religion through revelation, hearing voices from the gods. I have expressed the thought in other pages that these voices came from inside the heads of seers and not from gods above and altered states of awareness. We moderns believe in acquiring knowledge by practical means, mostly through observation and figuring things out. Less than 100 years ago, we did not know with a certainty of any galaxies other than our own. Now as we look up at the sky, with or without special instruments, we can be sure we are gazing almost infinitely far and back into space-time extending billions of years.
Most of the human race has yet to digest these concepts, as they are still steeped in religious understanding alone. But for the first time in history, knowledgable persons have entered a post-religious age where we can know our place in the universe. Further knowledge is revealed not by prophets or seers of the past, but emanates from scientific discovery and exploration. In our younger days we postulated the presence of greater gods, but now we of see the truth with our own eyes. Truth is convincingly and objectively available to everyone, not the select.
One dichotomy between religion and science is the choice of giver of truth. For Religion the seer, is chosen for particular characteristics, though for me, it is most difficult to say what those characteristics are. What separates Moses, Isaiah, Jonah, Jesus, Buddha, from the rest of us, is hard to say except maybe form of manic belief, or alternate mental state. For the sciences discovery is more quotidian or ordinary. Scientist discoverers are merely awake persons not in any mystical state of awareness. Scientists don’t differ much from the rest of us. Scientists may share with religious seers, a bit more of an imaginative faculty than run of the mill humans.
Religion may still be marketable if it taps into our need to know about the next world we are destined for after our death, even if that is wishful thinking. Science does not do that as well. Religion also still has a place as a reminder about an inner sense, basic human desires and how we think. For instance the idea that people who do heinous things have exactly the same end, that is oblivion, as others who spend their time on this earth selflessly, is abhorrent to most of us. I suppose you can argue that the saintly person lives a better life on this earthly plane than workers of iniquity. But the idea of a post-death world which we derive from belief and wishful thinking, and has no empirical evidence, comes partly from the strong human need for just comeuppance. That is why I love Dante who puts all humans on a proper shelf, as you can see from my earlier essays here.
In my own personal efforts to speculate about a world after I am gone, I exploit methods of the past including religious and mystical speculations, which for me still harbor shards of light, I still find useful and find difficult to dislodge, and even wishful thinking. I have a hunch many science based understandings will also over the course of time, be proven false, no, not just a hunch, because science is about overturning past truths with the light of future discovery. Science is merely the fashionable method to get to the truths that concern all of us. All methods of finding truth have intrinsic advantages and disadvantages. The pitfalls of ancient and religious method are obvious to most of us, In all likelihood basic techniques of the scientific process will eventually be found to be false.
In speculating on the future my sense is that will need to scour inside our heads and out, since many of the keys to human desires and insights derive from ancient sources as well as scientific inquiry. What do we want and need, what is intrinsic in human existence will find insight in historic myths, no longer accepted as being literally true, that fathom human desires, traits and proclivities.
In other words, I find it beneficial to look inside and out, far and near at exceptionally large and minuscule scales. As for the place of humans we find ourselves somewhere in the middle of these examinations in terms of size. Increasingly we find, in physics and astronomy and biology, tell us about characteristics of the human mind itself. Mathematical and astronomical calculations, the very essence of mathematics, may be more of a human character trait, a style of thought. We take math for granted, and hold in highest regard. Yet it’s possible math says much more about us, than it does about the external world, as mathematics is a mode of thought. When we come to find out about them, our own human mathematical or scientific style of thought may turn out to bear faint resemblance to other models emanating from a different cognitive structure of strange cognizant ectoplasmic beings of other worlds, should we ever meet them.