Characteristics of the Next Religion

2. The next religion will encourage and facilitate powerful religious experiences.

It has been said that only an unfortunate bishop has a saint in his diocese. This sums up the ambivalence that most religions feel about religious experience, which is above all a wild and unpredictable force. Belief-centered religions encourage the particular experiences that their belief system allows, but are quite afraid of all others. A Jewish boy who finds that he is born again in Christ has a serious problem, as does a fundamentalist woman who hears the call of the Great Mother. Liberal Christians are afraid even of Christian religious experiences like glossolalia, because they associate these experiences with the more repressive aspects of Christian dogma.

But a religion that values experience as experience (and not as support for this or that theological position) can welcome transcendent experiences of all sorts. There are many well-trod paths that lead to direct experience of the divine: meditation, yoga, fasting, ritual magick, chanting, ecstatic dancing, and a host of others. The next religion will encourage these practices and will not be threatened by what comes of them.

Scientism might ask "Why bother?" but by now the answer should be readily apparent. Whether one believes that divinity is inside us or transcends us, it is the ultimate source of new moral vision and new values. Whatever happened to Moses on Sinai, Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, or Paul on the road to Damascus, it was not the result of rational, scientific reflection. And if it had been, it would not have changed the world.

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