Characteristics of the next religion
6. The next religion will empower groups and individuals
to create new rituals.
Ritual and symbol speak to a part of our psyche that
is deaf to reason. Our self-images are virtually impervious to rational
argument, and so we need rituals to mark major life-transitions like marriage,
coming of age, and the birth or death of loved ones. In addition, we need
rituals to deal with the painful residue of our experiences, such as excessive
guilt or traumatic memories. Our current religions have preserved a number
of important ancient rituals, but somehow they have lost the ability to
create new ones. And so we lack rituals to mark life transitions that our
ancestors did not face, such as divorce or retirement.
The knowledge base necessary to create meaningful
rituals, however, has not been lost. It has just been driven underground
into Wiccan works such as Starhawk's Spiral Dance or the sometimes-lucid,
sometimes-arcane writings of the English mystic and trickster Aleister
Crowley. The next religion will re-inject these ideas into the mainstream,
and the ability to create rituals will be disseminated to the masses, rather
than held by a priesthood.