Nicolas Forero speculates about a new religion founded on lifelong learning practices: Lifelong learning is the continuous process of acquiring, challenging, and refining knowledge and beliefs. This process demands critical thinking and openness to new perspectives. The term “lifelong learning” suggests a pursuit that lasts a lifetime, making it more suitable to turn into a … Read more“What If We Made Lifelong Learning a Religion?”
George Adams, the author of the forthcoming Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century, writes for iai.tv on the emergent spiritualities of the 21st century and beyond: We are suggesting that what’s left is precisely that intuitive, experiential, difficult-to-articulate, but nonetheless solidly real and epistemologically convincing, intuitive sense of Spirit. More specifically, we argue that … Read more“Spiritual but not religious: The end of belief”
Rémi Sussan’s 2014 article for Tryangle (here translated from French into English) explores many avenues and possibilities of CultPunk/Poetic Faith: The creation of mythological pantheons is therefore the first step towards a true DIY religion. But it is very rare to encounter entirely original pantheons, with no link to the past. In general, it is … Read more“Tutorial: How to Create Your Own Religion?”
An elegant expression of the CultPunk/Poetic Faith perspective courtesy of Ross Douthat, writing for The New York Times: Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for manifesting desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways this is an extension of the … Read more“Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful.”
Arthur C. Brooks writes for The Atlantic, pointing out that spiritual practice is at least as important as feeling and faith; perhaps no more so than for the growing demographic of those who profess to be “spiritual but not religious”. The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. … Read more“How to Find Your Faith: the key to transcendence starts with a practice, not your feelings”
Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves writes: Theistic religions often only differ from nontheistic religions, at their core, only in degree of intellectual humility. We identify with our mythology, our values and ethics are contextualized by our understanding of Satanism, but we view all knowledge as provisional, as we religiously believe in the value of intellectual … Read more“The Demons of Satanism & the Religions of the Nontheistic”
Author Craig Chalquist on Lamplight, the religion of his Assembling Terrania Cycle of stories: Even more than readers, writers find themselves astonished by unexpected plot twists. In the story “Ten Lamps,” a mysterious philosopher named Simeon writes down ten cosmic operating principles that work at any scale, even inside us. One of these Lamps declares … Read moreLamplight
Chris Letheby writes for Psyche: Mystical-type experiences are the phenomena that people most commonly feel to be spiritual. So, if we want to know whether spirituality is necessarily always focused on non-naturalistic ideas, one obvious approach is to ask people who’ve had such an experience what it meant to them. Qualitative researchers have done this, … Read more“Psychedelics show religion isn’t the only route to spirituality”
Ross Barkan writes for The Guardian on the strange meldings of the nascent neo-Romantic movement: Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment … Read more“The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms”
An excerpt from the ever-increasingly-iconic Erik Davis’ 2006 essay on emergent cultic activity at Black Rock City: Thus it is with some trepidation that I turn to one of the more vexing questions that one might ask about Burning Man: can or should we speak of the event as a sacred gathering? Even if we … Read more“Beyond Belief: The Cults of Burning Man”
