Guide Bible Stories for Secular Humanists

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Here are eight of World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow's most controversial stories, including three previously uncollected ones. Each deals with a "sacred.
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While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them? One answer, of course, is that we simply get on with our lives.

Munificent economies, good government, solid education and effective rule of law can ensure that we rub along happily without any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some of the societies with the highest proportions of non-believers are among the most secure and harmonious on Earth. What remains debatable, however, is whether they can afford to be irreligious because they have strong secular institutions — or whether being secular has helped them achieve social stability.

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Religionists say even secular institutions have religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas about justice based on social norms established by religions. The likes of the New Atheists , on the other hand, argue that religion amounts to little more than superstition, and abandoning it will enable societies to improve their lot more effectively.

Connor Wood is not so sure. Financial exchanges, where people meet to conduct highly ritualised trading activity, seem quite like temples to Mammon, too. In fact, religions, even the defunct ones, can provide uncannily appropriate metaphors for many of the more intractable features of modern life. The pseudo-religious social order might work well when times are good. But when the social contract becomes stressed — through identity politics, culture wars or economic instability — Wood suggests the consequence is what we see today: the rise of authoritarians in country after country.

He cites research showing that people ignore authoritarian pitches until they sense a deterioration of social norms.

Perhaps one of the major religions might change its form enough to win back non-believers in significant numbers. There is precedent for this: in the s, Christianity was ailing in the US, having become dull and formal even as the Age of Reason saw secular rationalism in the ascendant. The parallels with today are easy to draw, but Woodhead is sceptical that Christianity or other world religions can make up the ground they have lost, in the long term.

Once the founders of libraries and universities, they are no longer the key sponsors of intellectual thought. And their tendency to claim we sit at the pinnacle of creation is undermined by a growing sense that humans are not so very significant in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps a new religion will emerge to fill the void? Again, Woodhead is sceptical. In the secular West, such support is unlikely to be forthcoming, with the possible exception of the US. In Russia, by contrast, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing.

Online movements gain followers at rates unimaginable in the past. MeToo started out as a hashtag expressing anger and solidarity but now stands for real changes to long-standing social norms. And Extinction Rebellion has striven, with considerable success, to trigger a radical shift in attitudes to the crises in climate change and biodiversity. None of these are religions, of course, but they do share parallels with nascent belief systems — particularly that key functionalist objective of fostering a sense of community and shared purpose.

Some have confessional and sacrificial elements, too. So, given time and motivation, could something more explicitly religious grow out of an online community? The full proposition is a complicated logic puzzle, but crudely put, it goes that when a benevolent super-intelligence emerges, it will want to do as much good as possible — and the earlier it comes into existence, the more good it will be able to do.

An artificial super-intelligence could have some of the qualities of a deity Credit: Getty Images.

Their case was not helped by the fact that many Rationalists are strongly committed to other startling ideas about artificial intelligence, ranging from AIs that destroy the world by accident to human-machine hybrids that would transcend all mortal limitations. Such esoteric beliefs have arisen throughout history, but the ease with which we can now build a community around them is new. The 17th-Century French mathematician suggested non-believers should nonetheless go through the motions of religious observance, just in case a vengeful God does turn out to exist.

Now there is, comes the reply. Levandowski, who made a fortune through self-driving cars, hit the headlines in when it became public knowledge that he had founded a church, Way of the Future , dedicated to bringing about a peaceful transition to a world mostly run by super-intelligent machines.

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We plan on doing so by keeping track of who has done what and for how long to help the peaceful and respectful transition. Levandowski is not alone. Other fledgling transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality — a new spin on the promise of eternal life.

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Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism. Are these movements for real? But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere flirtation or idle curiosity — perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony — can end in a sincere search for truth. The UK census found that Jediism, the fictional faith observed by the good guys in Star Wars , was the fourth largest religion: nearly , people had been inspired to claim it, initially by a tongue-in-cheek online campaign.

Ten years later, it had dropped to seventh place, leading many to dismiss it as a prank.

Bible Stories for Secular Humanists

But as Singler notes, that is still an awful lot of people — and a lot longer than most viral campaigns endure. But officials who apparently assumed it was not a genuine census answer did not record it as such. Scientology was barred from recognition as a religion for many years in the UK because it did not have a Supreme Being — something that could also be said of Buddhism. In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since that there is no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles.

The acid test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.



And such changes are exactly what the founders of some new religious movements want. Official status is irrelevant if you can win thousands or even millions of followers to your cause. After a decade spent working on engineering solutions to climate change, its founder Olya Irzak came to the conclusion that the real problem lay not some much in finding technical solutions, but in winning social support for them. So three years ago, Irzak and some friends set about building one.

Periodically they include rituals, particularly at traditional holidays. I feel so sorry for deluded atheists. May God forgive you when your time comes and the hate you spread needs to be explained. Can you point what hate is being spread by atheists by virtue of their atheism please? I cannot think of any but perhaps I am not looking hard enough. I can certainly think of lots and lots of hate spread by religious people by virtue of their religious beliefs. I feel so sorry for you deluded Christians. Im a born again christian 8yr now. And in that 8yrs god has not spoken to me i havnt seeing him heard him.

Havnt seeing any miracle or anyone getting healed. If god does exist why does he make it so hard for people to believe he is real instead he is da invisible man hiding in da clouds waiting for you to sin so he can punish you. If you believe in god you go to heaven an if u dont belive he puts you in hell. I thought god was all knowing an all loving and a just god. Why didnt he make himself known to all man an there wodnt be thousands of belief systems in the world today. That is confusion.. The only thing left for me is hope.

Hope there is a just loving god. Thank you. Is there anyone that has any kind of answer. Jon, to say there is a god then god created evil. He created everything, right? Jon, think about it. How does anyone know that this god exists? The bible is the word of god; how do we know?