I hate to quote a whole post, but I am too tired to paraphrase. While reading the post I had an interesting thought, which I will get to in a second. First, I did not think Wright was working toward the idea that we would have a global religion. It is very hard for me to imagine such a thing. Put any 10 people in a room and try to get them all to agree on anything. I got the sense that Wright was saying that as science revealed more and more about how the world works there would be less need for religion to provide answers to big questions.Chris OConnor wrote:Wright ends Chapter 1 with a few words about the eventual emergence of a global religion.
But what would this global religion look like?
Unless I'm reading Wright wrong (that sounded funny) I bet he is saying (or will come to say in later chapters) that this future worldwide religion will arise after a slow gradual evolution of the existing world religions. The eventual world religion will no longer resemble Christianity, Islam or Judaism.
The global religion will one day ONLY address morality and will not attempt to give answers to how the universe and life came to be. After all religion has failed completely to answer these questions, as Wright explained when he went over the primitive animistic religions. And still today Christianity, Islam and Judaism clearly have it all wrong with regards to the origins of the cosmos and life. This is obvious to anyone with an elementary education in the sciences.
The realm of God is shrinking as man continues to understand more and more about how the universe behaves and operates. (The God of the gaps) I think Wright will eventually argue that there will one day be a gap left that science cannot and will not close. This gap is morality or how we should behave and treat one another. Maybe Wright feels this will be the last stand for religion.
Now, my interesting thought. God and religion are two different things -- related but not the same. Religion has many components, some in reality having very little to do with God. Let me back up for a minute. Lets just for a minute assume there is a God with a capital G. There are many religions, which one goes to the real God. None and all, right? I think Wright in his book is not totally ruling out the possibiltiy that there is some sort of something that is what we call God, a god that is seperated from the human institution of religion. What I am thinking Wright is working up to saying is that all of these different version of religion and all of the different conceptions of God are maturing or responding to the developments in human society (science and technology) in ways that are pulling us closer to a truth (true nature of God or that there is no God).