Extra-Solar Religion and Science

 

Evolution of Religion

The fact that hyperspace energy interfaces with every particle in every neuron and every glial cell in the brain makes me think that this would be the channel for spirit communication. The generation of a specific vision probably involves an exact stimulation at some very small region deep within the brain. Radio waves have difficulty in penetrating the skull selectively to any depth or with any degree of precision.

While I am guessing that an eternity interlacing spacetime may provide the channel for messages like this, I do not think we have enough information about such interactions to draw a conclusion of how such spirit messages might actually be conveyed. We know nothing about the encoding or modulation that might be involved or the energy exchange across the spacetime interface, or how energy conservation is maintained. There may be a wave involved as in particle guidance.

We may gradually more details in the next 60 years, or when an extra-solar civilization explains it to us. But the experience to me, and reportedly to Saul, was real and we responded to what we heard. And that points towards a definition of religion.

One is acting religiously if one acts in response to phenomena for which one does not have a rational explanation but which conforms to a religious view of reality. One does not have a religion simply by recognizing there are things one cannot explain. But an act may be considered religious if an unexplainable phenomenon serves as an authoritative guide for intentional behavior. In the simplest case, one has a personal spirit religion, shared with no one other than a spirit one encounters.

People may come together for social discussion of personal spiritual experiences, or they may form an organization to explore the implications of their religious experiences further. This is likely if their nation has begun to develop a hierarchical structure of government as its population and complexity grows. An organized religion may then appear that adopts the hierarchical structure of other parts of society. Administrator Saul was very much part of such a hierarchy, he knew very well how to organize people, and was a key person in setting up the administration of Christianity, which then went on to evolve various rituals and dogma, including confessional privilege.

When we ask about the nature of an extra-solar religion, we are usually thinking of a planet-wide organized religion that can respond to our questions with single voice. Considering that the way the number of Earth's religions has grown over the centuries, the evolution of a single planet-wide religion could take many millennia.

It took a miracle to occur to re-organize the intensely personal religious movement of early Christianity, based on individuals expressing loving compassion for each other, when its local success threatened the established religious and social order. But it succeeded and became a large organization attempting to reach the same goals through formal channels of assistance to those needing help. The process involved construction of temples and administrative buildings and formalizing sets of religious strictures, codes, and rituals. As that type of religion has been declining on Earth as personal spirit religions have been growing, we should be ready for traces such a trend in an extra-solar religion that may have been shaped in the other direction by later development directed towards planet survival.

This could, perhaps, involve uniting a global variety of organized and personal religions under one core ethic (like that developed on Earth by the world nations of 1948) under a deity with a non-specific name, like a perfect mind (with no identification of time or place of origin, or language, other than Earth). Within such a concept  each religion could find the personality of its own god, while deriving its moral system from the core ethic, and pursuing a goal of saving the planet's spirit within a mutually supportive ecosystem.

 7/13/2020  11

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. . .a moment expressed while the poet is not the author but the subject of   . . .