Throughout the Old Testament the Same Pattern Emerges Again and Again

Tomorrow's Gods: What is the future of religion?

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Throughout history, people'south faith and their attachments to religious institutions take transformed, argues Sumit Paul-Choudhury. So what's adjacent?

Before Mohammed, before Jesus, before Buddha, there was Zoroaster. Some 3,500 years ago, in Bronze Historic period Iran, he had a vision of the one supreme God. A yard years afterward, Zoroastrianism, the world's first nifty monotheistic religion, was the official faith of the mighty Persian Empire, its fire temples attended by millions of adherents. A g years after that, the empire collapsed, and the followers of Zoroaster were persecuted and converted to the new organized religion of their conquerors, Islam.

Some other 1,500 years afterward – today – Zoroastrianism is a dying faith, its sacred flames tended by ever fewer worshippers.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are as well oddly bullheaded to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a organized religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse pantheons are now considered legends, non holy writ.

Even today's dominant religions accept continually evolved throughout history. Early Christianity, for example, was a truly broad church building: ancient documents include yarns about Jesus' family life and testaments to the nobility of Judas. It took three centuries for the Christian church to consolidate around a canon of scriptures – and so in 1054 it divide into the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. Since and so, Christianity has continued both to grow and to splinter into ever more than disparate groups, from silent Quakers to snake-treatment Pentecostalists.

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If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you lot might turn down the idea that it volition alter at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our behavior may be today, they are probable in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

If religions have changed so dramatically in the past, how might they change in the future? Is there any substance to the claim that belief in gods and deities will die out altogether? And as our civilisation and its technologies get increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship sally? (Find out what it would mean if AI developed a "soul".)

A flame burns in a Zoroastrian Burn down Temple, possibly for more than a millennium (Credit: Getty Images)

To answer these questions, a good starting point is to enquire: why practice nosotros have faith in the first place?

Reason to believe

One notorious reply comes from Voltaire, the 18th Century French polymath, who wrote: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."Considering Voltaire was a trenchant critic of organised religion, this quip is often quoted cynically. But in fact, he was being perfectly sincere. He was arguing that conventionalities in God is necessary for club to office, fifty-fifty if he didn't approve of the monopoly the church held over that belief.

Many modern students of religion agree. The wide thought that a shared faith serves the needs of a society is known as the functionalist view of faith. There are many functionalist hypotheses, from the idea that religion is the "opium of the masses", used by the powerful to control the poor, to the proposal that organized religion supports the abstract intellectualism required for science and police. One recurring theme is social cohesion: religion brings together a community, who might and then form a hunting political party, enhance a temple or support a political party.

Those faiths that suffer are "the long-term products of extraordinarily complex cultural pressures, selection processes, and evolution", writes Connor Wood of the Middle for Heed and Civilisation in Boston, Massachusetts on the religious reference website Patheos, where he blogs about the scientific study of religion. New religious movements are built-in all the time, but virtually don't survive long. They must compete with other faiths for followers and survive potentially hostile social and political environments.

Under this argument, any religion that does endure has to offer its adherents tangible benefits. Christianity, for example, was just one of many religious movements that came and generally went during the course of the Roman Empire. According to Wood, it was set apart by its ethos of caring for the sick – meaning more Christians survived outbreaks of affliction than pagan Romans. Islam, too, initially attracted followers past emphasising honour, humility and charity – qualities which were not endemic in turbulent 7th-Century Arabia. (Read about the "light triad" traits that can make you lot a good person.)

Given this, we might await the grade that religion takes to follow the function information technology plays in a particular society – or every bit Voltaire might have put it, that different societies will invent the particular gods they need. Conversely, nosotros might expect similar societies to accept similar religions, fifty-fifty if they have adult in isolation. And there is some evidence for that – although when it comes to faith, at that place are always exceptions to whatever rule.

Belief in "Big Gods" allowed the formation of societies made up of strangers (Credit: Getty Images)

Hunter-gatherers, for example, tend to believe that all objects – whether brute, vegetable or mineral – accept supernatural aspects (animism) and that the world is imbued with supernatural forces (animatism). These must be understood and respected; human morality generally doesn't effigy significantly. This worldview makes sense for groups likewise small to need abstract codes of conduct, but who must know their surroundings intimately. (An exception: Shinto, an ancient animist religion, is still widely practised in hyper-modern Japan.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the teeming societies of the Westward are at least nominally faithful to religions in which a single watchful, all-powerful god lays downwardly, and sometimes enforces, moral instructions: Yahweh, Christ and Allah. The psychologist Ara Norenzayan argues it was belief in these "Large Gods" that immune the germination of societies made upward of large numbers of strangers. Whether that conventionalities constitutes cause or effect has recently been disputed, but the result is that sharing a faith allows people to co-exist (relatively) peacefully. The knowledge that Big God is watching makes sure we behave ourselves.

Or at least, information technology did. Today, many of our societies are huge and multicultural: adherents of many faiths co-exist with each other – and with a growing number of people who say they take no religion at all. Nosotros obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to sympathize and shape the world.

Given all that, in that location's a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no hereafter.

Imagine in that location's no sky

Powerful intellectual and political currents have driven this proposition since the early on 20th Century. Sociologists argued that the march of scientific discipline was leading to the "disenchantment" of society: supernatural answers to the big questions were no longer felt to be needed. Communist states like Soviet Russia and China adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on fifty-fifty private religious expression. In 1968, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger told the New York Times that by "the 21st Century, religious believers are likely to be institute only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular civilisation".

Now that we're actually in the 21st Century, Berger's view remains an commodity of faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That's most truthful in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but as well, maybe more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab earth. Even in the Usa, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of "nones" has been rising sharply. In the 2018 Full general Social Survey of U.s. attitudes, "no religion" became the single largest grouping, edging out evangelical Christians.

Despite this, religion is not disappearing on a global calibration – at to the lowest degree in terms of numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Eye modelled the future of the world'southward great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a sharp turn down in religiosity, it predicted a small increase in believers, from 84% of the world's population today to 87% in 2050. Muslims would grow in number to match Christians, while the number unaffiliated with whatever religion would reject slightly.

Mod societies are multicultural where followers of many different faiths live side by side (Credit: Getty Images)

We also need to be conscientious when interpreting what people mean by "no religion". "Nones" may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn't hateful they are militantly atheist. In 1994, the sociologist Grace Davie classified people according to whether they belonged to a religious group and/or believed in a religious position. The traditionally religious both belonged and believed; hardcore atheists did neither. So there are those who belong only don't believe – parents attending church to get a place for their child at a organized religion schoolhouse, perhaps. And, finally, there are those who believe in something, but don't belong to any group.

The research suggests that the last 2 groups are significant. The Understanding Unbelief project at the Academy of Kent in the Great britain is conducting a three-year, six-nation survey of attitudes among those who say they don't believe God exists ("atheists") and those who don't recollect it's possible to know if God exists ("agnostics"). In interim results released in May 2019, the researchers found that few unbelievers actually identify themselves by these labels, with significant minorities opting for a religious identity.

What's more than, effectually 3-quarters of atheists and 9 out of 10 agnostics are open to the existence of supernatural phenomena, including everything from astrology to supernatural beings and life after decease. Unbelievers "showroom meaning variety both inside, and between, unlike countries.

Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever", the report concluded – including, notably, the dating-website cliche "spiritual, but not religious". Similar many cliches, information technology's rooted in truth. But what does it really mean?

The erstwhile gods return

In 2005, Linda Woodhead wrote The Spiritual Revolution, in which she described an intensive study of belief in the British town of Kendal. Woodhead and her co-author found that people were rapidly turning away from organised religion, with its emphasis on plumbing fixtures into an established gild of things, towards practices designed to accentuate and foster individuals' own sense of who they are. If the town's Christian churches did not embrace this shift, they concluded, congregations would dwindle into irrelevance while cocky-guided practices would become the mainstream in a "spiritual revolution".

Today, Woodhead says that revolution has taken place – and not just in Kendal. Organised religion is waning in the Great britain, with no real end in sight. "Religions do well, and ever have washed, when they are subjectively convincing – when you have the sense that God is working for you," says Woodhead, now professor of folklore of religion at the University of Lancaster in the Uk.

The states megachurches bring in thousands of worshippers (Credit: Getty Images)

In poorer societies, y'all might pray for good fortune or a stable job. The "prosperity gospel" is central to several of America's megachurches, whose congregations are often dominated by economically insecure congregations. But if your basic needs are well catered for, you are more than probable to be seeking fulfilment and significant. Traditional faith is declining to deliver on this, particularly where doctrine clashes with moral convictions that ascend from secular society – on gender equality, say.

In response, people have started constructing faiths of their own.

What practise these self-directed religions look similar? 1 approach is syncretism, the "pick and mix" approach of combining traditions and practices that frequently results from the mixing of cultures. Many religions have syncretistic elements, although over time they are assimilated and get unremarkable. Festivals like Christmas and Easter, for instance, have archaic pagan elements, while daily exercise for many people in China involves a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The joins are easier to come across in relatively young religions, such as Vodoun or Rastafarianism.

An alternative is to streamline. New religious movements oftentimes seek to preserve the central tenets of an older religion while stripping it of trappings that may have become stifling or old-fashioned. In the Due west, 1 form this takes is for humanists to rework religious motifs: there have been attempts to rewrite the Bible without any supernatural elements, calls for the structure of "atheist temples" dedicated to contemplation. And the "Sunday Assembly" aims to recreate the atmosphere of a lively church service without reference to God. But without the deep roots of traditional religions, these can struggle: the Dominicus Assembly, after initial rapid expansion, is now reportedly struggling to go along up its momentum.

But Woodhead thinks the religions that might sally from the current turmoil volition have much deeper roots. The offset generation of spiritual revolutionaries, coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, were optimistic and universalist in outlook, happy to take inspiration from faiths around the world. Their grandchildren, however, are growing upwards in a world of geopolitical stresses and socioeconomic angst; they are more likely to hark back to supposedly simpler times. "There is a pull away from global universality to local identities," says Woodhead.

DEEP Civilisation

This commodity is office of a BBC Future serial about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand up dorsum from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in fourth dimension.

Modern society is suffering from "temporal exhaustion", the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. "If ane is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, at that place is no free energy left for imagining the future," she wrote.

That'south why the Deep Civilisation season is exploring what actually matters in the broader arc of man history and what it means for us and our descendants.

"It's really important that they're your gods, they weren't just made up."

In the European context, this sets the stage for a resurgence of interest in paganism. Reinventing half-forgotten "native" traditions allows the expression of mod concerns while retaining the patina of age. Paganism also oft features divinities that are more like diffuse forces than anthropomorphic gods; that allows people to focus on problems they experience sympathetic towards without having to make a bound of organized religion to supernatural deities.

In Republic of iceland, for case, the minor but fast-growing Ásatrú faith has no detail doctrine beyond somewhat arch celebrations of One-time Norse customs and mythology, but has been active on social and ecological issues. Similar movements exist across Europe, such as Druidry in the UK. Not all are liberally inclined. Some are motivated by a desire to return to what they see as conservative "traditional" values – leading in some cases to clashes over the validity of opposing beliefs.

These are niche activities at the moment, and might sometimes exist more about playing with symbolism than heartfelt spiritual practice. But over time, they canevolve into more heartfelt and coherent belief systems: Woodhead points to the robust adoption of Rodnovery – an frequently conservative and patriarchal heathen faith based around the reconstructed beliefs and traditions of the aboriginal Slavs – in the former Soviet Marriage equally a potential exemplar of things to come.

A woman dances as druids, pagans and revellers get together at Stonehenge (Credit: Getty Images)

Then the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor fifty-fifty secularists, but a mixture of "apatheists" – people who just don't intendance nearly faith – and practitioners of what you might call "disorganised religion". While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, nosotros might for the rest of this century run into an efflorescence of relatively modest religions jostling to intermission out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?

Ane nation under Mammon

One answer, of class, is that nosotros simply get on with our lives. Munificent economies, good government, solid education and effective rule of police force tin ensure that we rub forth happily without any kind of religious framework. And indeed, some of the societies with the highest proportions of non-believers are amidst the most secure and harmonious on Earth.

What remains debatable, however, is whether they tin afford to be irreligious because they accept strong secular institutions – or whether beingness secular has helped them reach social stability. Religionists say even secular institutions have religious roots: civil legal systems, for example, codify ideas well-nigh 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 information technology volition enable societies to improve their lot more effectively.

Connor Wood is not and so sure. He contends that a potent, stable society like Sweden'southward is both extremely complex and very expensive to run in terms of labour, money and free energy – and that might not be sustainable fifty-fifty in the short term. "I call up information technology's pretty articulate that nosotros're entering into a menstruation of non-linear change in social systems," he says. "The Western consensus on a combination of market place capitalism and commonwealth can't be taken for granted."

That'southward a problem, since that combination has radically transformed the social surround from the i in which the globe religions evolved – and has to some extent supplanted them.

"I'd exist careful well-nigh calling capitalism a religion, simply a lot of its institutions have religious elements, as in all spheres of human institutional life," says Woods. "The 'invisible paw' of the marketplace almost seems like a supernatural entity."

Financial exchanges, where people meet to conduct highly ritualised trading action, seem quite like temples to Mammon, as well. In fact, religions, even the defunct ones, tin can provide uncannily advisable metaphors for many of the more than intractable features of modern life.

A Roman Catholic priest officiates mass on the first day of trading at the Philippine Stock Exchange in Manila (Credit: Getty Images)

The pseudo-religious social gild might work well when times are good. Only when the social contract becomes stressed – through identity politics, culture wars or economic instability – Woods suggests the outcome is what we see today: the ascent of authoritarians in country after country. He cites inquiry showing that people ignore disciplinarian pitches until they sense a deterioration of social norms.

"This is the human animal looking around and saying we don't agree how we should behave," Wood says. "And we need authority to tell united states of america." It'southward suggestive that political strongmen are ofttimes manus in glove with religious fundamentalists: Hindu nationalists in Republic of india, say, or Christian evangelicals in the U.s.a.. That's a potent combination for believers and an unsettling 1 for secularists: can anything bridge the gap between them?

Mind the gap

Perhaps 1 of the major religions might modify its form plenty to win dorsum non-believers in significant numbers. There is precedent for this: in the 1700s, Christianity was ailing in the Usa, having get dull and formal fifty-fifty every bit the Historic period of Reason saw secular rationalism in the ascendant. A new guard of travelling fire-and-brimstone preachers successfully reinvigorated the faith, setting the tone for centuries to come up – an event called the "Peachy Awakenings".

The parallels with today are piece of cake to draw, just Woodhead is sceptical that Christianity or other globe religions tin can make up the footing they accept lost, in the long term. Once the founders of libraries and universities, they are no longer the primal sponsors of intellectual thought. Social change undermines religions which don't conform it: earlier this year, Pope Francis warned that if the Catholic Church didn't acknowledge its history of male domination and sexual abuse it risked becoming "a museum". 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 one thousand scheme of things.

Perchance a new religion will sally to fill the void? Again, Woodhead is sceptical. "Historically, what makes religions ascent or fall is political support," she says, "and all religions are transient unless they get purple support." Zoroastrianism benefited from its adoption by the successive Western farsi dynasties; the turning point for Christianity came when information technology was adopted by the Roman Empire. In the secular Westward, such back up is unlikely to be forthcoming, with the possible exception of the US. In Russia, by dissimilarity, the nationalistic overtones of both Rodnovery and the Orthodox church wins them tacit political backing.

Merely today, at that place's another possible source of support: the internet.

Online movements gain followers at rates unimaginable in the past. The Silicon Valley mantra of "move fast and break things" has become a cocky-evident truth for many technologists and plutocrats. #MeToo started out equally 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 climatic change and biodiversity.

None of these are religions, of course, but they do share parallels with nascent belief systems – peculiarly that key functionalist objective of fostering a sense of customs and shared purpose. Some take confessional and sacrificial elements, also. So, given time and motivation, could something more explicitly religious grow out of an online community? What new forms of religion might these online "congregations" come up with?

We already have some thought.

Deus ex machina

A few years ago, members of the self-declared "Rationalist" community website LessWrong began discussing a thought experiment about an almighty, super-intelligent machine – with many of the qualities of a deity and something of the Old Attestation God's vengeful nature.

It was called Roko's Basilisk. The total proposition is a complicated logic puzzle, just crudely put, it goes that when a benevolent super-intelligence emerges, information technology will want to do equally much good as possible – and the earlier information technology comes into existence, the more than practiced it will be able to do. So to encourage anybody to practice everything possible to help to bring into beingness, it will perpetually and retroactively torture those who don't – including anyone who so much as learns of its potential existence. (If this is the first you've heard of it: sorry!)

An bogus super-intelligence could have some of the qualities of a deity (Credit: Getty Images)

Outlandish though it might seem, Roko'due south Basilisk caused quite a stir when it was first suggested on LessWrong – enough for word of it to be banned by the site'due south creator. Predictably, that only made the thought explode across the internet – or at least the geekier parts of it – with references to the Basilisk popping up everywhere from news sites to Md Who,  despite protestations from some Rationalists that no-one really took information technology seriously. Their instance 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. "We've always had new forms of religiosity, but nosotros oasis't always had enabling spaces for them," says Beth Singler, who studies the social, philosophical and religious implications of AI at the University of Cambridge. "Going out into a medieval town square and shouting out your unorthodox behavior was going to get y'all labelled a heretic, non win converts to your cause."

The machinery may be new, but the message isn't. The Basilisk argumentis in much the aforementioned spirit as Pascal's Wager. The 17th-Century French mathematician suggested not-believers should still go through the motions of religious observance, just in instance a vengeful God does turn out to be. The thought of penalization as an imperative to cooperate is reminiscent of Norenzayan's "Large Gods". And arguments over ways to evade the Basilisk's gaze are every bit as convoluted equally the medieval Scholastics' attempts to foursquare human liberty with divine oversight.

Even the technological trappings aren't new. In 1954, Fredric Brown wrote a (very) short story called "Reply", in which a galaxy-spanning supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

And some people, like AI entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski, think their holy objective is to build a super-auto that will one day answer just as Brown's fictional machine did. Levandowski, who fabricated a fortune through cocky-driving cars, hit the headlines in 2017 when it became public knowledge that he had founded a church, Way of the Hereafter, defended to bringing about a peaceful transition to a world mostly run by super-intelligent machines. While his vision sounds more benevolent than Roko's Basilisk, the church's creed even so includes the ominous lines: "We believe it may be important for machines to run into who is friendly to their crusade and who is not. We plan on doing so by keeping track of who has done what (and for how long) to help the peaceful and respectful transition."

"There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavours of Christianity, Judaism, Islam," Levandowski told Wired. "Merely they're always looking at something that's non measurable or you can't really see or control. This fourth dimension it'south different. This time you will exist able to talk to God, literally, and know that it's listening."

Reality bites

Levandowski is not lonely. In his bestselling volume Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the foundations of modern civilization are eroding in the face of an emergent religion he calls "dataism", which holds that by giving ourselves over to data flows, we can transcend our earthly concerns and ties. Other fledgling transhumanist religious movements focus on immortality – a new spin on the promise of eternal life. Still others ally themselves with older faiths, notably Mormonism.

A church service in Berlin uses Star Wars to engage the congregation (Credit: Getty Images)

Are these movements for real? Some groups are performing or "hacking" organized religion to win support for transhumanist ideas, says Singler. "Unreligions" seek to dispense with the supposedly unpopular strictures or irrational doctrines of conventional religion, and so might entreatment to the irreligious. The Turing Church, founded in 2011, has a range of cosmic tenets – "We volition go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the expressionless" – simply no hierarchy, rituals or proscribed activities and only i ethical maxim: "Try to deed with love and pity toward other sentient beings."

But as missionary religions know, what begins as a mere amour or idle curiosity – perhaps piqued by a resonant statement or appealing ceremony – can finish in a sincere search for truth.

The 2001 UK census establish that Jediism, the fictional organized religion observed by the skillful guys in Star Wars, was the fourth largest organized religion: virtually 400,000 people had been inspired to claim information technology, initially by a tongue-in-cheek online entrada. X years afterward, it had dropped to seventh place, leading many to dismiss it as a prank. But as Singler notes, that is still an awful lot of people – and a lot longer than near viral campaigns endure.

Some branches of Jediism remain jokey, merely others take themselves more than seriously: the Temple of the Jedi Guild claims its members are "real people that live or lived their lives according to the principles of Jediism" – inspired by the fiction, but based on the real-life philosophies that informed it.

With those sorts of numbers, Jediism "should" have been recognised equally a faith in the UK. But officials who apparently assumed it was not a genuine census respond did not record it as such. "A lot is measured against the Western Anglophone tradition of faith," says Singler. Scientology was barred from recognition as a organized religion for many years in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland because information technology did not have a Supreme Being – something that could too be said of Buddhism.

In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since that there is no widely accepted definition of religion fifty-fifty in academic circles. Communist Vietnam, for example, is officially atheist and often cited as one of the world's most irreligious countries – but sceptics say this is really because official surveys don't capture the huge proportion of the population who practice folk religion. On the other hand, official recognition of Ásatrú, the Icelandic infidel faith, meant information technology was entitled to its share of a "faith taxation"; as a result, it is edifice the country'south first infidel temple for most 1,000 years.

Scepticism nearly practitioners' motives impedes many new movements from existence recognised as genuine religions, whether by officialdom or by the public at big. But ultimately the question of sincerity is a red herring, Singler says: "Whenever someone tells yous their worldview, yous have to take them at face value". The acid examination, as truthful for neopagans equally for transhumanists, is whether people make pregnant changes to their lives consistent with their stated organized religion.

And such changes are exactly what the founders of some new religious movements desire. Official status is irrelevant if yous can win thousands or fifty-fifty millions of followers to your crusade.

A Russian church in Antarctica, where climate change is playing out (Credit: Getty Images)

Consider the "Witnesses of Climatology", a fledgling "faith" invented to foster greater commitment to activity on climate alter. After a decade spent working on engineering solutions to climatic change, its founder Olya Irzak came to the conclusion that the real problem lay not some much in finding technical solutions, simply in winning social support for them. "What'due south a multi-generational social construct that organises people around shared morals?" she asks. "The stickiest is religion."

Then three years ago, Irzak and some friends set virtually building one. They didn't see any need to bring God into it – Irzak was brought upward an atheist – but did get-go running regular "services", including introductions, a sermon eulogising the awesomeness of nature and teaching on aspects of environmentalism. Periodically they include rituals, particularly at traditional holidays. At Reverse Christmas, the Witnesses establish a tree rather than cutting one down; on Glacier Memorial Day, they watch blocks of water ice melt in the California sun.

As these examples suggest, Witnesses of Climatology has a parodic feel to it – light-heartedness helps novices go over whatsoever initial awkwardness – but Irzak'due south underlying intent is quite serious.

"We hope people get real value from this and are encouraged to work on climate change," she says, rather than despairing about the state of the earth. The congregation numbers a few hundred, merely Irzak, every bit a good engineer, is committed to testing out ways to grow that number. Among other things, she is because a Sun Schoolhouse to teach children ways of thinking well-nigh how circuitous systems work.

Recently, the Witnesses have been looking farther afield, including to a anniversary conducted across the Middle East and fundamental Asia just before the spring equinox: purification by throwing something unwanted into a fire – a written wish, or an actual object – and and then jumping over information technology. Recast as an effort to rid the earth of ecology ills, it proved a popular addition to the liturgy. This might have been expected, because it'southward been practised for thousands of years as part of Nowruz, the Iranian New year's day – whose origins lie in function with the Zoroastrians.

Transhumanism, Jediism, the Witnesses of Climatology and the myriad of other new religious movements may never amount to much. Merely perhaps the same could have been said for the pocket-size groups of believers who gathered effectually a sacred flame in aboriginal Islamic republic of iran, iii millennia ago, and whose fledgling conventionalities grew into one of the largest, most powerful and enduring religions the world has ever seen – and which is still inspiring people today.

Perhaps religions never do really die. Perhaps the religions that span the globe today are less durable than we call back. And mayhap the next great religion is just getting started.

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Sumit Paul-Choudhury is a freelance writer and former editor-in-primary of New Scientist. He tweets @sumit .

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