This is a plot development idea that sprang from Religious Aliens. My previous thread (see link) tried to ask how humans would unify under one banner. Also, would a far more advanced race of Aliens have faith, use religion and believe in God? https://www.writingforums.org/threads/how-many-creatures-believe-in-god.172966/ The thread itself came up with all sorts of brilliant human aspects, but failed to deliver in Alien ideals or in fact the possibility other creatures can believe in God. The thread is very interesting and worth a look. So, my more focused plot theory going forward is what possibly could unite the entire worlds population? Maybe religion is the answer... Major religious groups - Wikipedia Timeline of religion - Wikipedia In 2,000 years how will religion operate? Looking back 2,000 years the world was a different place with the Roman Empire as the planets first super power. Today we have 5 major religions with thousands of smaller off shoots. The progress of science to explain many of life’s mysteries have skewed the view away from a single living entity (or multiple entities) in man’s image to something more abstract. I’m not particularly religious or an atheist myself, but in general view most world religions the same. They teach the follower to be a better person and to help the greater good. This is very broad and swiping, but boiled down to its essence. I don’t think religion will disappear even though our technological advancements will be unimaginable to think of here and now. However, I could see a merging of faiths moving forward with the general percentage of believers remaining the same. By the year 4,000 I expect that only one religion will remain. If there is more, they will be diametrically opposed in all areas to each other. Even now, I struggle to see this concept unless we have an oppressed peoples that need to rise up. How do you think religion will look and operate in 2,000 years? What would the abstract concept of God look like with our ever-increasing knowledge on how the universe works? Will the human population at last unite under one banner? So, this is a tricky subject and needs thought. It’s quite different from the previous thread and should focus on plausibility. My plot is a realistic unification that sees humans coming together to defend itself from a much more advanced alien race. The idea I need to grasp is a realistic plot. I’ll talk about the aliens later… Let me know what you think? MartinM. Ps ADMIN if you think the post is in the wrong place, please move it.
Focusing on plausibility and plot rather than actual forecasting, I would suggest a reversion. Imagine a bell curve, with the Y axis starting at polytheistic and head up towards our state of monotheism-devolving-into-atheism-or-fundamentalism. X axis is time, starting 300AD or so, the middle of the bell curve is around now or in a few hundred years, line ending around 3300AD. Assume we started to peak around the 19th century to now, going on for the next hundred years or so, with monotheism becoming theistic on one end and monomaniacally aggressive at the other. By the time your plot is set societies have spent the last two thousand years kind of reversing back through the stages it went through last 2k, like a driver getting out of a cul-de-sac. So in your story's time the old is giving way to the new, except it is the old monotheistic religion which is about to be rejected by a new Constantine, who will embrace the vigorous new (and previously perscribed) cult of polytheism.
This seems very zoomed-out from the characters. It's a big writing task to say where we think religion is today. Different religions have always done different things - which I feel isn't captured in that wikipedia (since it's on a different topic) One of the dead sea scrolls is a very old copy of Isaiah from ~100BC. The next most recent manuscript is ~900AD. But they're nearly the same. Traditions are very able to continue over thousands of years, or most of the history of the written word. And we don't yet know if there's a limit to that - due to technology it might no longer be limited. It's fair to say all religions have changed in the last 2,000 years - but they may change in subtle ways that aren't all that noticeable from the outside, or in peripheral ways that only look like they matter from the outside. Even massive and bloody schisms might only last a few hundred years before being papered over again. If an MC has a religion then it might need to be written in sufficient detail - for that religion. And then there is an inherent risk of alienating readers of that religion who don't agree with the direction. This thread looks on the surface like a bold and inquisitive project, ready to be led wherever the posters below it may suggest - but let's face it, the OP ain't going to be writing a future Islam with a different concept of God. The brunt of the debate and the brunt of the literary experimentation seem sure to fall on Christianity again - the go-to religion for speculators, while most aspects of most people's faiths will be glossed over ("This is very broad and swiping, but boiled down to its essence."). But please do spare a thought for those of us who don't think there will be another 2000 years, e.g. because this is the day of the lord. It occurs to me that Philip Pullman actively avoids the OP's approach - I don't think his Magisterium is a speculative future of the Catholic Church (rather a parody of it), but he's very careful to not to say it is. Pullman respects the Catholic Church enough to not write a futuristic Catholic Church. And I think that's very much to his credit. The realistic unification of earth's humans (in some sort of Marxist wet dream) doesn't seem to me like it holds as much utility for character writing as it does for polemic. If it's a sci-fi story and everyone needs to be united to fight the alien menace, it's well established that we can politely skip ahead 10,000 years and not have to explain how any given reader's religious identity was obliterated to fit the prejudices of an all-knowing author. As well as being polite, that's good craft because it avoids subjecting readers to a novelist's take on comparative theology. We write what we know. Stick to character. By the year 4,000 I expect that only one religion will remain. The OP expects this from a "not particularly religious" perspective, and I suggest this has strong potential to disparage any religious reader's perspective, because they might take it to be saying "whatever you believe, there are reasons why you would stop believing it, as my novel explains." It might be a project for a world-renowned scholar, but then I doubt they'd do it with aliens.
Well that's the trope problem with sci fi utopias: it turns out we were all on path to the one correct ethics model, and now that's out of the way let's all fight space together. Anyone who disagrees can go to the gulag. Your five friends aren't going to all like a restaurant equally (that's core human nature), but you'll soon discover that Chinese takeout is an efficient compromise. An enlightened people aren't all going to think the same thing. They'll just be much more tolerant of each other, and the common enemy is a plausible driving force for that.
Even if formal religion itself completely disappears, humans have a powerful instinct for a religious (or pseudo-religious) belief system and will always create them. Today they substitute political affiliation for organized religion. Mass media and social media are the churches in the contemporary world. Excommunication is now known as cancellation, and good churchgoers get blue checkmarks. That's the official Establishment church—today's equivalent of when Rome made Christianity the official religion. There are rival sects of course, and they all claim their religion is the only true one and all others are false. People have a deep need for something, some large group to tell them how to live and what to believe, and they get a great deal of emotional comfort from belonging and being surrounded by so many others who all believe in the same way. This of course isn't real religion, it's a church with all religion removed. The world's great ancient religions were all built from the ground up on the deepest wisdom, today's pseudo-churches of this kind are built top-down from a knowledge of how to activate people's herding instinct and fear of excommunication.
And I agree—we need to hear some more specifics about your story in order to focus on your actual question. It's too vague as is. What are the aliens like? Are they essentially humans with rubber prosthetic makeup pieces glued onto their foreheads, like in the Star Trek universe, or are they truly alien? Or something in between? More importantly, how similar or different are they from us psychologically? We've never encountered any life-form that didn't co-evolve alongside us here on our little blue marble. We have no idea what their minds would be like or how they'd function, and it's very hard to write about totally different minds. Obviously that isn't your goal. But it's time for you to start to supply some more info to guide the thread. Otherwise we'll end up with more broad speculation like last time. Often what's required in order to find a satisfactory answer is mostly to refine the question, make it more and more specific. That process in itself, a winnowing down, is frequently all that's needed.
Here's an interesting speculation—the Church of Mass and Social Media (Hah! Gives new meaning to 'attending mass'!) manages to take over and declares itself the One True Religion, and bans all traditional religions. It stages massive book burnings and digital purges of all info relating to them, 1984-style. They pull down all the statues and destroy all the church buildings. OR... they retain the church buildings (that's some inspiring architecture) and install giant video monitor screens where the congregation can come and watch the televised Official Scripture. Just one possible direction 'religion' might take in the future.
Is this future world equally secure, economically and socially, in all places? Religion tends to grow in economically and socially insecure places and wane where there is security. If it is a secure world, then we would expect organized religion to have been mostly replaced by self-guided practices. Are all the people educated? Then it would be a more secular society. There would be no need for supernatural explanations to the big questions. You do mention that you expect there to be only one religion. If the cultural pressures to maintain local identity can be overcome in this move to global universality (and that's a big if), I would predict an amalgamation of religions, in a process called syncretism, sort of a "pick and mix" approach, where elements of different religions are fused into one.
If you're looking for something that can unite the world against aliens, religion is the wrong place to look. While religion can be useful to unite communities, it doesn't work on the large scale. Too much distance leads to different cultures and different interpretation, and those differences lead to religious conflict. You seem too dismissive in the way different denominations of the same general religion can absolutely despise each other. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics divided Europe and led to a multitude of bloody conflicts. The Sunni and Shia divide in Islam is also filled with blood spilling that continues to the modern era. Hundreds of years have done little to unite these differences, and I don't see a thousand years changing that. New religions may form, and old ones may fade away, but to get to the point that only one exists doesn't jive with the history of humanity. The only way I could see there being a singular world wide religion would be to have the gods being very up and front about existing. But even if the gods existence was as self-evident as the existence of grass, there would still be differences in how best to worship, or who is most worthy of worship, in the case of polytheism, and that would lead to conflict. Ultimately I'd say the best thing to lead to humanity being united would be mutual need. We see this to a degree in how globalization helps put a cooling blanket on open conflict. Conflicts still arise, obviously, but not to the extent they would if our economies weren't co-dependent. By having an obvious threat in the form of an alien invasion, humanity would very likely come together to defend itself from extinction or enslavement or whatever the aliens intend to do.
Unless that education included Jung! I can see it now—a world united by Jungian religious studies!! Oh crap, I'd better stop there! If I even begin on that I'll be writing on it endlessly, without sleep, for the next few years at least...
we've already got one religious thread from the OP that's had to be moved to the debate room, we don't need a second one
