How does a religious worldview work? To understand, the philosopher and religious scholar Boris Falikov suggests trying to come up with a new religion.
What is a religious worldview, how does it work? It is easier to understand this if you try to compose a new religion. Once I gave such a task to my students, future religious scholars. We discussed the results of student ingenuity, and I even ventured to give grades …
I recently learned that a similar experiment was carried out by my American colleague; unlike me, she was not too lazy to publish the results*. It would seem that our countries are separated by a religious and cultural abyss. Imagine my amazement when I saw that the imaginations of Russian and American students often worked in the same direction.
To begin with, young people came up with religions that did not have a hierarchical structure, the very one that we often call the “vertical of power”. You don’t have patriarchs or popes, and some have gone so far as to refuse priests as well. To choose for a while is still nothing, but to forever, God forbid. It seems that democracy is making its way through tradition, faith in unshakable authority is giving way to the right to criticize up to the replacement of those who did not justify faith.
Such a place as hell was also completely absent from most student “religious fantasies.” Post-mortem suffering is generally not popular with modern people, tuned in to endless pleasure, but the radical youth completely deprived them of the right to exist. But in fictional religions, meditation and reincarnation are very common. Prayer to God is giving way to silent work with our own consciousness, and faith in the uniqueness of our life has been replaced by the hope that we will have more than one chance to start over. Yes, we all know that Eastern religions are now pushing Western religions. Now it’s clearer why.
However, if you think about it, Hinduism and Buddhism in the young imagination are very different from their historical prototypes. Reincarnation in Buddhism is not salvation at all, but only a concession to human weakness. The real salvation is the eternal rest of nirvana, and only those in whom the thirst for life does not subside are reborn, a reprehensible thing for a true Buddhist: it only increases the suffering to which every living being is doomed. The fact that young people see Eastern religions through the prism of their own priorities is not surprising. Another thing is important: we do not recognize blind adherence to dogmas and insist on our right to experiment. And the new generation, giving free rein to the imagination, draws inevitable conclusions from this.
* C. Chellew-Hodge «Millenials invent new religion: no hell, no priests, no punishment». Religion Dispatches, 2014, 29 January.