Changing Our Faith, Inevitably

LATE IN LIFE, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to a friend in which he predicted that the American people, as well as folks around the world, would eventually embrace a new form of religion, a version of Christianity called "Unitarianism", in which science fact is blended with religious devotion to produce a more factually verifiable form of worship, devoid of all miracles and superstition, but retaining the enlightened philosophy which Christ brought to the world. This would occur, said Jefferson, because as more and more people became educated in science and embraced an informed understanding of nature in a modernized world, ancient dogma and superstitions would be cast aside, and the world would become more secular and scientific, less religiously primitive and rigid. Jefferson described himself as a "primitive Christian", by which he meant that he agreed with the teachings of Joshua ben Joseph, aka Jesus, but disavowed everything in the Bible which did not pass the test of empirical reason. Others called him an "atheist", which, in essence, he was, since he renounced traditional religions as superstitious nonsense, and believed that the terms "God" and "Nature" are synonymous. Jefferson, like most intellectuals in his day, described himself as "deist". And this cultural secularization is precisely what has happened, and is happening, as the percentage of Americans who identify as "Christian" falls from eighty five percent twenty five years ago, to less than seventy percent today. In general, the better educated the individual, the less inclined she is to believe in traditional religion. Churches in Western Europe stand empty, as Europeans plow ahead of the United States in updating their religiosity. Traditional religions, quite simply, do not pass the test of reason and fact. The world is not flat, and is older than six thousand years. There is no evidence, other than traditional, that the torturing to death of a good man two thousand years ago atones for our mistakes today. indeed, all evidence indicates that we pay for our mistakes in this lifetime, usually shortly after we make them. For Christ to have paid for them again is a double payment of purely symbolic importance. Hundreds of years in the future, if humanity still exists, it may be that the religion of our descendants if utterly unrecognizable from today's. And that is a good thing, since all human inventions evolve, as well they must, for without change there is no progress. As Goethe said: "the world advances only because of those who oppose it."