Dear WampusCat,
That is an interesting response.
Given Christianity's history of reliquaries and pilgrimages, not quite so strange (and many religions have ways of making the holy and the past tangible.)
I have been mulling over religions with falsifiable premises (all of them have some, anything supernatural can be shown in an overly cold light.) My favorite is Manichaeism (it's already dead, but not from that.) In a sense it does not matter, those who adhere, adhere.
But Manichaeism wove state-of-the-art biology and astronomy (circa 300 CE) into its founding scriptures and central doctrines, there are signs that it hung onto them literally and inflexably, over the course of twelve centuries. It just missed the Renaissance -- what would it have done with new knowledge? Would it have snapped? Gone reactionary? Shrunk? Proclaimed a new revelation that updated its scientific basis? Ignored those formerly-central parts of its scriptures and doctrines?
All religions have some flexiability, but Manichaeism had a fundamentalist streak and a structure that shut off the kinds of adaptation that other religions use ... (no new revelations, no adding to scriptures, no making the scriptures or doctines into metaphors or allegories, no deviation from the meanings given by the religion's founder.) Many religions say they preserve the original, pure, holy, revered, untainted scriptures, practices, rites and doctrines (or teachings) of their founders or early adherents ... yet Manichaeism simply didn't use these adaptive techniques. What would they have done if it could be shown that a central part of their religion was flatly untrue? (There is no doubt that their founder wrote their central scriptures and that he was the source of the entire religion.)
What if a central premise of any of the world's large tradition could be shown as simply not so, in a way that there was no working around or arguing about? What if there was no long any reason to be an X? What if the architecture, liturgy, art, music, dance, social mores, dress, holidays, fasts, and dishes associated with X tradition no longer had any basis?
(I'd feel sorry, I like spiritual biodiversity.)
It would certainly cut down on converts... but I think people would continue to be Taoists or Buddhists or Hindus or Zoroastrians -- although perhaps they would shift to being a self improvement program or an approach-to-life seminar or a cultural and historical organization.
What do you think? A major tradition -- perhaps not yours, but your friends' or neighbors' or part of you family's or a place you wanted to visit's -- just *poof* (in a way that no one who reads the news could argue against.)
I don't mean this in a let's-rejoyce-in-the-demise-of-any-particular-religion way, I mean it as a bit of sociological SF.
Yours,
Kushana (accustomed to uncomfortable ideas)
Note: Manichaeism died of persecution. (Of all things, we have a letter from one of the last Manicheans in China, fascinating and eerie reading. You can read it in
Manichaeism in Central Asia and China by Samuel N. C. Lieu.)
Thanks!
