Section 1:11 Are you saying religions are going to be obsoleted?

QUESTION: ‘Do you expect that all the religious people in the world are going to accept this, give up their faith and adopt the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING? Are you expecting religions to be obsoleted?’

ANSWER: Religions aren’t being threatened by the arrival of understanding of the human condition—they are being fulfilled.

Religions have, overall, been the custodians of the ideal state while the upsetting search for the healing understanding of the upset state was being carried out, which means that when that healing understanding is finally found the ideal state no longer has to be preserved in the presence of an upset existence because all the upset goes and the ideal state becomes universal, in which case the role of religions is fulfilled and therefore obsoleted.

The founding prophets of religions understood this—for instance, Buddha looked forward to the arrival of the ameliorating, healing understanding of the human condition when he said that ‘In the future they will every one be Buddhas [meaning in the future everyone will be free of psychosis and neurosis] / And will reach Perfect Enlightenment [perfect understanding] / In domains in all directions / Each will have the same title [everyone will be free of the various states of alienation that currently differentiate us all] / Simultaneously on wisdom-thrones [everyone will be full of the wisdom of understanding of the human condition] / They will prove the Supreme Wisdom’ (Buddha [Siddartha Gautama] 560–480 BC, The Lotus Sutra, ch.9; tr. W.E. Soothill, 1987, p.148 of 275). Yes, understanding of the human condition is the ‘supreme’ understanding that the human race has been in search of.

Christian scripture contains similar, numerous anticipations of our species’ liberation from all the upset of the human condition. In Revelations in the Bible it states that ‘Another book [will be]…opened which is the book of life [the human-condition-liberating book]…[and] a new heaven and a new earth [will appear] for the first heaven and the first earth [will have]…passed away…[and the dignifying full truth about our condition] will wipe every tear from…[our] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain [no more insecurity, suffering or human-condition-induced sickness], for the old order of things has passed away’ (Rev. 20:12, 21:1,4). (Note, all biblical references in Freedom Expanded: Books 1 & 2 are taken from the 1978 New International Version translation of the Bible.)

Similarly, when writing Genesis in the Bible, the prophet Moses anticipated a time when we ‘will be like God, knowing’ (Gen. 3:5), and, as previously mentioned, Christ’s The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:10 & Luke 11:2) anticipates the time when ‘Your [peaceful human-condition-ameliorated] kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’; Christ also looked forward to the time when ‘…another Counsellor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth [that is, understanding]…will teach you all things [in particular explain the mystery of the human condition]’ (John 14:16,17,26). He also said he looked forward to the time when, instead of being restricted to ‘speaking figuratively’, we ‘will no longer use this kind of language but will [be able to] tell you plainly about my Father’ (John 16:25). We will be able to explain in compassionate, understandable, first principle, scientific terms what the ‘Godly’, cooperative, ideal state actually is—namely, the physical law that causes matter to integrate into ever larger and more stable wholes (atoms integrate to form molecules, then molecules integrate to form compounds, then virus-like organisms, then single-celled organisms, then multicellular organisms, etc)—and importantly, we will be able to explain why we humans have not lived in compliance with that integrative, cooperative, complexifying, teleological, holistic law, which, as is explained in Parts 4:4B and 8:1 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1, is the physical law of Negative Entropy. Our ability now to explain why we humans have been divisively rather than integratively behaved means we can at last safely admit that ‘God’ is actually the integrative law of Negative Entropy. We can reconcile religion and science—as Christ anticipated, we can talk ‘plainly’ about the cooperative, loving, integrative law that we have personified as ‘God’ and our historical lack of compliance with that law.

And of course there is the prophet Isaiah’s anticipation in the Bible of the time when humans ‘will beat their swords into ploughshears…Nation[s] will…[not] train for war any more’ (Isa. 2:4).

A human-condition-free world was also anticipated by the prophet Muhammad of the Islamic faith when he spoke of ‘that which is coming’ when we will ‘hear no idle talk, no sinful speech, but only the greeting, “Peace! Peace!”’ (The Koran, ch.56).

The whole objective of science was to replace mysticism, superstition and dogma with understanding, especially with understanding of the human condition. Indeed, even E.O. Wilson once conceded that ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298 of 374)—despite later nullifying this ‘most important frontier’ with his own human-condition-avoiding ‘explanation’ of it. As I said, the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about the end of faith and the beginning of knowing, and that is precisely the transition the human mind has been committed to achieving. As conscious beings that was our fundamental responsibility: to understand the world and our seemingly imperfect place in it. In John Lennon’s song Imagine, where he sang of a time when the human condition is resolved and ‘the world will be as one’, he asked us to ‘imagine’ that there will then be ‘no heaven [above us and] no hell below us’—that there will be a world without the condemning differentiation of good and evil, a world liberated from the insecurity of the human condition and thus the need for religion, where, as he sang, there will be ‘Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…all the people living life in peace…No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man…all the people sharing all the world.’

The human race has always hoped and believed that humanity’s heroic search for, and accumulation of knowledge would one day lead to the finding of understanding of the human condition, at which time every aspect of human life that was seemingly so inexplicable would suddenly make sense and a new reconciled world for humans would suddenly open up, and that is exactly what has happened. From an overwhelmingly complex and problematic existence a simple and totally effective, WORLD-TRANSFORMING way of living for humans emerges that all humans—everyone—takes up.