Imagine - the Next world today

Since the dawn of the rise of science and the ascension of the modern world, humanity has lived in two worlds – both pre-modern and modern.  One world largely lives in the mytho-poetic cosmologies of their tribal pasts, with incremental advances.  The other cosmology continues to emerge from the Copernican and Newtonian cosmologies of the modern age into the indeterminate and subjective world of quantum mechanics and string theory.  With the increase in our scientific prowess has also come a rethinking of our historic cosmologies, many of which no longer make much sense in our postmodern age.  Most First Axial Age religions have made peace with this change, but those who have felt threatened by modernity have responded by becoming Fundamentalists of their supernatural forms of religion. 

In this time of philosophical and religious flux we are experiencing the last gasps of First Axial Age religions and philosophies, many of which have been co-opted by imperial or nationalist concerns.  When whole countries are considered Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist countries there still exists the possibility of religious warfare to preserve, enforce, or expand the primacy of that religious tradition.  With over six billion people on the planet, the chances that such conflicts can spill over into resource battles is increasing every day.

Now that we live in an increasingly global world there is more opportunity to interact with those of multiple faith traditions and cosmologies.  Whereas nation-states have been the moving institutions of the past, multi-national corporations have become the controlling and defining institutions of our age.  In many ways, this shift has brought about a dramatic increase in communication and contact between different cultures and language groups.  In other ways, the corporate influence on western, colonial nation-states has led to an increased military presence of their armed forces around the world to protect their “national interest” of the free flow of resources to their own countries.  This has led some of the aforementioned Fundamentalists to rally themselves against the nations of those corporate interests.   

Never before has the need for a new way of thinking and viewing the world been necessary.  Some have called for an end to all religion to battle such darker impulses in today’s expressions of faith.  Others are calling for a reconsideration – a reformation – of the world’s faith traditions to meet the new world.  Still others are calling for us to begin anew. 

This blog is an invitation to begin anew.  Like those creative religious artists of the First Axial Age, this blog is a meeting place for those who would shape the Second Axial Age.  Where the prophets and sages of the past made a new way of life within the empires of long ago, today we need to create new ways of building human communities of care, compassion, cooperation that instills a sense of our interconnectedness. 

To this end, what resources would you suggest for this enterprise.  What stories, songs, sayings, quotations, and images will inspire us to our fullest common humanity?