Tag: Catholicism

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How to hack religion

Easter Sunday is one of the two days a year when I engage in Pascal’s wager. This is because attending Christian service twice a year (the other date is Christmas) is, in some denominations, the minimal requirement for being considered a Christian.

This got me thinking whether it was possible to hack religion more broadly. What, in other words, are the minimal requirements to be considered a legitimate member of other world religions?

Firstly, in order to address the immediate objections of the devout, of course such an approach is not really ‘in good faith’ as it were. Furthermore, obviously certain contradictions immediately arise for anyone claiming to be an adherent of more than one faith-based belief system. After all they don’t agree with one another!

But one may equally argue that Pascal’s wager itself is not proposed in good faith either. And in any case, if we assume, as most religious people do, the existence of one or more deities, then one must also presume that the pertinent god or gods are entirely aware of the inherent dishonesty of such an approach (though this is not necessarily a disqualifying factor in some faiths.)

One bon mot often offered by atheists and occasionally agnostics to the religious is the sarcastic agreement that they concur with the devotee that all bar one god does not exist. Therefore their disagreement relates solely to that one final deity and the related belief system. It’s witty because it highlights the revelatory nature of religious knowledge and belief, the illogical component that this rather than that or indeed any other faith is solely correct.

But what if we were to jettison such narrow and unecumenical thinking? In other words, if we were to attempt to maximise our Pascal’s wager, how might we go about it? As mentioned above, two attendances at Church per year suffices to be Christian in some quarters. This is not an onerous requirement really. But what about other religions?

Islam is an interesting case. Generally, in practice, multiple daily prayers and weekly attendance at the mosque is expected. However, doctrinally, simply submitting to Allah is sufficient to be considered Muslim. Even better, that submission need not even be made in good faith, so long as the behaviour expected of good Muslims is also observed. Hence, it is possible to simply profess the shahada, the statement of belief in Allah, in order to become Muslim.

Buddhism likewise can be adhered to without major commitment of time or other resources. There are, as might be expected in a religion with such a wide range of variants, an equally wide range of expectations of Buddhists. To some, simply being alive makes one a Buddhist already. To others, seeking refuge in the ‘three jewels’, the triratna, that is the Buddha, the dharma (doctrine, or teaching), and the sangha (the monastic order, or community), is all that is needed. In practice, this involves turning to the Buddha, Buddhist teachings, and Buddhist community for guidance. This is a little more commitment than the monotheisms require, but again, arguably not overly onerous.

Hinduism, as a variegated collection of interlinked polytheist beliefs, is also a little difficult to pin down in terms of minimal requirements. However, in many cases, the eternal duty, or Sanata Dharma, is all that need be adhered to. This is the requirement to avoid malevolence to all living creatures, and treat them instead with compassion, charity and generosity. Quite a high bar, behaviour-wise, but doctrinally quite easy to accept.

Judaism is a much trickier affair. Generally, one must be born Jewish to be considered Jewish (and the nature of proving that descent is not always straightforward – matrilineal descent from a Jewish mother is generally required.) For others, a process of conversion is necessary, and this process – known as giyur – is far from easy. Judaism as a belief takes a range of forms, from Orthodoxy to Reform, and not all accept conversion. Furthermore, conversion even where possible is a protracted process generally undergone under rabbinical guidance, and even when successful then requires that the convert, among other requirements, adheres to all 613 mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah.

I’ve yet to explore properly the requirements of other religions, such as Sikhism, Baha’i, Jainism, Shinto or any of the traditional African or Chinese faiths and animisms. I fully expect that again, they would require a process of commitment to behaving well towards others, the requirement to engage with the religious community, and perhaps a conversion process also.

But it does seem to me possible in principle at least to hack religion in a manner than expands Pascal’s Wager outward, and in the spirit of the original wager if not of the religions themselves.

I’m not sure if this means that the world’s religious faiths are a little more accommodating than generally understood, or if both Pascal and I are much more cynical than the world needs people to be. Perhaps both. In any case, a happy Easter, Ramadan, Passover or simply Sunday to people of all religions, one religion, or none.

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Who loves thy neighbour, and which neighbours do they love the most?

One reason to study religious futurisms is because the world is becoming MORE religious, not less. In that context, it’s worth considering what various religious and non-religious groups think about one another. Here’s a nice table, derived from a new Pew Research set of polls, looking at this in the American context.

There are some fascinating anomalies here, more anomalies than patterns really, but we will need to explore these societally if we hope to have a peaceable future society. Additionally, the headline is a little disingenuous since mainstream Christian sects don’t tend to view Mormonism as Christian.

And there are many significant gaps in the polling which renders it incomplete. For example, what do Muslims think of the other sects? What about Buddhists, one of America’s fastest growing religions? Or Hindus? Or Orthodox Christians? What about New Age/Pagan/Wicca-based beliefs? Or Indigenous beliefs? And so on.

Nevertheless, this research, as a snapshot in time, is a reasonable starting point for ecumenical outreach for those who are religious, for religious futurist research for those like me who have an academic interest, and for those (sociologists, theologians, politicians, policy-makers) exploring similar inter-relationships in other territories.

For me, a number of these anomalies are particularly intriguing. Only Mormons like everybody. Only Jews are liked by everybody. Opinions on Muslims are almost entirely negative. Historical gulfs between Protestants and Catholics appear to be elided.

The biggest agreed antipathy instead is actually between Evangelical Protestants and Atheists. And the biggest imbalance in regard is between Jews and Evangelical Protestants (a 79 point divide). There is, in short, lots to digest, even if the research is limited in terms of range (America only) and scope (the various creeds for some reason not included.)

I suspect such a table would look different in different locations, needless to say. But we won’t know for sure until someone does the relevant polling in other nations. I look forward to such data emerging in time.

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The Cosy Sectarianism of the Great Irish Writers

How cosy and quaint do the petty sectarian bigotries of 20th century Irish writing seem today.

I’m not referring to the civil war in the North of Ireland, usually euphemistically referred to in a diminished manner as the ‘Troubles’. I lived through most of that, and it was extremely unpleasant indeed.

Rather I mean the slightly earlier period of the early and mid-twentieth century, when Irish writing bestrode the world in the forms of giants like Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Behan.

What’s interesting, considering just these four (though we could add many other lesser names), is the varying personal reactions to the sectarian divide in Ireland. For the Protestant-raised, middle-class and cosmopolitan Beckett and Yeats, minor distinctions in flavours of Christianity was an irrelevance at best.

Yeats in later life veered into mysticism, theosophy, magick and the occult. Beckett by contrast tended to dismiss Christianity if not all religion entirely, referring to it as “all balls”, though conceding that it amounted to more than merely “convenient mythology”. Raised in the era they were, both Yeats and Beckett imbibed plenty of Christian dogma in school and wider culture however, and both demonstrate in their writing an easy and deep familiarity with Christian writings and the Bible.

Beckett, probably not considering conversion to Catholicism

By contrast, the Catholic, lower middle-class/working class Joyce and Behan seemed unable entirely to shake off the tribal Catholicism of their backgrounds and education. I was reminded of this recently when I re-encountered Behan’s hilarious take on Anglicanism:

Don’t speak of the alien minister,

Nor of his church without meaning or faith,

For the foundation stone of his temple

Was the bollocks of Henry VIII.

Behan wearing a rosette proclaiming what is undoubtedly the greatest sporting chant ever.

Behan was a self-described “daylight atheist”. This is often presented online in the form of a quote: “I’m a communist by day and a Catholic by night”. However, I’ve not found a reliable source for this variant. Anyhow, Behan clearly had not managed to transcend the petty sectarian rivalries which beset Ireland, and in this he echoes Joyce, who in the highly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes his alter-ego protagonist Stephen Dedalus refusing to consider conversion to Protestantism:

– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a Protestant?

– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

We might consider this passage as a depiction in mature adulthood of his prissy adolescence were it not that it is echoed elsewhere in his work, such as the short story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners.

Joyce in his lengthy European exile.

It’s worth remembering too that Joyce and Behan both escaped the confines of petty Ireland if anything more completely than Yeats ever did, the latter becoming a senator in the newly independent Ireland whereas Joyce relocated permanently to Europe, while Behan spent much of his time in London and America. (Beckett like his mentor Joyce went to Europe and never looked back.)

So then, what fuels this seemingly pointless animus? The grounds of objection from both Joyce and Behan relate to an apparent illogicality inherent to Protestantism. Notably in both instances, there is no defence of Catholicism offered, merely a snide (and in Behan’s case, very funny) dismissal of Ireland’s second-largest faith.

And unlike Yeats, neither sought to construct a religious faith of their own, though in Joyce’s case at least there was an astonishing attempt to replace the religious impetus with an aesthetic one, succinctly underpinned as Joyce said, by “silence, exile and cunning.”

I think Behan’s piece (a translation as it happens from 16th century Irish) gives the game away here. In many locations, the first line of his translation is misquoted as referring to “your Protestant minister”. But Behan like his source material makes clear that while Anglicanism is being referred to, the issue is less the protest against Catholicism underpinning it than its alienness, that is, the fact that it was the faith of the foreign (ie English) overlords who governed Ireland from the time of bebollocked Henry to their present day.

In other words, it was an atavistic political tribalism rather than a theological objection. We still have those tribalisms in Ireland today, primarily in the North where those overlords remain in position, likely against their will and desire, due to the complexities of establishing a permanent and lasting peace. In the 26 counties of the Irish Republic however, these passages stand out as glaring anachronisms now.

And even in the North, the late great “famous” Seamus Heaney (like Yeats and Beckett a Nobel laureate) is best described as sociologically post-Catholic rather than a devotee of the creed of his birth. This runs counter to the opinions offered by some of his most astute critics, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edna Longley in particular of course, but is it unfair to point out that both critics came from Protestant backgrounds and hence saw the cultural references to Catholicism in Heaney’s work as more significant than it was simply because those references were alien to them in the same way that Protestantism was to Behan?

So, will you be converting to Protestantism, Seamus?

In other words, the sensitivities may be reversed here. Perhaps it is as readers that we detect these curious emphases. Perhaps we misconstrue the petty cultural rivalries of sectarianism in mid-20th century Ireland because religion played such a larger role in cultural life in those days, in ways that anyone under 50 is unlikely to recognise in Ireland today.

The great Irish writers never stop teaching us, and one of their lessons is that we must challenge ourselves as readers with regard to what we find striking in their writing. What we notice and what we do not says perhaps as much about us as it does about them. They hold a mirror to our souls, even if, like Behan, we are daylight atheists.

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Reach beyond the easy binaries

It’s always gratifying to be reviewed. I always thought that, even when I made my living from reviewing for newspapers, even when sometimes I (felt I) had to dish out a negative opinion.

It’s a commitment of someone’s time to your work, chronicled for posterity. That attention alone is flattering. You write so that people might read, after all. Reading closely and responding? It’s appreciated.

Everett Hamner’s review of Science Fiction and Catholicism is generous and astutely insightful. It is always an education to get a tour of your own thinking from the perspective of an attentive, observant and intellectually acute reader.

He has, I think, a slightly different vision for the future of Religious Futurisms than I do. Or than I did when I wrote Science Fiction and Catholicism. I’ve probably moved much closer to Everett’s position while writing a volume on SF and Buddhism, but especially as a co-editor of the very eclectic, ecumenist and transdisciplinary volume of Religious Futurisms.

It’s a very positive review, maybe kinder than the book deserves. I think it made one great point, and Everett identifies that very succinctly. I hope I can produce a better volume on Buddhism’s interaction with SF, as that is at least a more expansive and intriguing story to tell. And I hope I get a reviewer as acute as Everett Hamner to review it.

Thanks for reaching beyond the easy binaries, Everett.

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What can we learn from alternative Israels?

Earlier this year, I started working on a project looking at manifestations of the Jewish state in alternative history literature. The seemingly intractable weeping wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, of course, a product of history, but a history which seems increasingly without any obvious resolution, or rather, one in which the much-vaunted two-state solution appears to satisfy almost no one.

After working on Science Fiction and Catholicism for some years, it seemed obvious to continue that work by examining Buddhist futurism. A book on this will, in the fullness of time, emerge, but for now readers will have to be satisfied with the sole tangible output to date, an article on Buddhist reception in Pulp Science Fiction. (Another on Arthur C. Clarke’s crypto-Buddhism, and one on the Zen influence over Frank Herbert’s Dune are also due to arrive in public shortly.)

But a second offshoot from that work on Catholic Futurism began to take shape in relation to Israel. Specifically, I wrote a chapter in that book on the cultural anxieties revealed by how Anglophone writers dealt with Catholicism through alternative history. The other timelines imagined by those writers were uniformally negative, envisaging retrograde Catholic empires crushing all science, innovation and progress under its clerical jackboot heel, which runs rather counter to the significant amount of support Catholicism has tended to offer to scientists historically.

Indeed, it says much more about how Anglophone writers, and specifically how ENGLAND perceives Catholicism – not as a cultural taproot but rather as a kind of fifth column infiltration which threatens their survival in an existentialist sense. This sentiment, I sometimes feel, is the archeological origin of things like opposition to the EU and the Brexit campaign.

Anyhow, when I began examining alternative history as a mode for exposing such cultural anxieties, it became quickly evident that the alternative timelines different cultures are drawn to evoke are a little like Rorschach blot tests, identifying their cultural anxieties in very clear ways.

As a test case, I chose Israel, primarily because it is in one sense a new nation, in another a very old one. Also, many writers of alternative history are culturally Jewish and this mode of artistic exploration is one that they are often drawn to. I was not disappointed by the results, and have been incorporating this work into my broader research project examining speculative geographies in literature.

Alternative histories about Israel reveal a series of cultural anxieties, from the obvious fear of Jewish annihilation (in early history at the hands of the Babylonians, Pharaonic Egypt or the Romans, but also during medieval pogroms in Europe, and obviously arising from the holocaust), as well as imagined reversals of such annihilation (particularly the fantasy of Judaic global dominance, sometimes by converting the Roman Empire).

There is a particular phylum of these alternative histories which explores other geographic locations for a Jewish ethno-state. This is also real-world history, as the Zionist Council under Theodor Herzl did indeed consider locations other than historic Palestine for the creation of such a state. Actually many locations were seriously considered, by both Zionists and non-Zionists, and some territories were even offered by certain nations, during the interim between the emergence of Zionism as a political movement in the late 19th century and the creation of Israel in 1948.

I’ve been examining the literary manifestations of these real-world alternatives, to see in what way they unveil cultural anxiety about both the conflict with Palestinians and the Jewish relationship with Europe (from whence many current Israelis, especially the Ashkenazim, derive much of their cultural inheritance). This work has identified a strong sense of determinism about the current location of Israel which interestingly is secular and not predicated upon the religious diktat of the Old Testament (though of course the Promised Land of Eretz Israel remains a significant cultural driver within Israel itself, especially among the Orthodox community.)

I hope to publish something on this soon, when I get a moment. But for now, all I can offer you is a slide or two (above) from my latest conference presentation on the matter, which took place at the Specfic conference at Lund University in Sweden last week.

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What do reviews do?

The last post was on options for people seeking review outlets for their publications on SF, or alternatively, looking for outlets for whom they might write such reviews. What it didn’t address was what those reviews actually do.

When you’re slogging through the writing of a book, it can be difficult to remain motivated sometimes, especially if that book is an academic text. Once upon a time, I was a journalist, and I would spend a few hours writing an article I knew literally millions of people would read. Now? I spend years writing something that perhaps measures its readership in the hundreds.

So, you find motivation where you can. Imagining a positive response from that small but focused readership is one way. You may dream, perhaps foolishly, that the book once finished will be truly understood by the few who encounter it. That it might persuade, change their thinking, provoke thoughts of their own.

Sometimes, if you are really very fortunate, your book will find such a reader. If fortune compounds itself positively, they may even be motivated to review it. And then you might have that extraordinary experience of seeing someone engage positively and constructively with your work.

I am thankful therefore to Rhodri Davies for being such a reviewer: critically astute, carefully analytical, and positively engaged in his encounter with my book on Science Fiction and Catholicism. I’m also thankful to Foundation, the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation, for publishing his review.

Unlike reviews of, say popular fiction, which are aimed at either enhancing or eroding sales, reviews of academic studies aren’t going to tilt the dial of books sold, and in any case, no academic ever made their fortune out of book sales. Few make anything at all. Rather, when you see your book reviewed, what you’re hoping for is that someone got what you were saying, whether they agreed or not.

Rhodri got it. I hope you will too, if you choose to read it.

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SF and Catholicism on the New Books Network

I’m archiving the interview I did with the delightful, professional and highly astute Carrie Anne Evans for the New Books Network here.

Carrie Anne was an excellent interviewer, very well researched and informed, and asked some great questions. There are pro media interviewers who could learn a lot from how she goes about her work.

Interview conducted for New Books Network; aired first November 8th 2019.
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Ray Bradbury, William Blake, and Catholics in Space

Back when I was writing my book on Science Fiction and Catholicism, I came across a story by Ray Bradbury which I meant to include, but I couldn’t decide where to discuss it.

On the one hand, it appeared to speak to the Catholic Church’s earliest involvement in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but on the other, it spoke, as did Bradbury’s poem “Christus Apollo” (which I did include in the book) to Christianity’s main problem as regards non-terrestrial intelligence – whether Christ would have to incarnate on other worlds.

In the end, I had to cut a lot of text, and ideas, from the book and I didn’t get around to looking at “The Machineries of Joy”, the title story from Bradbury’s 1964 collection. So, as it’s Christmas, I thought I’d do so now, as it offers an interesting perspective on the predictive component of religious futurism.

Bradbury wrote the story for Playboy magazine originally in 1961, at a time when people could legitimately claim to read the publication for the prose. It’s a low-key narrative, mostly related via dialogue between priests who take opposing positions on the appropriateness of man’s expansion beyond the bounds of Earth. The story has not been well-examined. Neil Gaiman’s 2010 introduction to the collection refers to it descriptively and briefly as “Priests debate and argue about space travel …” But it’s worth taking a closer look.

It wasn’t Bradbury’s only foray into Catholicism as a theme of course. His story “The Man,” is a classic of the Jesus-in-space sub-genre. And priests often featured in his fiction, usually as a kind of shorthand for the religious disposition rather than any specifically Catholic theological purpose.

In short, Catholicism performs in Bradbury’s fiction similarly to the kind of ‘faux Catholicism’ I discussed in my book, a largely fictional form of faith that is innately conservative, faintly anti-science even when embodied by priest-scientists, and certainly anti-progressive politically.

This faux Catholicism is, in short, ultimately anti-Enlightenment, and is positioned by SF generally in order to present an easily grasped opponent to the utopian, atheist, scientific, pro-technological, almost posthumanist impetus that much of SF espouses, either tacitly or overtly.

In “The Machineries of Joy”, Ray Bradbury presents us with a narrative of warring priests. In the progressive corner is the Italian priest Fr Vittorini, who stays up all night watching television in the hope of witnessing the launch of a rocket from Cape Canaveral. In the regressive corner, we have the Irish priest Fr Brian, who finds the idea of humanity expanding beyond Earth to be an existential risk for the Christian faith itself. Presiding over this debate is their boss, Pastor Sheldon, who brings about an end to the hostilities by encouraging debate, understanding and a nice glass of Lacryma Christi Italian wine.

Their debate takes place on two battlefields. The first is the existence of a papal encyclical by Pius XII on space travel, written in 1956 at the time of an “Astronautical Congress” held at the pope’s summer home in Castel Gandolfo. The second is William Blake, claimed by the Irish priest as a kind of Irishman (allegedly descended from the Irish on his mother’s side, so he alleges) and his own particularly visionary version of Christianity.

It ultimately transpires that the papal encyclical does not in fact exist, and has been invented by Fr Vittorini as a way of annoying his Celtic colleague. Bradbury conveniently does not explain to us how Vittorini might have fabricated a plausible newspaper clipping about the Astronautic Congress, however.

Equally, Vittorini has also invented a poetic phrase which he attributes to Blake but later admits to having invented himself – the titular “Machineries of Joy.”

“Somewhere did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy?” asks Fr Vittorini slyly. “That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God’s Machineries of Joy?”

“If Blake said that, I take it all back. He never lived in Dublin!” is Fr Brian’s comic response.

What’s curious about both of these loci of variance among the priests is the religious futurist component. Perhaps Bradbury was aware of the Catholic Church’s early involvement in SETI and cognate astronomical research. Certainly the mention of Castel Gandolfo suggests that, as it is not only the papal summer home but also the location of the Vatican Observatory, which has driven much of the church’s research in this area, including later hosting a series of conferences on SETI and astrobiology.

Blake did not, to my knowledge, mention the phrase “machineries of joy” anywhere in his work, and certainly not in the very acute sense referred to by Fr Vittorini. Indeed, as Bradbury and Vittorini acknowledge, this is pure invention. But whether Bradbury was aware of early Catholic involvement in extraterrestrial research or not, he certainly seems to have been referring obliquely to Blake’s famous poem “Eternity”. The poem, which is brief, is worth quoting in full at this point:

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise

To Blake’s concept of flying joy, Fr Vittorini, as a proxy for Bradbury himself, adds the trope of machinery, specifically rockets in the early Space Age era. Bradbury’s story seems to warn against a regressive luddism in terms of Fr Brian’s negative reaction to the idea of transgressing the boundaries of this planet. Only by kissing the joy as it flies beyond those boundaries, in its machineries, can eternity be achieved, he seems to suggest.

Equally though, after Fr Brian has done penance and come to personal terms with this astronautic progress, the conclusion gives us a curious conundrum. Fr Brian in his mind’s eye merges with the machineries, with the astronauts themselves. “He waited for the thunder. He waited for the fire. He waited for the concussion and the voice that would teach a silly, a strange, a wild and miraculous thing.”

What is that miracle? “How to count back, ever backward … to zero.”

The miracle is to be reduced to nothing. This is also, perhaps, an iteration of eternity that Bradbury intends to convey, or equally, the conflict between the positions of Vittorini and Brian have not been fully resolved. Theologically, it’s a beautifully poised conclusion.

But also, it demonstrates the difficulty of engaging in religious futurism. Bradbury’s story evokes opposing perspectives from within Catholicism to express positive and negative opinions about the idea of leaving this planet. He correctly identifies the existential difficulties that Christianity might face if extraterrestrial sentience was encountered, a theme he pursued to greater length in Christus Apollo.

But he could not have foreseen that the Church’s ultimate engagement with astronautics would be neither counting itself down to zero in resignation, nor seeking colonially to dominate space as once the Church sought to bring its version of salvation to the New World of the Americas.

Despite those teasing hints at prophecy, Bradbury did not actually foresee that Catholic futurism would ultimately be driving research into life beyond this planet, or that a pope would not merely write encyclicals in favour of rocket travel, but actively espouse the baptism of Martians as Pope Francis has done.

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The multiplying tensions of religion(s) and the future

Just a quick observation on religious futurism(s).

With religions, we might term revelatory knowledge, which is deemed to be eternal, of divine or suprahuman provenance and therefore unchangeable wisdom. With the scientific method, we have a progressive, though unending, search for fundamental reality, generated via the attempts to disprove hypotheses empirically.

There is clearly a potential if not actual tension between the two, and we’ve seen this in the centuries since the Enlightenment period when the scientific method first came to the fore.

What happens when we add the temporal factor of futurism to the mix? Do we add tensions or multiply them? How do they manifest?

It’s going to be different for every religion, predicated on the nature of each faith’s own sense of revelatory knowledge of course. Some will be more malleable than others, and some more malleable on certain topics than others.

It’s also dependent on two other aspects which are perhaps less immediately obvious. The first of these is the future vision embedded within a particular religion. If a faith has a designated end point, in terms of apocalypse, apotheosis or otherwise, then obviously any world view based on that faith assumes that the world is moving inexorably towards that position, perhaps at varying speed, perhaps with occasional setbacks, but overall, invariably towards a set destination point.

The second aspect which may not be so obvious is a particular religion’s comfort zone in terms of adapting to scientific developments. A more fundamentalist faith is going to struggle with this more than a less rigid one, for example. In this sense, some religions may be somewhat surprising.

Catholicism is often perceived, from outside at least, as antipathetic to science due to anti-scientist positions it occasionally assumed during the Inquisition period. Nevertheless, Catholic clerics have played significant roles in the development of a number of scientific breakthroughs – genetics to name but one – and the Vatican observatory today is one of the leading institutions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In short, Catholicism has a strong sense of futurism even if elements of its dogma are not especially malleable or open to debate.

Islam likewise has been a strong supporter and fellow traveller of science at various geographic and historical points, and has no issue with futurist concepts such as alien intelligence, or space travel.

By contrast, Buddhism, which is often understood at least by non-practitioners as one of the more rational, or less revelatory, forms of faith, has a number of points where it finds scientific rationality tricky to engage with. There are reams of books attempting to square this particular circle, some of them inspired by or even co-authored by the Dalai Lama, who is well aware of just how hidebound his own particular variant of Buddhism is.

What is the disconnect here? The answer of course is adherence to the notion of a godhead. The Abrahamic monotheisms are unapologetically attached to the concept of a creator deity. It’s their core belief. Buddhism on the other hand manifests very differently. Some forms, inspired by Hinduism, have many supernatural beings in their pantheon. Tibetan Buddhisms in particular are prone to this. Others, and one thinks of some of the more austere Theravadan forms, do not espouse gods of any kind or form.

Because of the existence of the latter, Buddhism MAY not require belief in a godhead, and therefore it has tended to be perceived by atheists who practice science (or who practice futurism, in the form of science fiction or otherwise) as potentially more acceptable. The reality on the ground and across the entirety of the belief complex, is not as clearcut of course.

As always, I do not have any simple answers here, especially as answers would require the power of prophecy. It is unknowable how religions will develop in the future alongside further scientific insights and discoveries, because it depends on the nature of the discoveries, how they relate to existing revelatory dogma in various faith forms, and how faiths respond to apparent contradictions.

But it does seem to me that the simple tension between revelatory knowledge and empirically tested knowledge leads to a much more complex relationship when we try to project any of this into the future.

And based on the study I have personally done on Anglophone SF and its relationship with Catholicism, and now Buddhism, it seems to me that the futurists are to date struggling to encompass the complexities of that potential relationship.