experimental religion

Experimental Religion belongs properly in Philosophy of Religion because not only has it not yet emerged as an empirical science, it should not be permitted to do so.

Experimental religion, as a branch of Philosophy of Religion, has tenuous relations with both Theodicy and Philosophical Anthropology.

What experimental religion must do is to take seriously the hypothesis of Ron L. Hubbard concerning the creation of religion and reconsider what was achieved in the past by Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith and Moses and what is being achieved in the present and recent past by Moonies and the revival of yoga in the West as well as, and often confounded with, guru-oriented Buddhism and Buddhist sects.

Ultimately, experimental religion must account for the successes of Mahomet, the Sikhs and Mao Tse-Tung as well as the enduring strength of Animism in both SE Asia and Japan. Some such results presently have alarmed with Communist Party in China with the threat of revival of anti-science under the religion of Maoism.

A good starting place is to consider seriously how it was that Taoism went relatively long before the emergence of a panoply of gods and of the roles of quasi-deities in the varies of Buddhism. The Tao is in some ways divided in its source figures as is Christianity in Jeshua and Saul and as it might have been between John Baptist, Jeshua and John of Jerusalem, Btother of Jeshua.

Feminists may want to consider the role either or both of the two Marys might have played in alternative plausible outcomes. For this we already have variants of serious science fiction and the efforts of figures such as Giordano Bruno and several 19th century visionaries.

Ultimately, experimental religion should be able to show, by way of thought experiments, how it was possible that Saul of Tarsus, who had never Jeshua, an illiterate stone cutter who was called “The Nazarene”, was able to dictate a religion that finally was only countered by the emergence first of Luther and then of modern day variants of atheism.

It is very important to consider to what extent the emergence of revealed religions in not predictable, as this must be used in the calculus of the future prospects for the free exercise of peer-reviewed science in a technological age confronted with the major set-backs of climate change, species loss and environmental degradation in the presence of the newly emerged internet as a global social medium.