Does God have a future?

That is the question asked by Deepak Chopra.

Since science has falsified much of what the Bible tells us as stories, Chopra suggests that most people have two different choices they can make.

With no privileged link to God, no Adam and Eve who could be claimed as ancestors, believers had two choices. They could discover a deeper personal spirituality or they could compartmentalize reason and faith.

The first choice, discovering a deeper personal spirituality is the route most people have taken, and the Liberal Religions have moved right along with those people. This is personal religion, however, so it does not lend itself to the growth of large homogeneous and controlling organizations.

The second choice is the route taken by the Evangelists and the Fundamentalists. In an organized and institutional religion one is told by the institution what to believe and how to express it. This choice allows, and in fact requires, the growth of rigidly controlled institutions to provide the doctrine the believers are allowed to use and teach.

It is interesting that this distinction is what split the Southern Baptist Church. The Baptists, who used to pride themselves on not having someone who told them what to believe about the Bible and on the "Priesthood of the Believer" now have a conservative church which requires every theology professor in the Seminaries they control to sign a statement of belief which is dictated from their conservative leaders like Paige Patterson. This is what fundamentalist religion is about.

Fundamentalism took the second road. What's so compelling about joining a fundamentalist sect is that you instantly regain a personal relationship to God, as if science had never broken that link. In a wink Darwin disappears (only 15% of Americans polled say that they accept evolution as the truth without some input from God). Old dogmas going back to the Middle Ages suddenly become true again (the abortion debate is essentially a medieval one, since believers are asserting facts about when the soul enters the body). In a way it would be better to label fundamentalism as "literal metaphysics." Christ is the son of God, period. He sits in heaven on the right side of his Father's throne, period.

But the first road, which seeks to heal religion in light of science and rational thought, was the one taken by the vast majority of thinkers and believers. For God to exist side by side with science has proved enormously difficult, however. Sheer momentum kept people going to church, yet it was obvious that someone can be good, lead a moral life, uphold all the virtues taught by Christ, etc. without the benefit of religion. (I am using the terms Christ and church, but with a change of vocabulary the same schism prevails in Islam and Judaism).

If you don't need to attend church regularly to be a good and moral person, and in fact the church you attend is not answering the questions you ask about religion and calls you a heretic merely for asking those questions, what is the value of an institutional religion?

Most people I know have gone out and found some other people who are asking the same questions they are and created their own personal spiritual networks. These are networks in which no authority penalizes you for your beliefs and questions. Such people will look at a question on a form that asks "What religion are you?" and respond "Spiritual."

It is true that the fundamentalist religious organizations are the most rapidly growing in America. That is because true religion in America is not found in organizations. It is a personal religion.

Those who fear leaving the nonrational pablum handed to them by their organizations band together and try to force everyone else to join them through the actions of government.

This is the source of the battle against science, among other things. But it is a losers' strategy. The fundamentalists and evangelists are people who have been passed by in modern life, and they cannot win. They will in fact find their children reaching out to the more modern liberal ideas and abandoning them.

It is this last which frightens them most. They see it coming. It is this fear that motivates them and mostly prevents them from finding solace in their own personal religion.

It is sad to see people live in such fear. But it is their choice.

Does God have a future? Without any doubt. We just can't determine what that future will be. Whatever it is, it won't be found in the sad misreadings of the various religious books. It will be found in the real world, by real people open to real spiritual experiences. No one will be able to tell them who God is, because they will recognize the falsity of such instruction. They will find him themselves.