The subject of the Charter for Compassion project, I think, raises an important question: is it first of all possible to create a single unifying world religion? And if we could do such a thing, why would we want to do it?

The question is part of the much broader one of globalization, its benefits and inevitability…

New World Order conspiracists have long-since spoken of a world religion as being an essential component of any kind of global governance system. Religion throughout history too has been inextricably linked to temporal power. Durkheim called religion a force of social cohesion. The root Latin term, religare, means something like “binding together.” Carl Sagan, too, used to talk about a religion rooted in the wondrous natural mysteries of science being the one to finally unite the human race.

Would it be possible to consciously craft a religion which would unite the human family, while still retaining the rich diversity of many different traditions and belief systems? How would such a thing ever be possible with all the strife in the world: much of which people claim is actually caused by religious differences?

Parallel to that is an interesting Wikipedia page I found recently on “Language Death”:

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction, and sometimes pejoratively as linguicide) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language idiom is decreased.

Total language death occurs when there are no speakers of a given language idiom remaining in a population where the idiom was previously used (i.e. when all native speakers die). Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages.

Each religion, in my way of looking at the world, is essentially a language: a system of symbols, rituals and associated contextual meanings which allow people to communicate with one another and express truths about their experiences of the world. Any uber-religion whose goal would be to unify mankind would inevitably extinguish many of the smaller unique cultural traditions and systems which are encoded with religious systems in the same way that a monopolistic chain store like Walmart inevitably drives out competition from local ma & pa shops. Is there a way to circumvent such a thing happening on a mass cultural level, protecting the neurodiversity and polyculture we now have as a result of the Tower of Babylon kind of world we currently exist in?