The way I see it, all religions have two key parts: explaining the origin of the universe, and explaining how humans should treat each other. Everything else is pretty much just filler. Both of these things are great, and should be explored by the human race.
My problem with religion is, at least with the explanation of the origin of the universe, its not updated as time goes on. Science will always reveal things that someone 5,000 years ago could not have figured out, and those discoveries will conflict with various religions. Since religions wont update to accommodate those new discoveries, they are only left the option of denying those discoveries to be true.
This denial leads to generation after generation of people who are ignorant and paranoid. They are taught that the scientists are morons who couldn't possibly understand the truth of the universe, and their theories on the origins of the universe (TOU from now on) should be completely disregarded.
This is obviously a problem, but it gets much worse than that. When taught that something someone tells you is wrong, it's hard to believe anything they tell you. When told that a scientist's TOU is wrong, people tend to not believe any scientific discovery that they are told, even if it is a completely different category of science.
A great example of this is global warming. Christians (I only use Christians because of experience) are taught that the Big Bang theory (I feel like that may not be capitalized, but I don't care) and the theory of evolution are completely wrong, both of which are widely accepted by scientists around the world. Because of this, Christians are skeptical of other scientific discoveries, such as global warming.
The three of those discoveries aren't even associated with the same field of science. The big bang theory (There, its not capitalized. Happy?) falls under physics. Evolution falls under biology. Global warming falls under climatology. Very, very different fields. And yet, because the physicist and the biologist are wrong, of course the climatologist is wrong.
For a religion to truly be eternal, it needs to update itself with the things people discover to be true. Otherwise, future generations are going to be screwed, as they have been in the past.
Now for the second part of religion, the explanation of proper human interaction, I don't necessarily believe it needs to be updated over time. Do I think it would be better if it were? Of course. But if the two key parts of a religion keep changing over time, is it truly the same religion?
How humans should interact with each other, in theory, should not have to change over time. If you get the basics right, you should be good. The only thing that really changes is people become more tolerant with passing time. People learn to look outside of themselves and see the viewpoints of others. But if you make your religion very tolerant to begin with, you'll be fine.
Instead of telling people what not to do, just tell them what they should do. Tell them to love each other, or to help one another, or to be generous. Keep it simple, and it will be very hard for people to dispute your ideology.
Bottom note: It's been almost a year, and I still don't have a better word for blog. This is hard.
