The students in "After Religion" present their final projects in the discussion sections this week, and at least some of them will share them with the whole class in next week's lecture slot. (Their prompt: "What comes after religion?" )This means today was the last chance the TAs and I had to talk about the broader questions and implications of the class. I warmed us up with a counterpart to the "three ways" we'd parsed the course title in our opening class. "Faith beyond the human" - the name for this week's material on the interface of religion and new technology - might be taken three ways too.
(1) More than humans might be "religious." Last week we saw Jane Goodall's insistence that chimpanzees feel religious awe and wonder, and Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deacon's suggestion that we share "non-depressing and religiously fertile traits" with most forms of life. The modern western notion of religion may be obsolete and the "world religions" a fateful figment of imperial imaginations, but something of what humans are "after" in "religion" may vastly predate and transcend our experience.
(2) The function of religion (sic) might be to connect us to things beyond just the play of human feelings, meanings and relationships. One of the barren gifts of the secularism left us by receding western monotheism is the idea that religion has only ever been comforting stories human beings tell each other in a world that's really utterly indifferent to us. But what if we learned from indigenous traditions to feel and find ourselves in the land and the relationships which sustain us?
(3) And our own religion might outlive us in the robots and AI we have brought into the world. I illustrated my "three ways" with an image from a
Muslim Futurism collective we looked at a month and a half ago, androids enjoying the practice of "dhikr" even after humans have come and gone, the resplendent landscape evoking "the positive energy felt when performing a communal act." But I refreshed the point with that passage from solarpunk novella
A Psalm for the Wild Built that I so love.

"Wild-built" robot Mosscap experiences the gods "everywhere and in everything" - and not just because it was made of parts originally made by human beings, recombined since by other robots. Mosscap is a curious and caring observer of everything it encounters (like the mushroom it's named after), and so has observed the gods because they, well, are more than just stories humans made up. "Surely
you know that," Mosscap says to his human interlocutor, a traveling healer.
And then we watched a video of a whooshing soul-exalting starling murmuration, and then a video of a simple computer simulation of such movement, something I told the class I'd learned about from Tyson Yunkaporta, whom we met two weeks ago. Where western folks are terrified that AI will do to us what we've done to the rest of the living world, Yunkaporta's view, rooted in Aboriginal ways, suggests that the right kinds of AI might reaquaint human beings with the "patterns of creation" which have all along sustained us. "Surely you know that."

It all added up to a more upbeat conclusion than anyone, including yours truly, anticipated. This isn't a time when you hear much in the way of hope for the future, so perhaps I was semi-consciously compensating for that. But the funny thing is that I was more than academically rehearsing a hypothetical possibility as if it were real - what I've become so good at over my years in religious studies. I was (egad) preaching.
Evidently this is what I think comes "after religion," "beyond the human" (and not just after the human, it's true now). The gods, the pattern of creation, are everywhere and in everything. Everyone else knows that. Don't we?