Tim Boucher has a great post today speculating on what the future will bring for religion. His ideas tie in closely with major upcoming planetary events:

As the Latino population increases in America, and big companies start advertising more to and being fluent in their culture, I bet we’ll see a huge upswing in Latin and Afro-Carribean religious practices, like Santeria, Voodoo, and all the other variants.

The planet Uranus brings revolution and breaks up rigid social patterns in the sign that it travels through, and earlier this year Uranus moved into Pisces, the sign of the spiritual quest. Pisces is less concerned with dogma (that’s the realm of Sagittarius) and more with a real experience of the Divine. Uranus will remain in Pisces until 2011, bringing with it a huge influx of new religions, occult and not.

Will Christian “megachurches” become even bigger and more popular? My guess is yes. How big and how popular is the question.

Pluto’s travel through Sagittarius through 2008 has brought with it issues of power and religion. Everywhere we turn we see this: The power of the religious right in the government of GW Bush, the battle in the middle east between Jews and Muslims, and between Shia and Sunni. In 2008 Pluto will enter Capricorn and begin creating and destroying our power structures. At that point we may see more banding together of religious groups (Uranus in Pisces) in order to form stronger power bases (Pluto/Capricorn).

When artificial intelligence finally is created, I think we’re likely to see an enormous move towards religious organization around it. The fact is that (most) humans on some level do strive for an external authority. If we have a super-intelligence, I guarantee that one of the first things we’re going to ask it to tell us is whether or not there is a god, and it seems VERY likely that it’s answer is going to be: “Yes, me!” Or something similar. Or, we’re likely to see people feed this computer with a “complete” history of the world, a full text documentation of everything available from every religion, philosophy, etc. And we’ll ask the computer to find the “truth” in all of it.

This I believe is what we are beginning to see as we move into the “Aquarian Age.” Not the “Age of Aquarius” where the moon is in the seventh house and love will rule the sky, but a 2,000 year period where everything we believe we know turns out to be false and many of us become tuned in to sources of knowledge that are beyond the dimension in which we now live. Computer technology is associated with Uranus which rules Aquarius, and the boundary between computers and personal thought will begin to blur. When these changes take place, the concept of a divinity will be completely transformed.

Another related alternative is that technology and mass deception is used by a power elite to fake the above scenario, or to fake the re-appearance of Christ or some other religious figure. Project Blue Beam conspiracies talk about projecting holograms into the sky of religious figures around the world along with microwave pulses conveying information in various languages, directly to the minds of percipients. If such a thing were indeed possible, the world would be pretty much ripe for the picking, I think.

This could certainly happen at any time, but is very likely during the opening Uranus/Neptune square that will occur in the 2040s. Uranus opens a gateway of consciousness and Neptune can create illusion and delusion, and that is bound to be a time of difficulty. Here’s a great article about the effect these planetary cycles have had throughout history.

A fascinating topic; both technology and human consciousness are accelerating at a rate that has not been seen on earth before. I doubt that we can even imagine what even the next twenty years will bring.