What will become of religion, organized and personal, during the next 100 years? A projection, based upon present trends, of changes in religious ideas and practices that will come about through the influence of science and the cross-fertilization of cultures.
In what sense is the future real, and in what sense is time an abstract social convention, like the equator?
Is there a way of measuring irreversible motion, or are our current notions of time obsolete?
And what of religious hope for "the life of the world to come?"
Will politics--as we now know them--become irrelevant and disappear, and will the state, as Marx imagined,
fade away? What are the prospects for individual liberty, civil rights, law and the courts, the police and
penology? If nature abhors a vacuum, into what will "dropouts" drop in?
Modern methods of communication are extending man's nervous system to cover the planet. How and why
will such an extended nervous system operate? How will it affect the "private person" and our ideas of ethics and responsibility? To use Toynbee's word, will it "etherealize" our entire society?
