Via :
Today’s spiritualities fail to incorporate the material constraints we’re all now well aware of within the scientific worldview.
Thus sci-fi now plays the role religions used to play in conjuring believable visions of human salvation.
Conversation
Do you think that this is a qualitatively new phenomenon?
One alternative story: ancient spirituality was often pretty grounded in knowledge-about-the-world as understood in ancient times. Maybe sufficiently old sci-fi gets read as religion by those in the far future?