Religions come, religions go but religion in some form or another is almost always with us. Religion is one of the near-universals of social behaviour and this is not about to change merely because an arbitrary calendar of antique Christian invention indicates a change in century and millennium. During the sixty millennia that separate us from the earliest decorated grave uncovered to date, mankind has produced on the order of one hundred thousand religions. To say that religion is found in nearly all times in nearly all societies is not to say that all religions are more or less the same. They're not. They aren't all pluralist philosophies tending to pure monotheism. Nor are they invariably irremediable clots of superstition. Growth in scientific understanding and technological complexity in this century has generated stronger and more diverse responses in a non-uniform way: Unbelief has also risen but it is much more localized, clustered among the most and the least technologically advantaged in the industrialized world. As Jikan, "the Silent One", wrote in Beautiful Losers when he was merely Leonard Cohen,

"God is alive. Magic is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied."

God (or the gods) may or may not be the beginning and end: the concepts are largely undefinable and the hypotheses are untestable. The complex mental processes that have created and continue to sustain religious beliefs were wired into our neural apparatus by thousands of generations and ancestors numbering in the millions. That doesn't make them true but it does make them powerful and habitual.

Canadians are not very receptive to new religious movements and are as reluctant to embrace unbelief as to reject traditional rituals at life's pivotal moments-birth, marriage, death. New gods have not been born in Canada but there's a new religion and it seems to be gaining the allegiance of many. Holy Spirit religion-Pentecostalism and its Charismatic offshoots-is spreading faster and wider than any other faith in Canada and the rest of the world. It has gained somewhere around half a billion very enthusiastic followers in less than half a century. Within another twenty years, one in three Christians is likely to be Pentecostal-Charismatic and very vocal. Its fifty-thousand-a-day-or-more converts are profoundly influencing the general landscape of Christianity across the world and down the street. If Holy Spirit religion fails to become the dominant form of Christian belief and practice, its failure will be caused by paranoia and racism and outright catastrophe.

Assuming that humanity does not have to face up to the realities of either nuclear holocausts or massive environmental calamities and that the weak-kneed international political community does have some success at controlling militaristic gangsterism in Eastern Europe in the next few years, the forms of Christianity that are to dominate the new century are going to be shaped by forces beyond the Pope's or any other European's control. For the first time since the seventh century, the majority of Christians are no longer of European origin. Within another generation, Christianity will be firmly centred in equatorial climes: it will be massively Spanish, Portuguese, and English-speaking. Equatorial Christianity is very young, unstable, diverse, and poor but its dominantly Pentecostal-Charismatic presence and pressure are undeniable. In Africa, where it is powerfully allied to Catholic rituals and pageantry, it's more than matching Islam in growth and moral fervour. In Asia, Christians are likely to sever all religious ties to the West and most probably demonize us anew with the passion of ayatollahs within our lifetime. In China, Christianity will break free of male domination sooner and faster than elsewhere in the world: leadership will be with women who heal, exorcise, and teach a personal morality that combines dignity and discipline.

The shapes of Judaism and Islam to come are further beyond this reckoning. So too the resurgent Hinduism of Mother India's nationalist offspring and the Buddhism flowering everywhere. I'm an interested onlooker to all of them. As for myself, I much prefer the narrative epic of stars and neurons disclosed by science to any of the myths propagated by religions. Science takes in more with greater eagerness and somewhat better techniques of self-correction and asks for no more belief than this: that physical laws are consistent with biological laws and biological laws are consistent with social laws and that the visible universe is everywhere subject to these explanations. To believe this is to remain open to the unknown without allowing oneself to be overwhelmed by it.

Like the past, the future is only one of our daily considerations. We'd do better to focus on the present for its own sake. Tragedies arise when we surrender too much of our present to the future of those whose terrible will to power insists that life must be harder than death and that a blurring of the imagined and the real in varying gradations of virtual reality is preferable to the immediately real and realizable. We are a welter of genetically resonant adaptations to the world of Ice Age hunter-gatherers that are largely archaic and atrophied in most of our daily circumstances. This isn't all that we are; the choices that have brought us to this point are only a subset of possible choices. To get beyond this point, to see that there are other endings for us than an apocalyptic conflagration we must all get better at being here now.

T. F. Rigelhof teaches religion and social analysis at Dawson College in Montreal. His 1996 memoir A Blue Boy in a Black Dress (Oberon) was a finalist for the Governor-General's Award and won the QSPELL Award for non-fiction. His second novel, Badass on a Softail (Goose Lane), has just been published.