COSMISM

A book that presents a new cosmological theology.

God is the cosmos, writes Oraiah in his nonfiction debut, and all humans are parts of that totality. The word cosmos, he writes, refers to “the universal order and intelligence present in the world, as opposed to just chaos and disorder. It also implies the deep interconnectedness of all things in the universe.” As a stave against such chaos, the author proposes a new religion: Cosmism, which seeks to fuse religion and science into a kind of conceptual soup that’s equal parts dark energy and dark matter. “The field of cosmology is intricately connected to the field of theology,” Oraiah writes. “Researching and understanding the Cosmos and our place in It is the same as understanding the nature of God and our relationship with It.” According to Oraiah, this realization is one of the fundamental tenets of Cosmism. Oraiah writes all of this with a profusion of narrative energy and a generous amount of quotation and allusion; the book is immersive, providing readers with plenty of food for thought. The main drawback is that much of it is almost complete gibberish. “The spirit Supersoul houses the Ghost of the superior intelligence & supreme consciousness at the Cosmic scale,” goes one passage among innumerable passages of undiluted nonsense. “It is the power beyond our limited material data and comprehension ability.” Few to none of the author’s assertions about the nature of reality have any grounding in scientific fact. And Oraiah adds an element of blasphemy to his work by constantly invoking Carl Sagan in the context of Cosmism. Sagan’s book Cosmos (1980) is called “one of the sacred writings that is part of the Bible of the religion of Cosmism”—a statement that would have surely irked the rationalist atheist Sagan.

The blueprint for an energetic new religion—composed mostly of woo-woo and blather.