When my father was a young man, fresh out of the Navy and with three young children, he attended a Catholic new fathers retreat. There the priests taught him the perils of sex education, but most importantly the dire need to combat "Teilhardianism".
This was right around Vatican II, of course. As a child I witnessed the turning around of the Catholic mass from all of the congregation looking at the back of the priest's head, to guitar masses and "happy birthday Jesus!" banners. Ah yes! The Sixties.
Things were changing fast, what with the hugely unpopular Vietnam war, hallucinogens and birth control, and I am sure my father never thought twice about the insidiousness of the creeping Teilhardianism all around us.
When I was in Catholic high school, I took an elective called "Science and Religion", and it was all about Teilhard de Chardin's view, which later became elaborated as a sort of new mythology of the Coming of the Cosmic Christ. That is, that the mind of Jesus was percolating through the firmament of our collective telecommunicative "noosphere" and would eventually transform (transmogrify?) human consciousness into a true egalitarian/Utopian kingdom of heaven, here on Earth.
All this was heresy, of course, which the Church uneasily dealt with (all the while covering up its pedophilia problem, we now know). Millions subsequently left the Church, myself included. The world no longer fit this weird old institution's view of reality. Relativity, the A-bomb, alien abductions, and the Big Bang Theory, all conspired to undermine the Church's two-thousand-year-old authority on just about everything. Not only was God declared dead, but the much feared Teilhardianism became a quaint theory in an endless array of Sci Fi cosmologies we could choose from.
Currently there is no cosmology that can unify human behavior with the actual universe in which we live, except perhaps the most absurd amalgam --spaghetti monsters and Cthulhu. Carlos Castaneda's great Eagle and Philip K. Dick's VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). Or as one poet put it, "you must become what you most fear."
But the vast majority of human beings coexisting on this planet still have no clue about all this, of course. They are still under the yoke of what the self-proclaimed "Great Beast" Aleister Crowley called the "three great slave religions".
We may be dawning into the Age of Aquarius, or the New Aeon, but we are kicking and screaming all along the way, like Pinhead awaits us on the other side. And maybe he does... And maybe we will like it...
Astrophysics has us awakening to our cosmos just as it is accelerating into total darkness. And the Crucifix/carbon atom, which is the basis of all life, now overheats our whole planet. We don't need a new religion that brings us to our knees. We need escape velocity for the masses. We need to climb out of our Platonic gravity well. Otherwise, we're all just playing with our Perky Pat dolls.
The Sepher Yetzirah postulates that the universe is a "language", like Cobol or Java. We just have to decipher it's blueprint to build our wormhole navigator. We need Nirvana for interstellar travel. We need Christ so we can tolerate the trip. We need Allah so we can awaken from our idolatrous dreams when we arrive at our destination.
But I despair we can't stop weeping over God's dead body floating in space.