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Aleksandar Malečić
393 days ago |
I am a Christian. Christianity is my starting point and final destination in the spiritual journey. But, I tolerate other religious and non-religious beliefs. I don't know whether this comment is aligned with Christianity (or your religious belief) or not, but I suppose that asking questions won't do much harm.
Is yoga a Hindu alternative to prayer? Is a believer practicing trance-inducing shamanism or transcendental meditation a good believer or not? An atheist can practice yoga, meditation, Zen koans or other way to experience altered states of consciousness (I am heavily against drugs) without any harm to his/her non-religious belief. It's true that atheists, after experiencing alternative ways of perception, might sometimes be easy victims of destructive cults (nationalism and political parties can also be cults). But, if some techniques to figure out certain things work for some people, do I have a right to criticize them?
Monotheism developed during a very specific moment in human history, between two ice ages. It belongs to organized societies. It focuses on human interactions with other people. Shamanism and paganism belong to hunters, gatherers and barbarians. Practicing monotheism and its moral values requires some kind of stability. You can hardly make a person who can't feed his/her children or who doesn't have enough clean water interested in philosophy of personal relationships. I don't want to say that any religion has loopholes. Our way to understand everything, to grasp complexity and interconnectedness in a single moment has loopholes.
Our generation and all following generations will meet huge challenges. After a long time, we shall be like early pagans when they were trying to understand and control winter, thunders, floods and hunger. Religious people and atheists alike will ask the same questions. Their approach to those questions will differ, but the questions about purpose and interactions with other people and the environment will be the same. This is the last generation which will be able to ignore the fact that there is a huge challenge in front of us, a gap between or necessity to do something and our understanding of what to do and how. Priests, economists, scientists, managers and engineers will look at the same void. Are we about to reach the biggest societal change ever or will the future bring us an unsolvable chaos and instability?
It's not time for new religious movements. We shall indeed start living on the edge of our understanding of phenomena (natural resources, biodiversity, economic and biological globalization, climate change, overpopulation, consumerism...), but we don't need a new religion or ideology to give us new universal answers. New religions wouldn't only be heresy. They will never be able to go as deeply as a religious or non-religious belief of your choice (hopefully you have chosen the right one). This also applies to any kind of new paganism, because we shall need to improve our society and communities in the first place. More functional interactions between people will be the starting point.
We need to be good people doing the best possible things in order to avoid a disaster. With or without religious belief, you are a witness of an emerging global consciousness. You are, just like me, a brain cell in a bigger global brain. There is a hypothesis that you can reach any person in the world within six degrees of separation or less. I strongly believe that people who are aware of this meshwork's existence as a whole can reach any person involved in sustainability or renewable energy within three degrees of separation. Actually, knowing one's e-mail address makes one degree of separation, but I am talking about already existing and relatively strong links in the network. Religious people and atheist alike are, aware or not, parts of a bigger transpersonal consciousness - just like ants in an ant colony.
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