Editor’s Note: We thank the author for offering this piece to us at the beginning of a new season. The opinions expressed in this article are of the author and may not correspond to DGR. DGR is a biophilic and feminist organization. Our stance puts us in conflict with religion many times, but we are not an anti-religious organization. The following article is published as a critical analysis of religion and capitalism, not to oppose any religion.
For further insight into DGR’s views on spirituality, read this portion from the Deep Green Resistance book.
By Paul Edwards/Information Clearing House
Is this, our lifetime, the critical moment when the survival of life on earth will be determined; or just another of the ongoing crises that have always defined human existence? For a great majority of people it’s the latter: a time like any other. To most people, beset as they are with daily struggles, the question doesn’t even occur. One of the mixed mercies of human limitation is their blindness to what threatens them and the capacity to ignore it.
But assume that it is. Assume that in our time the future of life will be decided. This idea, as Dr. Johnson said of the prospect of being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully. If we imagine this is where we are—that whether human life continues truly does depend on us now—then all would agree that it’s imperative to abandon the hypocritical bullshit that prevents us from acting to preserve it. Humanity has never had to face the certainty its actions will determine whether life continues, and has never had to make ultimate choices irrevocably. Suppose that now it does.
Beneath and behind the cowardly sophistry that has prevented humanity from acting for its own survival, there are two powerful conceptual anchors that support our refusal to accept the iron fact of finity and prevent our acting rationally. They provide both cover and tacit permission for our self-elected suicide.
The first—longest enduring, and deepest—is the absolutism of organized religion; not of one religion, but all religions, religion itself. We understand why they exist. Awareness of finity, that fear we feel of our inevitable mortality, in addition to the random miseries living entails, create a desperate yearning for protection, hope, and safety every human experiences. Since life provides no such dispensation, a magic answer had to be devised. All religion originates in this need and is an attempt to address it.
Humanity in the mass found relief in religion; it assuaged the eviscerating hopelessness and mollified the inescapable dread mortality imposes. It’s psycho-spiritual gift has come at great cost, however. In insisting upon godly direction of Man’s destiny, religion allowed him to obliquely offload responsibility for his actions onto deity. The notion that “Man proposes and God disposes” has been used not just to provide a fantasy heaven, but as an excuse for the horrors Man inflicts on his own kind.
The appalling tragedies Man has perpetrated on himself and the living world through the ages, have found ultimate excuse and explanation in the Will of God. Religions have provided historic justification for Man’s long saga of cruelty and murder of his own. This is not because gods are portrayed as malevolent, but rather as omnipotent and incomprehensible. Man is not ultimately in charge of himself and his actions. God is. Religion requires Man to conform to a destiny he is unable to understand. Deus lo vult!
Although science has so long and so thoroughly exposed all religions for the specious, infantile fantasies they are, weak Man continues to use God myths to justify his brutality, and to elude, in his own mind, responsibility for the disasters he has planned and executed that are leading him and the living world to an end.
The second categorical imperative of human policy is Capitalism. It has been said that it’s easier for men to envision the end of the world than the end of Capitalism. Because it has proven the best means to amass the wealth that insures power and privilege, it is the ruling economic system of the world, and all business of significance is conducted through Capitalism. It is absolute.
Economics—a “social science”—has no more relation to ethics than chemistry has to politics. It is simply the study of the way people contrive to exchange goods and services. Its “laws” or, more accurately, practices, are not subject to ethical strictures or regulated by social effects. Economic systems simply enable servicing of the needs and wants of Mankind, and Capitalism is one of them. There is nothing inevitable and numinous about its so-called “laws”. They are a human created collection of rules that serve the interests of money power; in other words, stories.
In spite of that fact, Capitalism, the most powerful engine of wealth generation in history, has assumed a mythic character of permanence, an aura of inevitability, that has raised humanity’s belief in it to the level of a sanctified religion. The fact is, that human-created economic systems work as money power wishes them to work, but are riddled with cruelties and failures, and are subject to change if and when humanity demands it.
For the same reason religions continue their hold on the vast majority of humanity, Capitalism is virtually invulnerable to honest criticism. It has been portrayed as somehow holy, and ultimately necessary for the survival of humanity. Nothing could be more false and ridiculous. Ages of lying indoctrination and relentless force-feeding of dishonest propaganda by the money power has rendered it unchallengeable as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The combined power and dominating influence of these forces—religion and Capitalism—which virtually all mankind upholds and fiercely defends—is rapidly destroying the physical bases of human life and the prospect of any possible future for Mankind.
To return to our premise, if this is the age in which survival of our species will be determined, which seems certain, then unless the tyranny of these deeply evil belief systems is broken there is no hope for Mankind. Perhaps, the sense that any possible future is ours to determine, if widely disseminated, will provide the moral strength to break free and live? The choice is ours to make.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
Featured image by Paul Fiedler on Unsplash
Good connect dots by Paul Edwards. I just reread an excellent book, “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” by Steven T. Newcomb, and one phrase that stood out, “divine right of empire.” Also there’s the documentary film “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code”.
Author Paul Edwards seems to know little if anything about true spirituality or eastern religions. “Spirituality” means expanding one’s wisdom, empathy, feeling of oneness with the whole universe, and generally expanding one’s consciousness. Monotheistic religions teach false dualities and are therefore actually ANTI-spiritual. But religions like Buddhism (what Siddhartha actually taught, not the perverted versions that teach BS like reincarnation), which doesn’t even have a god, are very spiritual and are good things. They don’t search for false rationalizations of reality to make people feel better; quite the contrary, they try to get people to feel better by looking at reality more clearly and holistically, and thus having a better perspective on it.
As to belief in god, I look at it this way: If you believe in god, you need to realize that god is in everyone, including nonhumans and the rest of the universe. There’s a very good indigenous saying: “Beware of the man whose god is in the sky,” which pretty much says it all about this subject. If there’s a god in the universe, it would be something like the Force in Star Wars, and would be so far evolved beyond us that there would be no way to communicate with it, making things like prayer or worship totally ridiculous and ineffective.
I agree that capitalism is a cancer on the Earth that must be removed, but like the climate crisis it’s very far from being a root cause of any major ecological or environmental problem. The ultimate problem here is human failure to evolve mentally and spiritually, which causes humans to be materialistic and egotistic, among other things. Money shouldn’t even exist, and if it didn’t there would be no economic systems over which to argue.
Finally, people should not use science as a religion, which most people who think they’re smarter than the religious rubes, do. Western science is just another evil force on this planet, as bad as any religion. This science is reductionist and mechanistic, which is why it has created a hellscape on Earth that’s turned large portions of our planet into an inanimate machine that wrecks and kills the rest of the planet. Some scientific disciplines, like ecology, wildlife biology, conservation biology, and marine biology are forces for good, because they look at life holistically. But disciplines like chemistry and physics are evil, and they only cause harm & destruction to the natural world, in addition to killing of the life there.
Not sure why the verbal diss of Edwards when his article focuses on the Abrahamic trinity. And “believing” in a God or Spirit is different from having personal and direct experiences which are readily available b/c God or Spirit is in all beings. Also, many people have significant and instructive experiences, myself included, of other life-times, so referring to reincarnation as “BS” reads like, well, BS, which may be a result of the Council of Nicea circa 325 A.D. when the awareness of reincarnation was banned. There are modern stories of little children recognizing places and people from other times. Also, i don’t know that it can be said that Siddhartha “taught” “religion” or “Buddhism”, rather that what he taught got packaged as Buddhism, probably the kindest of the religions, yet also there is Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist ways of living and being that don’t need classified as a religion yet are helpful for living more consciously, more fully. And yes, Original Peoples being attuned with the energies of the Earth have good reason to be wary of ‘sky gods’.
The problem with screeds like this is that they lack a very, very basic understanding of both history and the religious faiths they seek to describe. Instead, they mistake the object of religious faith with the evil actions of people. In literally every example described above, it’s not religious faith that’s the issue, but how humans have acted in history, only sometimes using religion to justify awful behavior.
The writer of this particular screed ironically seems to be aware of this, at least marginally, when writing: “weak Man continues to use God myths to justify his brutality, and to elude, in his own mind, responsibility for the disasters he has planned and executed that are leading him and the living world to an end.” Very, very clearly, we see that the writer acknowledges the difference between the object of religious faith and the people who ascribe to those faiths (ostensibly all the big monotheistic religions–even though we clearly understand that he’s actually writing about Christianity). Maybe he really does conflate Islam and Buddhism with Christianity, but that would be a huge misunderstanding. This is confusing, because shouldn’t people write about what they know about? Clearly, he doesn’t seem to know much about world religions, or history. Meanwhile, he lays baseless, generalized claims at the feet of religious faith broadly without substantiating a single one of them.
So I’ll do it for him, by asking a very basic question: ‘how do history’s most evil masterminds use religion to justify their actions?’
Now, I don’t legitimately believe that this article’s writer wants DGR’s readers to believe that religious adherents are responsible for some of the world’s most historically evil mass murders. At least I hope he doesn’t, because Jews, for example, were the VICTIMS of one of the largest attempts at genocide in human history; they weren’t perpetrators! In this example, Hitler was the mastermind behind the evil, and he hated organized religion–Christianity in particular. It’s most often adherents to Islam (and American racists) who back the claim that the holocaust didn’t exist, though hardly every Muslim makes this claim (then again, let’s not forget 9/11). And let’s also not forget Stalin. It was Stalin who ordered the deaths of over 9 million political dissidents in a 10 year period (some estimates place this number far higher in the ballpark of 60 million). But did Stalin do this in the name of religious faith? No! He dropped out of a theological education to become a Marxist! So, too, was Mao Zedong a murderer unlike any in human history, having ordered the deaths of close to 45 million people. Mao wasn’t religious either, having abandoned Buddhism in his teens only to eventually become a Marxist. So it’s not religion, but politics and power that are the root of all the evil the author of this article would describe.
To be fair: Christianity has also been used to justify the evil deeds of political leaders throughout history. And often, religious authorities have been too complicit in these actions, because these leaders lured them with greater conversion numbers, through assenting to colonialist, imperialist, ultimately capitalist impulses. British and American colonialism are two obvious examples. And to return to the point I’ve already made, it wasn’t religion or religious faith at the heart of the issue, but was rather politics and power that led to the evils I’ve described here. To be clear: mine is no defense for the evils of capitalism either. It was capitalism that lay the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, which is the cause for all our ecological crises, and which is being played out today in the form of the Tech Revolution, in which our cognitive ecologies are under constant attack from digital information. I pay attention to DGR because I agree with their tenets that, as I see them, are akin to green anarchism. But then one of the greatest anarchist writers in history also ascribed to the Christian faith: Leo Tolstoy.
I don’t think the author means badly; I don’t think DGR means badly. But this writer’s article is badly mistaken, and DGR should better vet their writers. Or maybe I’m wrong, and the author and DGR both aspire to align themselves with a Marxist historical materialist worldview. I hope not, though. Because as I’ve shown above, political leaders that have been chasing Marxist notions of utopia have been humanists only in name, and evil in deed.
What a pitifully poorly thought out article. I am hoping against hope that DGR remains a non-religious organization and isn’t an anti religious organization.
It’s amazing. This guy can write off billions of peoples as brainwashed indoctrinated imbeciles but I guess he’s thrown the shackles off. The arrogance is astounding.
‘”Although science has so long and so thoroughly exposed all religions for the specious, infantile fantasies they are, weak Man continues to use” This completely ignores that many sciences have their root in faithful people and societies.
Another thing I don’t understand about many environmentalist anti religious attitudes, particularly Abrahamic is how on earth is it relevant to the damage that industrialization is causing to the planet?? Industrialization and a lack of religiosity in the western world have a direct correlation. Read Jacque Ellul. Midieval Europe could not develop industrially precisely because of Christianity imposed a moral order against it. You can see similar things in the islamic societies as industrialism encroached upon them.
Not to mention the inherently anti-capitalist notion of being against usury that is built into each of the Abrahamic faiths and it was only when European countries lost all higher morality besides the idea of ‘efficiency’ that usury became the norm and indeed is the foundation of our global economic system. Yet in this article Abrahamic faiths and capitalism are made to be wicked bedfellows “rapidly destroying the physical bases of human life and the prospect of any possible future for Mankind.” Absolutely preposterous.
Is DGR an environmentalist movement or an anti-thiest movement? Do anti-thiest really consider the vast majority of humanity to be mindless indoctrinated drones? That they have the real moral license to do so. (Many of these beliefs are held by indigenous peoples the world over, which I thought was one of the points of solidarity DGR stands by). This is a poorly uninformed article at best and infantile at worst. I’m disappointment DGR would even publish such nonsense. But I can’t say I’m surprised.
I’d like to apologize for the negative tone of my comment, it wasn’t necessary and it was a bit rude.
I do stand by the core principles that I presented. That the author greatly over simplifies religious faith. That the coupling of capitalism with religion is unfounded and that it alienates 90% of humanity with an (ironically) holier-than-thou attitude characteristic of colonizers attempting to ‘enlighten’ the superstitious natives to the saving grace of scientific rationalism.
To reiterate I encourage readers to research the lose of spirituality and religiosity with the development of industrialization. I highly recommend the first several chapters of Jacque Ellul’s ‘The Technological society.’
To the contrary of the article. I propose that on the whole religion provides a source of light, inspiration and sense of justice to the vast majority of humanity. And although every religious tradition has it’s negative interpretations (so too materialism and nationalism) I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that each religious tradition has room to accommodate a way of life that is compatible with life on this planet, which is what I understand DGR is all about.
sorry if my harshness offended anyone.
How does the saying go? When Christianity started in Palestine it was a fellowship of believers. Then it moved to Greece and became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome and became an institution. Then it moved to Europe and became a culture. Then it moved to America and became a business.
So capitalism and religion in America are mostly two sides of the same coin, to the frequent astonishment of people from other continents. The so-called prosperity gospel that’s the baby of fundamentalist US religion is worlds apart even from the gospel of looking after the poor taught by Catholicism (for all its faults, but a completely different understanding of that far more based on the Sermon on the Mount).
The fundamental problem with a sky-God religion is that it paints mortal existence as a poor cousin and mere forerunner of an imagined consciousness-and-identity-retaining eternal existence elsewhere – either on a “new earth” or in the sky (metaphorically). This leads people to undervalue life on earth – both their own, and the whole planet’s – and has led to many people viewing the earth as a commodity to be consumed, that will be replaced with something “better” by the sky-god at the Apocalypse.
Of course, some brands of Christianity are aghast at such a view, and say it’s like using a Van Gogh as a doormat to wipe your feet on. The Quakers in particular are almost a diametric opposite of American fundamentalism – no religious dogma, serious about social justice and environmental stewardship, no hierarchy, members sit in a circle during services and anyone can speak if moved, nobody officiates.
I don’t belong to any religion and agree with Jeff that nuance is often lacking in discussions about this topic. I include in that criticism Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” – he really does himself and his arguments a disservice by not doing his homework on his self-declared enemies’ viewpoints and mostly resorting to oversimplified caricature when discussing them and their beliefs. Not all religions are Abrahamic and not all Abrahamic religions are American or any other fundamentalism. Alain de Botton, though also an atheist thinker, has a far more nuanced and educated view on religion and wants to see some of the community and spiritual practices of the best of religion adopted into secular life. For further food for thought, see the Three Interfaith Amigos who are always excellent listening on podcast interviews about spirituality and community.
By the way – to the mod – I accidentally left my initial off. I’ve posted here before as SueC and maybe you could tack that on to avoid confusion? If not then this comment might clarify it (otherwise delete).
Reminder from the Editors: We respect all opinions, even those contradictory to ours. That’s why, we try not to censor any comments on our articles. That said, we also have a zero tolerance policy for abuse. Feel free to criticize and comment on ideas. That is how discussions take place. Please be careful that you do not attack any individual person. If any comment is found to do so, we apologize that we will have to remove it. Happy discussion to all!
Regarding DGR’s policy on religion, we would like to remind you that DGR is a radical environmental and feminist organization. That brings us in conflict with major religions of the world at times. However, we are not an anti-religious organization.
For those wondering what one of the the author’s points is, imho look no further than one of the cruxes, from Genesis: 28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” This spawned man thinking he is superior, “dominion over” every being except man. So there is one direct connection and as i already mentioned in a previous comment the “divine right to empire” was baked into the system of domination the colonial settlers brought to Turtle Island, a system of domination adopted by the USA and nowadays employed by corporate greed.
Essentially, religion is primitive man’s contrived answers to the questions of origin, destiny, purpose, and meaning, which ultimately occur to any intelligent mind.
And, almost inevitably, the answers they came up with were self-congratulatory rationalizations that humans are the highest life forms — and that somehow, we must be the ultimate purpose of all existence.
The priests behind ancient Judaism (which gave rise to Christianity and Islam) looked at the sky, and incorrectly concluded that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around the earth. Thus, we are at the center of the universe. And, as its dominant species, it must have all been made for our use.
To make it even more convenient, we were even made in the image of our creator — a
male deity, with power over everything beneath “him.”
The first thing that made me wonder about this “reality” was how and why God (in the absence of a goddess) needed genitals.
Then I heard that God was also loving and compassionate, which made me wonder what kind of “compassionate” creator would regulate animal populations by predation — with animal terrorists killing and eating others. Wouldn’t a wise and compassionate deity been more likely to have animals die in their sleep, and be eaten by scavengers?
Then we have the Christian God, subjecting God the Son to death by torture, so that God the Father could forgive the sins of all humans who believed in God the Son.
So, why wouldn’t this loving, compassionate Father spare the Son, and forgive his mortal subjects their mistakes, simply because forgiveness is the godly thing to do?
With evolution, however, everything makes sense. Everything follows survival of the fittest, and the path of least resistance.
There does, however, appear to be a higher intelligence than human reason — AND a spiritual existence, beyond mortal life.
As for what that intelligence is, my best guess is that it’s the collective wisdom of those who have gone before us, trying to keep us from making their mistakes.
I’ve been contacted by three spirits of the deceased, and have had two experiences consistent with reincarnation.
At age 20, out of nowhere, the face of my five-years-dead grandmother appeared on my ceiling in broad daylight, telling me that she had a message for my mother, but had been unable to get through to her.
The message made no sense to me. But when I repeated it to my mother, it made perfect sense to her. It also resolved a problem that had bothered her since my grandmother’s death.
Then, when I was 33, my youngest uncle appeared to me in a dream. I hadn’t seen him in 15 years, and only knew that he lived in Denver, while I was in California.
In the dream, I was in a junkyard in the Colorado Rockies, looked down the hill where I was standing, and saw my uncle ride up to the gate on an old bicycle. He didn’t speak, but gave me a long, knowing look, as if he had some great truth to tell me, but didn’t know where to begin. Then the clouds broke, a beam of sunlight shone down around him, he waved goodbye, and rode away.
Five days later, a note from my mother arrived in the mail. A few hours before my dream, my uncle — tormented by years of schizophrenia, and a failing marriage — had called the Denver police, and reported a shooting at his address. Then he sat down in the bathtub, and shot himself.
Only much later did the symbolism sort itself out: While I was in the junkyard and shadows of mortal life, my uncle was outside the junkyard, in the light.
My third contact from the other side came on New Year’s morning of 1995, when I was 47. A dear and truly mystical friend had died in a car wreck, two weeks earlier, along with her 130-pound dog, Indigo.
On New Year’s morning, however, Indigo appeared to me, also in a dream. In life, I had sometimes pretended to ride her, like a horse. In the dream, she beckoned me to do this again. But in the dream, she effortlessly supported my full weight. She led me through a dark tunnel, emerging on the far side into the most brilliant sunlight I had ever seen.
In the distance, I saw a tall and beautiful vase, filled with flowers. I knew that Indigo’s owner, Gina, was somehow present in the vase, and that if I looked down into it, all the mysteries of the universe would be revealed.
I also knew that at any second, Indigo would run for the vase, and leave me behind. Then she looked at me, and — communicating with her eyes — said, “Do you want to stay, or go back?”
I had never wanted to be anywhere so much as to stay there with Indigo, and to run with her to the vase. But I knew somehow that it wasn’t my time to be there.
“Okay,” Indigo said, telepathically. “But you know I can’t go back with you.”
Tears filled my eyes, and I raised my hands to wipe them away. But when I opened them again, the dream was over, and I was back home in my bed.
Gina’s memorial service, three weeks later, was very informal. It began with some of her favorite music. Then a woman asked if people who had known Gina would like to share some memories of her.
I was reluctant only to tell about a dream. But when everyone else had finished, I reluctantly stood, and told about my journey through the tunnel with Indigo, and into the light.
After the service, a man I had never met before approached me, introduced himself as Gina’s father, and told me that he was a Hopi Indian.
“What you dreamed is true,” he said. “In my culture, animals often come to us in dreams, with messages from the Other World.”
He invited me to a brief reception at his home. When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was a beautiful blue vase, like an exact miniature of the one in the dream. And I knew without asking that it contained Gina’s ashes.
As for past lives, I believe that between 100 and 130 years ago, I was the Portuguese government official, in charge of colonial affairs in Angola. I was a very lonely and unhappy, middle-aged man. One day, as I was descending the marble staircase from my office, I felt an incredible weight and pain in my chest, collapsed, and everything went black.
This, too, occurred in a dream, 53 years ago, when I was living in Montreal. I had left the radio on when I sent to sleep, tuned to CBC. When I awoke from the dream, the network was doing its morning news broadcasts in various languages, as a service to the city’s many immigrant communities. The broadcast I awoke to was in Portuguese. And for a few moments, I understood every word. On various occasions since then, I have also heard Portuguese being spoken. And I always understand it fluently, until I realize that I don’t speak the language, and it turns to gibberish.
In my other past life dream, I was a ten- or twelve-year-old orphan girl, living on the streets on some small, heavily bombed European city, during World War Two.
I’m walking down the street, looking for food and shelter, when I hear an approaching aircraft overhead. It begins training machine gun fire on the street, and I see the bullets raising puffs of dust — each one coming closer to me. Then, just like my dream on the stairway in Luanda, everything goes black.
Such is my knowledge of the spirit world — brief, rare, and sketchy, but as real as yesterday’s sunrise.
Religions do provide comfort, etc. for some, yet also in some instances, capitalism and religion do work together, as clearly expressed in the following bit from Sir Robert Heath’s Patent 5 [King] Charles 1st; October, 30 1629: “Whereas our beloved and faithful subject and servant Sr Robert Heath Knight our Atturney Generall, kindled with a certain laudable and pious desire as well of enlarging the Christian religion as our Empoire & encreasing the Trade & Commerce of this our kingdom…”
Just some general comments after reading recent posts, not directed at anyone in particular but just thinking out loud.
One is that people create their deities in their own image, and that when religious people are asked, “What does God want?” and when they are asked, “What do you want?” the same brain pathways tend to light up.
Another is that spiritual experiences can’t be objectively verified as being connected to some greater intelligence “out there” – although they can hold intense meaning for the people who have them, no matter what their religious or other flavour.
The brain can do extraordinary and, to its owner, highly convincing flights of its own. I really recommend the book “Hallucinations” by Oliver Sacks as a nice basic intro to some of those ideas. I’ve never personally met anyone who’s had what they consider spiritual experiences they thought were connected to a higher being and who has revised their opinion later, though I’m know from podcasts etc that such people exist (and yours truly is one of them).
But consider two things: What are the very earliest post-birth experiences of many people in the West – as neonates? Long stretches of being alone in their cot, often in the dark, with a Great Being (parent) coming intermittently to tend to them. I think it sticks with people subconsciously, as a familiar pattern, which can be revisited later for a “sky-parent” without too much internal argument because it’s a familiar experience (even though for most people not consciously recollected). And if you think about it, traditionally babies in Indigenous cultures were kept in body contact with another person for much of their infancy and therefore never had that sense of being alone in a void and waiting on a Great Being so they wouldn’t die (of hunger, thirst, loneliness etc) – instead they grew up connected to other people from the start, to community, and also were exposed to the natural environment instead of an indoors – and their religions/spirituality I think reflect that.
The other thing: Consider the experiences many people have under the influence of psychedelics – oneness with the universe, feeling connected and loved, awe, ego dissolution etc. Only in that case they know it was psychedelics – but if it happens spontaneously (as it can – again see Oliver Sack’s book – and as it did for me), it’s easy to ascribe that to some greater being / various templates that you may already have to scaffold onto…
Dear Mark B., Thanks for sharing those stories, fascinating. It shows one of the reasons why if someone asks me ‘Do you believe in God?’ i say ‘No, i experience God/Spirit’. Each of us can have unique experiences, yet also there are common threads, as for example i’ve heard many stories of people receiving guidance from ancestors, birds, trees, dreams, and on and on it goes.
Thanks, Mankh.
In my case, an atheist and philosophy grad talked me out of the supreme being belief when I was 19. Thus, the conclusion I drew to a godless, but spiritual reality was that spirit survives death, and that spirits from before us can sometimes visit, as if doing therapy sessions for the less enlightened.
On a couple of occasions (one awake, one in a dream) I have also been allowed to visit the spirit world briefly.
When there, I was able to pass through walls, hear whispered conversations, 100 yards away, and had 360 degree vision. When I wanted to go somewhere distant, I only had to think about it, and suddenly I was high overhead, flying effortlessly toward my destination.
The reason we don’t have more of these experiences, I believe, is simply that it can be as hard for spirits to contact the living, as it is for the living to contact spirits. And — with their abilities to fly, move through time, and contact other spirits from the past — they’re usually MUCH too busy to waste time on such mundane activities as contacting mortals!
My three contacts with spirits were brief, and only happened, I believe, because they had messages important enough to justify “slumming” with a mortal for a few moments.
In the case of my grandmother, she wanted to give my mother peace of mind, and relieve her of the guilt of feeling that she had neglected her mother, during her final days.
With my uncle, it was simply to tell a like-minded nephew that he was departed, but far from “dead,” and that he needn’t be mourned for gaining freedom from mortality.
With Gina (who was like a soul mate to me), she just sent her dog to let me know that, while we couldn’t have the relationship we wanted in this life (she was half my age, and already had a boyfriend), there would be no limitations, when we meet again in eternity.
Thanks for sharing more, Mark. What seems consistent in general with these kinds of spirit messages that i have heard about from others and my personal experiences are: 1) peace of mind/alleviating suffering (what Buddha spoke of with the 4 noble truths and 8-fold path) and 2) guidance to avoid trouble. Living in the physical dimension is a school of hard knocks, yet the knocks can be alleviated if we live in harmony with the natural world energies and are open to messages/guidance from non-physical dimensions. So to tie this into the topic at hand, capitalism/extractivism are deaf and dumb to such messages/guidance and egostistically think it’s all there and their’s for the taking. Oren Lyons (Seneca), Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan,, “says that when the American colonists borrowed from the Haudenosaunee system in forming the US government, they neglected to include the spirit world, and thus began the problems that beset the US government today.”* Look at how much destruction has been done in just over 2 centuries because of neglecting the spirit world. Imho that’s reason enough to stop arguing about religions and whether spirituality is real or not, and instead start healing what we can, and protect and defend what we can. The biggest common ground, despite any differing viewpoints and beliefs is …. common ground aka Mother Earth, and the biggest mystery of which we as human beings get glimpses of an orderliness beyond immediate comprehension is the Spirit world. And how those two ‘biggests’ interact, provides some clues for living peacefully together. (*”An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”)
This is a really ill-thought article. All religions do not equal Abrahamic religions.
I suggest, as other commenters have addressed, that you examine neopagan and earth-centered religions. These are the fastest-growing religious categories in most Western nations and represent real hope. These are new movements, inspired by ancient traditions but adapted for the challenges of the age of the Anthropocene.
My own tradition, druidry, has had over 200% growth in the last few years. I am currently the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Our basic curriculum, that all new druids follow, is to make at least three lifestyle changes to tread more gently upon the living earth, to plant trees, to learn about their local ecosystem, to learn how to live more in line with the cycle of the seasons, to adapt their practices to their local ecosystem, just to name a few. To us, the earth is sacred, all life is sacred, from the smallest ant to the forest to the waterways. Further, in addition to direct physical action, we also engage in healing and blessing ceremonies on behalf of the earth.
Many druids are bioregional animists, recognizing the spirit in all things and having the ability to interact with those spirits. It is pretty hard to want to cut down a forest or turn a wetland into a housing development when that forest or wetland is literally full of your friends and equal beings. Animism asks us to recognize our place as part of nature and equal to other life.
That these new religious identities are growing, and that they exist at all, demonstrates a clear counterpoint to the narrative you provide here.