The "Bridge to Being" Blog

No religious discovery or working spiritual modality is ever “owned”. 

Prayer, meditation, redemption, moral rebirth (all these modalities of the spirit and more) are humankind’s acquired spiritual technologies, in the same sense that civilization is our primary social technology. 

The Neanderthals never owned the rights to fire; the Etruscans didn’t acquire an eternal patent to the wheel-on-road technology; and the Europeans never owned the Calculus. 

No religion, denomination, sect, or priestly class can legitimately claim to own or monopolize our access to the numinous, to grace, to God’s direct love and guidance, or to holiness – however, wherever and whenever it manifests to us.

The three new truths of the current era are:

(1)   Religion as such is irreplaceably valuable to humanity only to the extent that it amounts to a useful and authoritative repository of our truly eternal moral foundations (as opposed to the exclusive, sectarian doctrines) and represents the incarnation of mutually supporting, inclusive spiritual-moral communities.

(2)   Secular humanism and the faux religions of empirical science have been exposed as incompetent to supply our needs for moral guidance and spiritual food.

(3)   Increasingly, there is a free market in religion; more and more people are voting with their feet.

We are rapidly moving towards “open source” religion, away from the ecclesial monopolies and into “out of the box theologies”.  In this radically new situation, a chasm has opened up between an enthusiastic literalism and an equally enthusiastic illiterate-ism. 

I‘ll not say much here about the phenomenal growth of the “big box ” literalists except to point our that their very success is ample evidence of humanity’s hunger for morally founded, loving communities and the evident hollowness of the mainline religious institutions from which these new congregations have fled. 

And this is not the space to lament the empty pews within the mainstream congregations, except to point out that people have voted with their feet whenever religious leaders have lost confidence, grounding, and a sense of the core mission.  As a result the mainstream religions, especially liberal Protestantism (but not Reform Judaism[1]), are losing traction with males, families with problem kids, and teens of both genders.

The “crystals and aroma” brands of spiritual exploration have emerged as the church of spiritual esthetics.  They represent the spiritual spas of the New Age.  In their serene salons, engagement with the gritty evils, pains and difficulties of the real world are forgotten; the critically necessary ethical education of our children is neglected; and the vital supportive communities we so desperately need are supplanted by a culture of moral gesture and cost-free caring. 

The trap and the challenge to that brave subset of traditional religious institutions whose leaders are paying close attention to current conditions (and remain nimble enough to adapt) is this: 

If we didn’t have religion to do this work, we’d somehow have to rediscover it, reconstitute it and reincarnate it in our lives.  Or we slip in to the abyss.  For a preview of the abyss, pick up an urban newspaper.

Yes, there is more to be said on this topic…

Copyright 2008 by Jay G. Gaskill, Attorney at Law, Alameda, CA

Contact: law@jaygaskill.com