Sunday Morning In California As The Season Changes

It’s absurd to believe that life only arose on earth, and that the forms of life on other planets are any stranger than they are and have been on this one.

Though it takes billions of years, life in the universe evolves, through random processes, brains with the capacity for communion with Mind. However, the final evolutionary threshold for that neuronal capacity – conscious symbolic thought – is also the greatest impediment to realisation.

There is a tremendous elegance in direct perception of this universal paradox. But it brings with it disturbing questions. Why do humans continue to decimate this beautiful planet? Is Homo sapiens completely incorrigible?

These are essentially religious questions. But people are still turning to organised religions, despite them having become undeniably hollow, divisive, lifeless and irrelevant.

Even progressive newspapers remain attached to the status quo. The Guardian, for example, exhibits a parade of panaceas for the unprecedented global crisis of the human mind, institutions and consciousness.

This Sunday it featured one of their columnists spouting treacly nonsense about religion, ending his enervating piece by praying for a revitalisation of Christianity.

He quoted some halfway back Christian: “To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the Church.”

The key phrases are “my truths,” and “thoroughly human institution of the Church.” The first is New Age pabulum taken as a given, the path to “personal awakening.” There is no “my truth” unless there is no such thing as truth at all.

The second clause combines the secularism of humanism with a moribund institutional religion. It upholds precisely what can and must now be transcended – the emotionally and spiritually extinct past of humans over a true civilisation flowing from emergent human beings.

After praising “the enduring presence in our culture of essentially Christian thinking,” the Guardian’s religious philosopher ends by stupefyingly saying, “Slowly, increasing numbers of people are being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those pews, in other words, may not stay vacant forever.”

You cannot separate Christianity from nationalism and from Christian nationalism. This is the kind of shallow thinking and writing in the mainstream media that is paving the way for Trump to be elected again.

It’s probably too much to ask the Guardian to get serious in the face of humankind’s polycrisis, but for the sake of humanity, please push the unseen and unwritten boundaries of acceptable thinking beyond your current nonsensically narrow limits.

As far as “the human institution of the Christian Church,” a serious person can find solace and guidance in new insights into Jesus as a human being with a divine mission. But no thinking person can find solace in Christianity anymore.

Christianity is a crumbling, 2000-year edifice built on the foundation of a deliberately manipulative inversion of the teachings and crucifixion of Jesus. Still unable or unwilling to understand what went wrong, Christians continue to drink from stagnant ponds of the past.

The mental and physical artifacts of organised religion are not human institutions to be preserved in the hope of their revitalisation, but sources of division and hatred between people. And as such, they are also sources of alienation from the sacredness that imbues life and the intelligence that imbues the universe.

Therefore let churches, mosques and synagogues be the archeological ruins they have become, so they don’t continue to be the engines of the ruination of humanity.

Behind the impossibility of finding freedom in man’s theological contortions is a refusal to face the human condition as it is, and do the spadework of finding out for oneself what is true and what is false.

Just as I finished writing this, a group of Christians pulled up in a van and piled out in their Sunday finest. From about 30-60 years old, they’re all smiles and high-fives as they fan out down the street. Twenty minutes later, they return, glum and dejected. No one was buying what they had to sell.

Rather forlornly, one fellow begins to walk up the driveway. He’s motioned back by the woman in charge with a look and gesture that says, “Why bother?”

Why do people bother to hang onto these dead institutions? Is it because people are so empty and alienated they look back to religions and churches to fill them up and give them a sense of identity and belonging?

They don’t realise that religions are holding them back from growing out of the childhood of man’s past into the flourishing and flowering human beings demanded today.

Creeds and doctrines prevent direct perception of the sacred. Whatever meaning and fellowship they once provided are far outweighed by their destructive irrelevancy in the present world.

Religions and their belief systems are things of thought, not gateways to insight and sublimity. Besides, the basis of man’s prior, prideful domination of the earth (the primacy of “higher thought”) is being superseded by AI.

Never before in human history has there been both a greater necessity and possibility of bringing about a new human being within us. Failing to do so now will mean a continuation of the decimation of the earth, the devastation of war, the gross disparity of wealth, and the desolation in people everywhere.

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