A friend asked us to look over Joseph Chilton Pearce's recent The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit. As usual he expresses a strong dislike of Western Religion, which he would like to think is dying. On one page he described "a university professor I knew", a former "preacher" who "wrote a brilliantly researched book" in which he denounced monotheism; it caused wars.
His friend, and Pearce himself remind me of several seminary students, disillusioned by lessons from more advanced teachers, who turned their hostility upon "religion"; one of them took up a beatnik role in the French Quarter (of N.O.). We could hope that at least some of those unfortunate young men might in due time have worn out their hostility toward organized religion.
A larger number of men I knew became disillusioned at the parish level; they usually didn't "throw out the baby with the bath water", the way it appears to me that Pearce did.
Strange! he's a habitue of Indian gurus. Apparently he doesn't consider this 'religion', but I do. He has his own religion although he would never own to it.
I've known so many people who went that route, and more often than not, the attraction of Indian religion seemed to be primarily a reaction against western religion. (Jung would have found that a matter of great concern.)
There are religions and religions, even western ones. I yield to no one in my criticism of the abuse of the Christian religion. The abuses (and the wars) began when Constantine took possesion of the church, and unfortunately it's still in that Captivity up to the present, when princes of the church will signal support for just about any cockeyed war the latest Constantine wants to convene.
But that doesn't impeach the gospel; if they had only stuck to it in 325.
3 comments:
"...the attraction of Indian religion seemed to be primarily a reaction against western religion." This has been my observation also. It seems to be in vogue and easily acceptable in light of the problems or failures of institutional western religion.
Beneath western religion there's a truth that has been encrusted by years of history, cultures and economic/political intervention. It may be hidden beneath layers but the truth is there.
Thanks, Paul. You and I are in close agreement here. We need to preserve the "hidden layers of truth". I suppose Pearce is trying to do that to some extent, but his basic hostility bugs me. I, too am pretty hostile at established religion, although I belong to it organically. That's how he and I differ.
Strange! I love to criticize the church, but object to anyone outside the church doing it.
Well, I don't know anything about this guy, but atheism seems to me terribly unimaginative. Or, if he is as you say, simply antiChristian, it seems almost a double shame... first because the Church has so terribly failed in communicating mystical reality that mysticism is seen as something only available in the East. Secondly for being too lazy a researcher to find it in spite of the Church.
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