RATIONALITY AND SPIRITUALITY

Implacable Foes or Powerful Allies?

© Ian Lawton 2005

The huge reaction to the death of Pope John Paul II across the globe, and the revitalisation of fundamentalist Christianity in America, both suggest an at least superficial desire to halt the onslaught of secular materialism in the western world, and to reinstate religious and spiritual values to their proper place.

There are many and varied motives underlying this trend. On the macro level, the global threat of fundamentalist terrorism has produced an old-fashioned reaction – we must believe that God is on our side to justify our at least reactive, and arguably proactive, retaliation. It is depressing and perplexing that, at the start of the twenty-first century, humankind should have made so little progress over the millennia that we are still prepared to let our leaders justify their purely political ambitions by reference to supposedly religious values.

On the micro level, it is becoming clear to even the most hardened materialist that something is dreadfully wrong with western society, when all our efforts to control crime, drug abuse and the breakdown of the family seem to come to nothing. There can be little doubt that our blinkered assertion of human rights and of freedom of choice, without any discussion of the required trade-off in terms of personal responsibility, must take a large share of the blame for this. But would the reinstatement of good old-fashioned religious values do anything to halt this decline? Arguably not, because in fact those of a religious persuasion do not tend to act with a markedly greater degree of morality than atheists. Moreover, orthodox Christianity hardly encourages people to take personal responsibility when everything that happens to us is considered to be “in God’s hands”.

Leaving aside these more obvious and dubious motives, there is nevertheless something rather more substantial underlying what remains, arguably, a widespread even if poorly elucidated dissatisfaction with our increasingly material and hedonistic lifestyles. There is an increasing tendency amongst ordinary people to reject the notion that material status is all that matters; and an increasing reassertion that it is perfectly valid to ask why we are here – and to feel dissatisfied with the idea that it is just the result of random genetic chance. But there is a problem.

We are always talking about increased choice in modern society, but it seems this is largely the preserve of the material world. When it comes to orthodox religion our choices are severely limited in one particularly crucial aspect: because none of those most widely practised in the western world – including not only Christianity in all its forms, but also Islam – have as their central tenet the idea of reincarnation. And yet we know from surveys that a majority of American citizens have at least a loose belief in the concept, and it would be surprising if we in Britain were far behind.

This widespread belief will, to a large extent, have arisen from some sort of exposure to the idea of past lives. Most titles on the increasingly popular and arguably overcrowded mind-body-spirit bookshelves are predicated on the twin assumptions of reincarnation and karma, often influenced by eastern religious thinking. And the proliferation of satellite television stations has led to the airing of many more documentaries on past-life recall and similar subjects.

Has this led to an upsurge in orthodox eastern religious belief in the West? No. Despite the apparent success of the Hare Krishna movement in the sixties, few people would now describe themselves as Hindu, for example, even though this is the major faith that most closely adheres to the concept of reincarnation. Many might suggest they are more Buddhist than anything else, not realising that the Buddha’s teaching was most probably misunderstood and turned into the doctrine of “no-self” – that is, the belief that the individual soul does not reincarnate.

So what we have in the West is a whole mass of individuals who believe in reincarnation, at least loosely, but have no obvious home in any spiritual movement. Of course, a great many prefer that their beliefs should remain personal to them, both from fear of ridicule and because of the personal nature of their spiritual experiences. They have also seen what orthodox religious dogma achieves in the world, and want no part in more of the same. But there are two major downsides to this undirected proliferation of belief. On the one hand, this mass of people has no common spiritual framework that they can turn to for solace and guidance. And on the other, they are deprived of any sort of authoritative voice or mainstream media exposure.

A major factor in this sort of worldview not being taken seriously, despite the huge potential audience, is that western belief in reincarnation is derided as based on nothing more than half-witted, new age nonsense. It does not even have the dubious privilege of a grounding in the “revealed wisdom” of a Christ or a Mohammed. But this assumption, although probably historically correct, will sooner or later require considerable revision.

Why should this be so? Because we now have a mass of genuine evidence to support this worldview. This ranges from remarkable cases of near-death experience in which obscure information recalled by subjects who have been clinically brain-dead is subsequently and independently verified; and on into the similarly obscure but verifiable details of past lives recalled spontaneously by many children, and under hypnotic regression by many adults.

Before I am accused of merely spouting more new age nonsense, I accept that any intelligent person with no particular preconceptions would be forgiven for thinking that this evidence would be easily pulled apart by proper, rigorous, scientific method. But they could not be more wrong. In fact, materialist explanations for all these phenomena are not only inadequate, they are laughably so. Reductionist is hardly an adequate way of describing them – ridiculist would be more appropriate. And it would also surprise many people to know that the professionals doing the core research – almost all fully-scientifically-trained and initially-atheist psychologists and psychiatrists – are fully committed to devising scientific controls for their research.

So next time you are inclined to write off such talk of evidence that supports a Rational Spiritual worldview, remember we are not talking about crackpot mediums, self-proclaimed psychic gurus and disingenuous illusionists – even though these undoubtedly exist as arguably the greatest threat to genuine spirituality on the planet. Instead we are talking about professionals whose research, when brought together, provides a framework for understanding our world and our purpose in it that is far more philosophically and logically coherent than that put forward by the materialist intelligentsia. The latter have held the intellectual upper hand for a long time, but it is now they who should be put on the back foot and forced to explain why they persevere with their illogical belief systems.

As a Rational Spiritual worldview gains increasing exposure, intelligent people looking for answers to the big questions are being given a new choice that no longer lays them open to intellectual ridicule. Not only that, but all the evidence on which Rational Spirituality is based points towards personal responsibility for choosing the circumstances of our many lives, and for learning the lessons we have set for ourselves. This is a major new development that should, in time, have huge ramifications for us all.