In the article below, I liked the “Buddhism is the highest form of Christianity” joke. Hee hee. And I am glad the author says “sick religion is dehumanizing”, not healthy religion.  Not all religion should be thrown out with the bath water. I inserted little comments as I read along, mostly because the author kept messing up his own article (in my opinion!) with his personal bias by allowing politics to constantly intrude into his arguments and conclusions.
See the end of the article for more comments from yours truly and also for +Christian-Thomas’ sapient comment…
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DEAR GOD… FIVE THINGS RELIGION-HATERS SHOULD KNOW
By Stuart Davis
stuartdavis.com
August 9, 2009
http://www.stuartdavis.com/blog/dear-god-five-things-religion-haters-should-know
I just finished reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. He’s given us another powerful work in the vein of Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Bill Maher (Religulous). Team Rationality is ushering in a long-overdue examination of religion in the modern world. They make a strong case that religion is sick and dehumanizing. I would say more specifically, sick religion is dehumanizing.
And we do have a global pandemic of sick religion: billions of believers stuck in low levels of consciousness, riddled with pathologies — called Samsara where I’m from.
However, reading these best-sellers has inspired me to make a wish-list.
Here are five things rational religion-haters should know:
1. There are levels of religion.
I keep noticing that what many rational types detest is not religion per se, but its least-evolved expressions. Over and over I hear atheists say “religion” when they are actually describing low levels of religion. That confusion is not helping. Eliminating religion will not eliminate low levels of development. And that’s the real threat to humanity: Low levels of development in high positions of power. Saying “Religion” is the problem doesn’t mean anything. What level of Religion is being referred to? For example, here are five distinct levels of religious expression, from lowest to highest:
Magical-Animistic: Recently in Tanzania, religious figures have murdered over fifty innocent human beings because they happened to be albino. The victims are killed so that their organs can be used in religious rituals that are supposed to create wealth. That’s one of the things we get from a Magical mode of religion. Blood sacrifice.
Mythic: After the massacre of 3,000 Americans on 9/11, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell claimed it was god taking revenge on our society for homosexuality and abortion. Mythic religion is that old-school religion of supra-natural allegory. Virgin births, raising the dead, walking on water, and the rapture. Except mythic believers don’t consider their stories to be metaphoric symbols, they regard them as literal and real. Mythic religion guided George Bush through eight years as President of the United States, [Katia inserts: so you say, but you have no evidence for this rather snobbish claim. Perhaps POLITICS guided him. Or power-lust? Or whatever…but religion? If so, seems to me he would have been obsessed with sending missionaries and trying to convert people to Christianity. We can’t read minds. It is arrogant in the extreme to announce one knows another person’s inner spiritual life, to claim exact knowledge of what level of religion intimately guided that human being for eight years. Pat Robertson’s and Falwell’s remarks are clear evidence they were at this level — at least at the moment in time when they made their god-is-punishing-us remarks. But to judge eight years of someone’s spiritual life without any evidence of mythical Christian mindset (sick or healthy) seems unduly biased.]
…coincidentally also guided the terrorists to commit mass murder.
[I agree with you there. That is a single provable event. They left letters saying their mythic level of religion did indeed guide them to commit that repulsive crime against innocent humans.]
Rational: Francis Collins, one of the World’s most accomplished Scientists, calls his faith BioLogos, or theistic evolution. He sees Science, and the empirical method, as a form of worship. He rejects intelligent design.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of rational people who believe in a Divinity of some kind.
Pluralistic: For a taste of pluralistic Christianity, check out The Christian Pluralist by William C. Buffie, M.D. and John R. Charles. They even incorporate psychology in their faith, exploring shadow / projection in the realm of religion. They embrace the Bible “as a story, not a weapon.” Jimmy Carter has also demonstrated a strong pluralistic Christianity. He even taught Sunday School in a Southern Baptist church while President. [Southern Baptists are actually more fundamentalist by far than Methodists–George Bush’s church. Not that we know how fundamentalist or evolved either ex-president is/was because again, we cannot read minds nor souls.  To actually be teaching Southern Baptist Sunday school while president…Now that might indeed imply being guided by fundamentalist Christianity during a presidency. Yet you place Carter at a more spiritually evolved level than Bush and don’t claim he was “guided” during his presidency. It appears you are allowing political bias and/or spiritual arrogance to creep in to your otherwise good piece.]
Integrative: In my opinion one of the most spiritually evolved Christians on the planet, Father Thomas Keating teaches a form of contemplative practice called Centering Prayer, which he describes as
“. . . a journey into the unknown. It is a call to follow Jesus out of all the structures, security blankets, and even spiritual practices that serve as props. They are all left behind insofar as they are part of the false self system . . . The false self is an illusion. Humility is the forgetfulness of self.”
These are five very distinct levels of the same religion, in this case Christianity, but it applies to any religion. (I forgot to list the highest level of Christianity, which is Buddhism. Kidding!). The point is, religion should not be regarded as horizontal and homogenous. All belief systems include a vertical chain of development.
The ‘answer’ to fundamentalism is not to get rid of Religion, but to get religion to evolve. How can we help Pat Robertson discover his hidden Father Thomas Keating? Will Francis Collins agree to mentor Sarah Palin? [Maybe you should ask will he mentor YOU. And read Matthew 7:5 http://bible.cc/matthew/7-5.htm ]
I’m kidding. But I’m not. The answer to low levels of religion is higher levels of religion. The real work ahead of us is religious development, not just embarrassing people into forfeiting their belief system (they will just trade it for an equivalent one anyway). If tomorrow, all the religions in the World magically vanished, we’d face the same dangers of low levels of consciousness in high positions of power.
2. There are healthy and pathological versions of every level.
A religious person can be healthy or sick at any stage of development. The answer to sick religion is healthy religion. While Pat Robertson told us 9/11 was God’s revenge for homosexuality [sick], millions of other Christians — at the same mythic developmental level [but healthy] — were organizing their communities to offer help and healing. Because that is what healthy mythic Christians do (and they do it better than just about anybody). For every sick fundamentalist there are many healthy believers contributing to society in a positive way.
3. The more people evolve, the less religious (fundamentalist) they are.
One definition of ‘religion’ is a partition between the saved and the damned, a boundary that separates ‘us’ and ‘them’. When people grow, they include more and exclude less. As we live into higher development levels, our circle gets bigger. Evolving means a bigger experience of ‘We’. Also known as Love 😉 As the self evolves, it recognizes more people (and plants, and animals, and things) as part of its own identity. That’s why development creates security for everyone, it transforms ‘them’ into ‘us’.
4. At its higher levels, Religion resonates with science and rationality.
That’s because at its higher levels, religion becomes spiritual. I define religion as a belief system used to interpret Reality. I define spirituality as the direct experience of Reality. No beliefs are required for spiritual practice. (In Zen there is a saying: All beliefs are false.) Spiritual experience can often undo religious belief. Religion provides filters, and depends upon intermediaries and externally located salvation. Spirituality removes (or improves) filters through direct access to our intrinsic nature.
Spiritual practices are empirical in this sense: You want to know something (like, what is Reality) so you conduct an experiment. For instance, you may spend a few decades making your Subject an Object of awareness. You share your data (gathered through direct experience) to a group of qualified peers who have repeated that same experiment for centuries. They verify or falsify your findings, and you proceed with further experimentation. You don’t have to ‘believe’ anything about it, before, during, or after. In this way, the contemplative traditions have evolved over millennia. They are in harmony with rationality and science, and generally welcome any methodology that might increase our knowledge of the visible and invisible Kosmos.
5. Everybody starts at the bottom.
Even if everyone in the World became Mensa-level enlightened today, every baby born tomorrow would have to begin at square one, and develop the old fashioned way. So far, we haven’t figured out a way to skip developmental levels. However, we move through them faster than we used to. For instance,
John Ashcroft may be a poster child for the low-level of Mythic religion, but a mere 100,000 years ago there WAS NO Mythic level of religion. It hadn’t even emerged yet. Even 3,000 years ago, George Bush Jr. would have been one of the most evolved people on the planet. Not so much now.
[There you go again messing up an otherwise good article and causing us to question YOUR level of development because you can’t resist getting in petty jibes, and are bringing politics and sarcasm into the topic at hand].
Now Mythic Religion is like, totally a crappy low level of consciousness, and most nine year olds or U.S. Presidents have access to it, thanks to recapitulation. Recapitulation? When we’re born, we basically get a free pass to evolve up to the prevailing center of consciousness in the population. The level of consciousness we are immersed in (in the family we are born into, in the culture we live in, etc) exerts a developmental gravity. And that gravity pulls us up to it. But, when you try to evolve beyond it, to higher altitudes of consciousness, then that same center of gravity drags you back down to it. If you are below it, it lifts you up.
Rise above, it will try to pull you back down.
That’s why Mythic religious peeps are freaking out. Their World (view) is vanishing like millions of species God gave them Reign over [And in the Islamic worldview it’s even worse: they believe strongly that God gave them “reign” over all females of the human species].
Eventually (if they don’t destroy humanity first, with their lust for an apocalypse), mythic religion will become about as important to future generations as magic is to us. Magic should be used in Harry Potter movies, not for the religious murder of Tanzanian Albinos. Mythic religion should be a history lesson, not the guiding belief of a U.S. President. [He isn’t in office anymore, can you get over it?]
That’s why Bill Maher’s movie Religulous is funny: It’s pointing out the fact that there are a LOT of people living with a World View that went out of style in 1637 (thanks, Descartes!). Bill Maher is hilariously pointing out the fact that religion is literally retarded, because it is developmentally arrested. I mean, it would be hilarious, if it weren’t so appallingly true. Evidence indicates 70% of the world is at a Mythic (or lower) level of development. And they are religious!
If we get these five simple points into the debate about religion, I think it would help eliminate some confusion.
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Katia wishes to add:Â And if you read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose it would eliminate even more of that confusion.
Seriously, A New Earth is one of the most life-changing books I have ever read. I am currently working on memorizing its table of contents, just like people memorize the Bible’s “layout”, so that I can find passages more easily. If you still haven’t read it, email me and I will send you a copy. I have extras laying around and I believe it should be in every motel room’s bedside drawer… Â A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose original non-Oprah hardback version at Amazon.
The author of this article, Stuart Davis, is a primary disciple of Ken Wilber. I have read Wilber extensively and like his teachings very much. Â Wilber is very much in harmony with Eckhart Tolle. But his student Stuart Davis has a tendency toward dragging politics into spirituality (yikes!) and making smug assessments as to what level specific humans (i.e. Bush, Palin, etc.) are in their spiritual development.
He also tends to assume the lower levels are “bad” and the higher levels are “good” as evidenced in this particular article when he calls the mythic level “crappy”. What he fails to realize even while admitting that everybody goes thru all these levels is that there is no good or bad and we shouldn’t say to a kid or a teen during their mythic phase that they are at a “crappy lower” level. Again, smug. No more than we say a child who can’t yet do times tables but is learning to add and subtract, is at a crappy level. I mean, really. It is vital and healthy to work up thru the levels, that’s why they call it spiritual evolution. The lower levels are required, so let us not judge each other for spending time in them just as we are or did. The only thing that becomes “crappy” is the behavior of the person if they are expressing an UNHEALTHY version of any particular level, be it magical, mythical, rational, pluralistic etc. Â Ken Wilber himself says that it’s better to be a healthy lower level than an unhealthy higher level. So the behavior of an unhealthy pluralist is less crappy than a healthy mythical levelist (fundamentalist). Davis even points out how the healthy mythical levelists are the best charity organizers, donators in the world. Yet he doesn’t make clear their behavior is only “sick” or their level “crappy” when they deliberately harm others. Leave ’em alone, they’re evolving up the spiral (of Spiral Dynamics) at their own pace. Sheesh to calling their level crappy, since we know what word crappy is a euphemism for. Not to mention you run the risk of falling into the good-or-bad labeling habit: evaluating everything that comes across your desk as either “good” or “bad”, seeing everything as either black or white, sweet-to-me or crappy-to-me. Â This polarized mindset is characteristic of the very mythical level you are criticizing! Tolle teaches three ways to react to everything that comes across our desk: with acceptance (never resistance nor judgement as “bad”), enjoyment or enthusiasm. He calls these the 3 Modalities of Awakened Doing and they are described in the final chapter of A New Earth.
I sometimes sense almost a holier-than-thou mindset when reading Stuart Davis. Still, his re-cap of the Spiral Dynamics levels of religion teaching and Wilber’s interpretation thereof, is nicely described in this article — and his hypothesis is spot-on. Yes, please let those religion-haters take note! So overall I enjoyed this article, Dear God…Five Things Religion-Haters Should Know, and wanted to pass it on.  Hope I didn’t ruin it with all my interrupting comments. <grin>
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Gnostic Bishop Christian-Thomas writes:
Dear +Katia:
Perhaps I’m biased, but I believe that Judaeo-Christian Gnosticism is the highest developed and evolved expression of both orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity. Too bad that most commentators, such as this one, did not cite Gnosticism, in his fascinating hypotheses.
Peace,
+Christian-Thomas
***
Dear Reverend Katia,
The idea that in earlier ages humanity had a greater spiritual faculty is based on the widely found traditional teaching that humanity has declined from an earlier golden age (or Satya Yuga) to the present iron age (or Kali Yuga). Rudolf Steiner, who has definitely influenced my understanding Christianity, similarly taught that spiritual vision was progressively lost and substantially disappeared after about the time of Moses (c. 1200 BC). This spiritual vision did persist to some degree in the mystery religions but even this was lost by late classical times.
Sri Yukteswar, who was Sri Vivekananda’s guru, wrote in the Holy Science that the capacity for spiritual vision was linked to the great year (the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes) as well as to longer astronomical cycles. According to Sri Yukteswar, we are currently in the dawn age of the ascending Dvapara Yuga, having passed through the lowest point of the Kali Yuga, and time of greatest spiritual ignorance, at around 500 AD.
Correction, Sri Yukteswar’s disciple was Sri Yogananda, author of the well known Autobiography of a Yogi
Reverend Katia,
Thanks for this post. I have found the spiral dynamics principle to be of doubtful value. The higher levels are extremely vague and the lower levels are defined primarily by a rather patronizing attitude to political and cultural ideas seen as less evolved.
I don’t think that committed atheists care much about the distinction between good and bad religion. For the committed atheist, all religion is irrational since they accept only an empirical standard of evidence (and God is by definition not an empirical object). On this view it is the irrationality of religion that usually leads to “bad” religion.
A superficial rationalization of religion is no remedy, of course, since this approach tends to lead quickly to practical atheism. Religion properly understood rests on a super-rational intellectual faculty, and that faculty was far more widely present in earlier forms of religion than it is today.
Dear St John K:
Thank you for reading and commenting. Good points about atheists, and about the super-rational intellectual nature of religion. Personally, I do like Spiral Dynamics, but now that you mention it, I am going to pay more attention to see if I detect the patronizing attitude in the Spiral Dynamics literature and in Ken Wilber’s writings on it. As I said above, I surely find it in Stuart Davis’ articles and blogs, but in the original Spiral Dynamics and Wilber, I have perhaps only seen that slightly. Wilber tends to focus on the higher levels, which as you say are vague, since those levels (what Wilber calls 2nd Tier) are raw mystical connection and difficult if not impossible to convey in writing. Wilber is one of the few (and Tolle!) who manage to describe with these pale signposts (words) the tip of the iceberg to the point of catching a glimpse… in my opinion. That’s why I found Wilber’s Theory of Everything and Tolle’s A New Earth and Power of Now to be so exhilarating.
Why do you think and what evidence do we have that the super-rational intellectual faculty was more widely present in earlier forms of religion than today? The earlier forms of humankind’s religion are not really known, altho many modern reconstructionists like to imagine what they were like, often reading into scant texts or even pre-historic relics religious practices and beliefs that probably were not there.
+Katia
I like it very much. I express my spirituality through Liberal Catholic/Old Catholic Tradition but came to this point through Zen practice and Martial Arts. So I would agree totaly with the quote “No beliefs are required for spiritual practice.” (In Zen there is a saying: All beliefs are false.) but everything is wonderful to explore as in this post.
Namaste’
Bp. DDL. Rochelle, OST
I express my spirituality through service, servant leadership to be specific. Spiral Dynamics makes common sense when looking at (wo)man’s evolution over time. Humans evolve and adapt to meet the challenges of their time (with Divine guidance). The servant leader however, helps to facilitate the change but focus is put on the result’s benefit to his fellow man, not on his or her own individual contribution to the solution. No second tier recognition is sought or is necessary.
I am always amazed at the arrogance of humans who think they know everything. Why would anyone want to disect and label differences in how religions are practiced? Who made them the judge of what is good and bad, evolved or base? The divine intelligence of the universe has purpose for us all and poking fun at others is truly showing ignorance. I refuse to even acknowledge this with a response.
I really appreciate Katia posting this article online here. Stuart Davis mentions some great points about there being higher and lower ideas of religion among others. Unfortunately throughout the article every time that he mentions a great point, he follows up by making an irrational comment. So I really appreciated Katia’s comments and responses to his article in her brackets. My favorite comment by Katia was where she suggested that maybe it was just politics that influenced George Bush’s presidency and that there is no way that we can pretend to know or understand someone’s inner spiritual beliefs.
Overall I thought this was a very good article. However, point no. 1 states that there are different levels of religion but how do we measure these levels? Are they meant to be hierarchical and therefore improving, becoming more spiritual? I’m not so sure that I see it that way. If we are attempting to measure a qualitative experience then how do we do that from the outside?
I completely disagree with no. 3 – ‘the more people evolve, the less religious (fundamentalist) they are.’ If this were an absolute truth then we wouldn’t be experiencing the confused nationalism, literalism and bigotry in the ‘Mythic’ levels of religions that would rightfully belong at the ‘Magical’ level. This could have been clarified by stating which ‘people’ he is talking about. Are we referring to spiritually evolved individuals here, or is it the pace at which corporate religious structures evolve? These are completely different.
Does he accurately represent Wilber’s views, I wonder?
Ah yes! almost forgot. Jim Marion’s book ‘Putting on the Mind of Christ’ gives a good description of the inner work of Christian spirituality. Forward by Ken Wilber.
The grace of Christ is sufficient, sufficient to cover our debt, sufficient to transform us, and sufficient to help us as long as that transformation process takes. The Book of Mormon teaches us to rely on “the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” (Nephi 2:8). As we do, we do not discover as some Christians believe that Christ requires nothing of us. Rather, we discover the reason He requires so much and the strength to do all He asks. (Philippians 4:13) Grace is not the absence of God’s high expectations. Grace is the presence of God’s power. (Luke 1:37)
Having a conversation with an atheist today is not as easy as it would be some years back. As we have seen the evolution of many churches fight hard to remain to their dogma and rules of text that were written during different times and cultural contexts. Just as humans evolved so needs the church to meet those needs. Spirituality did not stop when the final holy scripture was written thousands of years of go. These five arguments can easily be used to say that the church is failing – not dying. People are incredibly hungry for God. The church has failed to be mature and sincere its faith. It is failing to give people a space to meet the God that wants to meet them (not the God of the 1950’s or 200AD). To minister is not by words its by our actions. The church must do new things. Celebrate the resurrection, rather than the depressing and disheartening story that the Messiah was not going to restore the Kindom of David. It’s time for us to authentically feed people spiritually, emotionally, and physically to earn our keep in society. It’s time for us to be dissident disciples. Just like everyone else, we MUST justify our existence. We cannot expect to hold a position in society if we don’t actually do what we say we are about. God will do new work through a failing establishment church, just like God did new work through a dead Messiah
I really like your insight that we as clergy must, “to earn our keep in society”. Yes, spiritual inspiration and POSITIVE aspects of the god-human relationship are what people deserve, not endless guilt-tripping and lists of “don’ts”.
To do the works of God, one must have the conviction and Faith.
F: full A: acceptance I: in T: the H: heart
Mr. Davis brings some food to the intellectual buffet, and then seems to apply critical theory to the entire right-wing political establishment. Hopefully in the last 9 years he has found his ideological mirror and taken a good look at his life and learned to redirect his Rage Against The Republicans. He’s obsessed, it’s not healthy.
That being said, Stuart Davis brings some much needed analysis of Religion Haters. I like that he differentiates between low-level and high-level religious people. To be sure there do seem to be plenty of so called low-level people, but do we really need to call them that? Is it really that simple? Perhaps it’s intellectual laziness. I mean, after a lifetime of generally the same stories over and over the message seems to get lost in the noise. People get tired of it. People get tired of working just to live. Do I really need to carry a dog-eared holy book around my whole life? How long does it take to get the message?
Our nearly unlimited capacity for creative pursuits and intellectual hunger for answers comes at a price. It takes a lot of work. I mean real mental rigor by dedicated individuals who yearn for a higher plane of thought and existence. Not because this one is so bad but because it is inherent in our humanity to do so. Always work at being better, share it with others so they can do likewise.
I get where the atheists are coming from. I used to verbally beat up creationists till I learned to back off and just listen to their points. I offered my views and let it rest. I’m not going to penetrate dogma by fighting head-on. I like the Zen approach, flow like water around an obstacle of thought, try another route. Keep them thinking. I don’t need anyone to agree with me, I just need them to think.
It’s easy to pick on religious people, but it’s not nice. And nobody likes a bully. The hyper-rational approach has the least answers in the areas that religion has the most. Right or wrong, religion, spirituality and metaphysics can provide plenty of direction till science can catch up. And that’s ok. We need directions to travel on the road of life and GPS won’t get you there.
Katia, I liked your comments. Stuart tends to do an excessive amount of labeling. He needs someone like you to keep him on tack.
What fun commentary from you! Spot on, brother, spot on.
This will be brief: (this is my take on 9/11)
1). Sodom and Gomorrah happened because God could not find ten righteous people in the city, so He destroyed it. This does not apply to 9/11. Yet, because these are key leaders of the faith, followers adapt the same concept without even thinking of what the scripture actually says about this.
2). Robert Cross – disagreed with #3 “the more people evolve, the less religious (fundamentalist) they are”, but I agree with the statement as it may refer to spirituality, because the more we evolve spiritually the more open we become to things (spiritually and naturally). Spirituality enlightens us to the Word or how we interpret it. We must remember the difference in the law of Moses and Christ’s coming so that the law might be fulfilled. One was meant to rule, govern or control and the other was one of compassion; to give hope or “sight to the blind” as I like to call it. However, I do agree with Robert’s question: “Are we referring to spiritually evolved individuals here, or is it the pace at which corporate religious structures evolve? These are completely different”. ***oh and by the way, Jim Marion’s book ‘Putting on the Mind of Christ’ was a phenomenal read. I have pages and pages of notes from this book.
3). Lastly, Justin Hurtado-Palomo statement was very passionate. “Just as humans evolved so needs the church to meet those needs”. I mention this in my book, Don’t Let the Authority Fool You! Restoring the Faith. “People are incredibly hungry for God”. Might I add, the One True Living God and not the God that is being presented to them today. (my last one) “To minister is not by words its by our actions. I always say the most powerful sermon any of us can preach is through our actions, by how we live.
Religion like most phenomenon is subject to varying interpretations often influenced by the emotional,sentimental and knowledge inclinations of the adherents. Any or a combinations of these factors could play out in the expression of extremisism or fanaticism by adherents thus projecting a false image of the religion they profess with dire consequences .
I really enjoyed this lesson and what I was able to take and learn from it. I felt as though it aligned with a lot of what I believe and a lot of the direction that things are moving. Just like Katia I did not enjoy the labeling of “bad”, “good” and “crappy” as well as the political and personal attacks. Other than that though I enjoyed and recommend it. I also enjoyed what Rev Michael Feryok II had to add with his comment. Always very interesting and aligns with how I feel as well.
I agree that where we are right now, regardless of where we are on the ladder, is about learning to live healthy in the now. Our “now” will be different soon enough and there are many lessons to be learned there as well. But, develop a spirit of gratitude in the “now” and leave tomorrow for another day.
I agree that we all-too-often see a holier-than-thou from one whose experience transcends ours. However, we also should recognize that the knowledge gained by them has not yet become wisdom, for such exudes the overwhelming love of the Father. This is the trademark of humility. Is it not written “You shall know them by their love”?
While Judeao-Christian Gnostistism is the highest of these three, it is but 1st grade compared to what we can know and experience even in human form on this tiny little planet called Earth.
Hi All,
What I admire about this article is the expression, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, along with the professional option and perspective and how it is expressed so that it makes you think and reflect on these types of topics and matters within society today.
When it come to service we need to know what community we are serving and we need to be comfortable with who we are leading.
I would not be comforable leading a “ABA” or “SBA” Church here in the south because they are more of the Mystic and I don’t belive in brow beating. And the services I have sat in and the beliefs they go by don’t make me all warm inside.
They don’t believe that Women can be preachers however they can teach children and other women. They look at females as lower then me but they also say man was the first to sin. Most Preachers are cherry pickers from the Bible.
I remember reading a comment above from Mary Newton-Baldwin refering to the Sodom and Gomorrah happened because God couldn’t find 10 sinful people in the city.
Yes, there is arrogance here in Davis’s writing and from what Wilber teaches us about parking the ego and transcending our attitudes, this really didn’t happen here. We need to be able to move from integral to post-integral altitudes of development, not downwards. Nevertheless, it gives us another model from which we can contemplate our learning even though we have difficulty with some of those five things rational religion-haters should know. ‘Rational’ of-course is a very important word here and as an inspirational work colleague once told me – ‘You can’t argue with a fool’.
I am concerned though. I’m concerned whether even the most rational of religion-haters could be bothered. In this case, perhaps the more rational case for us would be to look more closely at the work of Eckhart Tolle for common ground. As I have already found, this may prove to be the cornerstone of a much valued journey.