And I think we are all psychic, to greater or lesser extents. I think most of us, for reasons of self protection, systematically denigrate this capacity from earliest childhood until, not surprisingly, it largely atrophies in fact, if not in potential.
So I have been feeling this current flowing through me the past week or so, and it occurs to me that I am no longer just feeling my own traumas, but feeling a sense of loss that is flowing deep in the veins of America, my nation, and through much of the world.
We need connection to what I might call the Great Breath, the spirit that flows in and flows out, which–according to one very plausible reading of quantum mechanical theory, seen in a relatively orthodox way–destroys and recreates what we call reality a million times a second, which in fact creates time, and the possibility of the sense of flow that the existence of time enables.
It is a historical fact that much conflict over recorded history is connected to religion. This is certainly the case in the Christian era, with Christianity, as developed by the Romans and Byzantines, being the world’s first experiment in radical religious intolerance (albeit one influenced by activities of some Jews in roughly the 1st and 2nd centuries BC).
I think some genuinely thoughtful people–which is always a minority among the numbers of those educated to render “expert” opinions–see all this violence and see religion as the root problem. If we want to stop the hate, they argue, we have to stop believing in anything non-empirical. We need to eradicate faith and belief, in favor of what we can stomp, throw and measure.
So we get this urge to erase from humankind’s historical memory all sincere attachment to religious sentiments, all attachments to any form of faith found outside some lab, in some form or other. The French Experiment, we might call it, in willed public atheism, saw the world dichotomously in terms of religious sentiment and science, of the past and the future, of tribalism and universalism.
America was different. We saw the need for God. We saw the need for the divine, the transcendent, the sacred. Our intent was to create a system within which many “tribes” could live in harmony, by living and letting live, by neither prohibiting nor requiring any particular religious form.
When we see people calling for the end of the expression of references to God or Christianity, however, we are seeing residue of the French Experiment, not the American one. It was understood as self evident that religious people would guide their lives according to their faith. What else could they do?
It is remarkable that so many people can buy into the delusion that people who are deeply religious can somehow confine that religiosity to home. An eternal soul does not change when it walks through the front door. The purpose of life does not change when one becomes a politician. Our whole nation was founded on live and let live. This is a sound philosophy. That of the French was “If you want to live, do what we tell you to.” This is a bad philosophy, which is why you will rarely find it articulated that clearly; and why, to be sure, they have long been at pains to attack the notion of “bad”, as if you could attack any concept without substituting some new standard of measurement of your own.
But what I feel is we have banished an authentic sense of God’s presence from our lives, more or less. Many Christians act more in fear of hell than conviction of the power of God’s love.
And to be sure I don’t feel God takes care of us. But that does not mean that something wonderful, something magnificent, is not potentially present to all of us, every moment of the day. A beautiful day does not take care of you either, but it still has the power to inspire, enlighten, and create joy.
God is not dead, and was certainly not killed. God has simply been forgotten.