Meeting The Masters

The excerpts below are quotes from Table Talk by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which consists of recollections of his conversations published after his death by his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge. I came across the first one recently and thought it very pertinent to our present time, particularly with relevance to the reaction during the recent health scare. So I looked through an online version of the book and found it full of similar pithy observations, a few of which I reproduce here with an occasional comment in italics

 There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth – the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry.

One should add that the real good is the same as the real true so it is the apparent or even the false good that people, especially women, prefer to the real good, and this is because it makes greater appeal to their feelings or to their desire for comfort, safety and general 'niceness'.

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is  not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in  two words : — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. 

This is not exactly two words but one can see what he means, and it could be said to be what is happening to the West now.

Kant assigns three great races of mankind. If two individuals  of distinct races cross, a third, or tertium aliquid is invariably produced, different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. But when different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to what we call chance ; it is now like one,  now like the other parent. Note this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct European complexions, — as English and Spanish, German and Italian, Russian and Portuguese, and so on. 

I have noticed this in people of my acquaintance.

There are two principles in every European and Christian state: Permanency and Progression. In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. It was natural that the great and the good of the nation should be found in the ranks of either side. 

Many of the present problems are caused by the abandonment of what Coleridge calls the sense of Permanency.

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind;  just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts — and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. 

Bring back the use of the word 'methinks'.

This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of Charles I and the Cromwellate. In them the premises are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premises are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it. 

You could apply this to our age in the sense that reasoned discourse stripped of ideology is becoming rarer, but I suspect that could have been said of many other times too.

St. John's logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system.

The mystic and the philosopher.

The first three Gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of  the prophecies in the facts. St. John declares explicitly the doctrine, oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be proved by itself. For Christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its own light. Its evidence is involved in its existence. St Paul writes more particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines, which were capable of such proof, by common logic. 

A proof of Christianity lies in the fact that it offers us more than we could have ever hoped for or imagined.

St. John used the term Logos technically. Philo-Judaeus had so used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this Gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the Jewish Rabbis at that time, and afterwards, of the manifested God. The Jewish Church understood the Messiah to be a divine person. Philo expressly cautions against anyone's supposing the Logos to be a mere personification, or symbol. He says the Logos is a substantial, self-existent Being. The Gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind of Arians; and thought the Logos was an after-birth. They placed the Abyss and Silence before him. Therefore it was that St. John said, with emphasis, “ln the beginning was the Word." He was begotten in the first simultaneous burst of Godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in speaking of eternal existence. 

To assert that God is a Person is not a childish projection but the most advanced religious doctrine.

The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so.

It certainly has and even more so today.

Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet.

As now when completely incompatible ideologies unite to contest the real.

Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is Pythagoras.

It's a pity we know Plato by his nickname or we could talk of Aristocles (his real name) and Aristotle. Apparently he was given this nickname, which means broad as in broad-chested, by his wrestling coach. All philosophers should have a wrestling coach.

In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The ancients had no notion of the fall of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in Aeschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together. 

An interesting insight.

"Most women have no character at all," said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better,  saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Everyone wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife, — creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.

If the highest state of matter is to reflect spirit perfectly you can see what he means here.

The man's desire is for the woman ; but the woman's desire is  rarely other than for the desire of the man. 

A generalisation but not without substance.

I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Everything really that is intellectually great in that country seems to me of Grecian origin.

Sometimes he gets it wrong. On the other hand (and see below), the Greeks did make rational what the Egyptians seemed only to understand intuitively.

There was, I conceive, one great Japetic original of language, under which Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanskrit, range as species. The Japetic race separated 

into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west, — Greeks, Italians, &c. ; and the other northwest, — Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic. 

Japetic means descending from Noah's son Japheth and seems to refer here to Indo-Europeans.

I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity (that is to say, the Trinity) is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it.

The result of my system will be to show that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat. 

More true than ever today.

The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right and both wrong. They each maintained 

opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premise. 

I see what he means but I would still place the Realists above the Nominalists. The latter could be said to be the origin of modern materialism.

A Fall  of some sort or other — the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute — is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.

The doctrine of the Fall makes sense of so much.

A woman's head is usually over ears in her heart Man seems to have been designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, I think women are generally better creatures than men. They have, 

taken universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever. 

The tragedy of feminism which poses as a liberator but actually corrupts.

The Trinity is the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendent as the distinction. 

If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer it to, but the fiendish ? Passion without any appetite is fiendish. 

Demons exist.

The best way to bring a clever young man who has become sceptical and unsettled to reason, is to make him feel something. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual ; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. 

We must distinguish between feeling and feelings.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.

I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood, — identity in these makes men of one country. 

Immigration without proper integration is a disaster. This is why it should be kept to reasonable limits, limits which it has far exceeded in Western nations in recent years.

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. 

Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. I quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many Christians than the Unitarians and open infidels. It must be undergone by everyone who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things. 

It's more important to be on the right side than to believe exactly the same things.

People may say what they please about the gradual improvement of the Arts. It is not true of the substance. The Arts and the Muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like Minerva from the front of

 Jupiter, all armed: manual dexterity may, indeed, be improved by practice. 

The difference between inspiring impulse and execution.

I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek philosophy to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with physics only. Then it took in the idea of a living cause and made Pantheism out of the two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally, Plato asserted or reasserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add what before was wanting - assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists joined Theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and mere mysticism. 

Egypt probably did not have an intellectualised philosophy as such but it did have a highly developed knowledge of mysticism and magic. Otherwise this is not a bad history of religion in the West.

This is just a small selection from the first half of the book. I may do another post on the remainder but it serves to remind us that Coleridge was much more than just a romantic poet.

 "I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made men out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything: God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God has no original nothingness with which to take refuge."

George MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting.

George MacDonald was one of the first important writers of fantasy and a great influence on C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. I was given some of his children's books more or less as soon as I could read properly. The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind played a large part in forming my imagination as a child though I can't remember much about them now, other than that they had a magical atmosphere to them. Then as a teenager, hungry for more Lord of the Rings-type novels, I came across Phantastes and Lilith which, again, I don't recall much of other than I found them rather obscure and definitely not Tolkien. His complete works in an online version run to over 14,000 pages and include children's books, fantasy, regular novels and sermons but I haven't read anything more by him since my teenage years though, as my great grandmother was a MacDonald from George's part of Scotland and he died in Ashtead, Surrey, just a few miles from where I now live, I feel almost obligated to investigate further.

I came across this quote of his in a book by the Catholic writer Stratford Caldecott. It struck a chord with me because it took me back to a time when I was about 8 years old when I wondered to myself what would there be if there was nothing. I can actually still see myself having this thought for the first time. The human mind can't imagine nothing. All we can come up with is empty space or darkness but that is still something. I'm sure we've all had this thought. It's not uncommon as we start to think about the world, what it is, why it is or even where it is. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who hasn't thought about this is a bit of a dullard! For most people it passes but for some it can provide an entry into deeper considerations on the subject of God, the only important subject one might justifiably say.

Does God create out of nothing as Christianity teaches or is it as George MacDonald says and he creates out of himself? Perhaps we can resolve this conundrum by saying it is both, but the nothingness out of which God creates is not outside him but within him. He makes a space in himself, in fact, forget the article, he just makes space, and then projects his being into that space. As George MacDonald says, there is no nothingness out of which God can make us. There is nothing apart from God. You might say there are no things in God until he creates them but there is never nothing. God is indeed all in all but he creates things that are other than himself in order to give expression to love, beauty and the good and to become more than himself. He is never other than perfect but through creation he becomes more perfect.

That is not all. The human soul is a created thing, created by and out of God, but within that soul, giving it its life and being, there is an uncreated part. This is our spirit which is God within us and explains why we can be united with God. There is a part of us that already is God but we cannot knowingly become this part until through grace but also through our own efforts, the two factors are both required, we go beyond our identification with the soul and replace self at the centre of our being with God. Then we know that we ourselves are indeed as nothing and everything we are comes from God.

 Modernity was largely born out of the Reformation. This was the manifestation in the religious domain, which up to that point had always been the primary domain, of the new consciousness, one with a greater focus on self, the rational mind and the merely human. It was a step forward because it increased our powers of agency and self-determination. It moved us from a largely passive to an increasingly active mode of participation in the world. This brought many advantages but also many problems because human beings, first in the vanguard and then more or less everyone, were no longer directed by an external authority rooted in the real (cf. the instinctive nature of the animal kingdom) but by their own selves, and those selves were, and still are, limited by and to the phenomenal world of sensory experience, though for some journeys into the realm of abstract thought were possible. But even these were largely restricted by the nature of thought centred on itself. Greater freedom and creativity became open to us but the price was the loss of connection to everything that is summed up in the word 'God'. Our horizons became extended but our vision contracted. You might say we saw further along the East/West axis but as a consequence the North/South axis collapsed. And yet this was absolutely necessary if we were to advance from the state of a being embedded in creation to one able to move out of that and manipulate creation ourselves. This was once again eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and it meant we could become gods, if we did this with full recognition of the will of God and in line with his natural and spiritual order, or, failing that and acting according to our own will and its own ends and glorification, devils.

With the Reformation and its rejection of authority the seeds were sown for every man to become his own pope. Eventually every man should be his own pope but the pope is subject to God and if every man becomes not his own pope but his own god then you have crossed the line from saint to demon. That line can be thin sometimes and unfortunately it does seem that humanity as a whole has not succeeded in avoiding it at the present time. We are called to be individual but not individualistic. We are called to be gods in creation, able in the fullness of time to create worlds ourselves, but never to be our own gods. A god must serve the will of God or he becomes a devil.

The Protestant Reformation created the modern world which is why the main drivers of modernity, until its corruption, were those countries in which that ethos was most fully embedded. The spirit of the times was everywhere and that spirit created outcomes in most places but still the Protestant countries were at the centre of it all. One of the defining characteristics of Protestantism was its rejection, either overtly or in effect, of the supernatural. While this meant it could focus its energies more fully on the material plane as was intended by the powers that be, in the short term anyway, it also meant it became spiritually dry and unfulfilling. Religion without the supernatural becomes legalistic and limited to morality. It has no real life or colour or flavour or joy or mystery or power to uplift and inspire. It's an arranged marriage rather than one founded on love. Protestantism also demoted the Mother of God to just a mother. It lost touch with the Divine Feminine.

When the Romantic movement arose at the end of the 18th century, as a reaction against the rationalistic spirit of the Enlightenment and the reassertion of imagination, poets, artists, writers and philosophers rediscovered the Divine Feminine. This might be identified as the soul of things as God the Father is the spirit. It is associated with beauty, mystery and love as opposed to will, life and being. It is also associated with wisdom and in this aspect the Divine Feminine is identified as Sophia.

Sophia is the Divine Feminine in her most elevated mode of being. According to some she actually incarnated in the Virgin Mary. A debate has long been whether she is created or uncreated with some theorists equating her with the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. This might seem logical were it not for the fact that it contradicts scripture which describes her as a created feminine image of God. The very first created being but still a created being. In beautiful language chapter 8 of Proverbs extols her thus: 

"The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old; 

I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.

When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;

before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.

I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command,
 and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

Then I was constantly at his side.
 I was filled with delight day after day, 
rejoicing always in his presence,

rejoicing in his whole world
 and delighting in mankind."

The apocryphal Book of Wisdom in chapter 7 supports this when it says of Sophia that: "She is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness."

These Old Testament quotes can be taken as authoritative or not. They certainly have a poetic truth. However, part of the modern mindset when applied to the spiritual quest is that nothing can be taken as unquestionable just on say so. We must always use our own intelligence and intuition though making sure it is intuition and not wishful thinking. But associating the Divine Feminine with the third person of the Trinity goes against the fundamental Christian teaching that Mary, who is the embodiment of Sophia and the Divine Feminine, conceived Jesus by power of the Holy Spirit.

One can see why the Protestant suppression of the Divine Feminine might cause her to come back in unbalanced or exaggerated forms, action and reaction etc, but still one should know that there is a feminine dimension to divine reality without going to the extreme of feminising God as making the Holy Spirit feminine does do. Seeing Sophia as the first of the Lord's works gives us a clue as to where the Divine Feminine might arise but she is not just the first created being. She is the actual foundation principle of creation. As substance and even space she is the Universal Mother and World Soul who receives the image of God and who ultimately becomes the Heavenly Bride or Divine Spouse. She must arise before anything can be created because everything is created out of her body.

Going back to her source, she could be said to derive from the receptive nature of God which arises when the positive principle of pure act takes expression as its complementary opposite, creation necessarily being founded on duality since a world of subject alone cannot be known. You cannot say she comes after the male principle since the two must arise together as one suggests the other, but she is a reflection of God (as Wisdom says) once God moves into creative/dualistic mode from his original uncreated form, the Ain Soph or hidden God that is at the back of and beyond everything. This is why she is, as Mary, her incarnation in human form, says, submissive to God. Her will is to do his will not the other way around for although the two arise together in time, they arise out of his pre-temporal being. 

I think this insight would resolve the difficulty with feminism which is right to see the feminine as integral to divine reality, there from the very beginning as in "let us make man in our image" i.e. male and female, but fails to see there is still a hierarchical distinction. Sophia is the very first of everything but she still comes from God, created as his Divine Consort.

From God the Creator comes before anything else Sophia who is the light and glory of God and who comes into being when He expresses Himself in creation. She is the mirror in which He sees himself. She becomes His Bride and could even be said to the primary reason for creation because in herself she sums up and includes the whole of creation as it is in relation to God. At the end of days when all is accomplished, she will sit in glory alongside Him on His heavenly throne, created by God out of Himself but now by His great love made equal to Him.

I have used this image before on this blog because it contains so much. It comes from Robert Fludd's History of the Two Worlds (Macrocosm and Microcosm) and can be interpreted in various ways. In the context of this post it shows Sophia as Queen of Creation. She presides over all the created worlds, outer and inner, shown by the concentric circles but is linked by the chain attached to her right hand to the hand of God who is hidden in the cloud above the circle of angels. The image shows the relationship of God to Sophia and Sophia to the universe. He is the Creator, she the Creation.

 Is the highest spiritual state one in which the sense of separation between the soul and God has been so obliterated that there is no separation at all and the soul has, in effect, become God? There remains no self at all. This is the basic theme of Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism. As it is of the modern derivation of ancient Eastern mysticism which is Oneness spirituality though that is usually an excessive simplification of its inspiring models. There are Christian versions of this too which I suspect are heavily influenced by Zen with a dash of Meister Eckhart and a pinch of Plotinus. In these beliefs (and they are beliefs notwithstanding the fact that there is some kind of experience in which self seems to be dissolved), self is the cause of sin and what needs to be eradicated is not just sin but the very possibility of it. This can seem to be the highest form of mysticism, the one at the apex of the triangle on the base line of which stand all the different religions. But is that really so or is this just a particular mystical experience which may point to an aspect of the soul's relationship with God but by no means covers it in its totality or indicates its intended destiny?

Are we not here just killing the patient in order to save him? Self may be the cause of everything bad but it is also the cause of so much that is good, including goodness itself. And love. God created for a reason and that reason was for the joy of relationship. The no self advocates would deny the purpose of creation. They would return us to the non-manifest state of darkness or limitless light. It makes no difference how you envision it as it is the boiling down of everything to nothing. It is possible to return consciousness to the pool of infinity whence it arose but that is not what God wants and nor is it what Christ offers and why he came to redeem the world from spiritual darkness. Christ came to heal the soul rather than kill it. God and creation is more than just God by himself and no self means no love, no beauty, no goodness, no expression and growth through time. Nothing but resting in eternal peace. That is fine if you have a limited view of spiritual life but there is so much more and to know this so much more the self must not be destroyed but transformed. The no self advocates are turning their back on God in his creative, expressive mode and retreating to a passive form of consciousness which is really just the spiritual womb. But God wants us to be born and to be alive and to partake in his creative glory. He wants us to know day as well as night and then add to the beauty of creation ourselves. This we cannot do if we do not have a self. Then we add precisely nothing.

My last post observed that there seems a greater sense of the divine presence in churches when there is no service going on and no congregation in attendance. I was pleased to see that J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere agreed, and he wrote a splendid poem expressing the same sentiment. The obvious thing to ask is why is this?

Some people are solitary types who simply don't like crowds. I am one but this is not the whole answer though it may be part of it. Others find a greater closeness to God in silent contemplation than in public worship. This also is a partial explanation but, again, it does not satisfy as the full reason. It may always have been the case that the tall pillars, lofty roofs, statues of saints and stained glass depictions of episodes from the Bible spoke more loudly to the visitor when there was no human distraction but I believe that there is a deeper reason for this today than simply that a more inwardly focused nature feels closer to God in quietness and solitude.

The key lies in understanding Matthew 7:21-23. How many people who profess Christianity really are followers of Jesus Christ? I know one cannot presume to judge the state of another person's soul but one must ask how many believers really believe? Christianity is a supernatural religion, one whose whole purpose lies in what is beyond this world but these days it is often reduced to a form of secular humanism with some added on spiritual trimmings. There is a social aspect to Christianity but it is vanishingly small compared to the spiritual. Love your neighbour as yourself must be one of the most misunderstood teachings. It does not mean love everyone. It does not even mean love your neighbour in the generally understood sense. If it did then God clearly does not love us. It must be seen in the light of the commandment to love God. That is primary. Then, loving your neighbour means acting and behaving for his spiritual good. To reduce this love to the material plane is to radically misunderstand it. The material plane is not excluded but it is very much subsidiary to the spiritual.

If the people performing an act of worship are not stretching with their whole being towards the divine is it any wonder that the resultant worship is spiritually sterile? They may mean well but if their hearts are not really oriented to the true God and if their minds are not clearly focused on the meaning of the divine message and its overwhelmingly spiritual sense then the atmosphere that is created by their worship will be flat, literally so for it will lack the multi-dimensional quality of a spirituality that aspires up to the heavens. If worship is not animated by love of God and a real yearning for Him then it has no flavour. You might say this has always been so but at one time we would have been less distracted by the world and the reduction of the religious message to the field of human relationships. We looked up instead of around us or towards the altar instead of towards our neighbours.

Christianity has been brought down to earth and many Christians follow a religion in which there are no towers or spires stretching heavenwards. It is a religion that has a flat roof and does not rise. If we enter a church in which the architectural features pull us away from the earth and towards the heavens then we are temporarily uplifted and ennobled. If the hearts of the worshippers are in tune with that then all is well. For an effective ritual needs a proper form to give it expression but it also requires that the hearts and minds of its participants are fully open to the higher worlds. Without that there is no material for the divine spark to ignite.

 I was flipping through The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis recently, a book I last read quite a long time ago and the contents of which I had forgotten. It's a short work, based on lectures he gave in 1943 and is not overtly religious in theme even though it is in essence. What it does is defend universal spiritual values against the contemporary assault on them, specifically in the field of education, which denied that moral and aesthetic values were grounded in something objective. It was the beginning of the moral relativism, now so firmly established, which dismisses the idea that there are universal truths and these are rooted in an absolute reality. Lewis argues for something he calls in this book the Tao, the word deriving, of course, from ancient Chinese philosophy, which is something like Ma'at in ancient Egypt or just objective reality, the foundation truth of the universe and of being in general. The Tao is not provable by materialistic, rational, intellectual, logical, scientific means because it derives from a ground much deeper than can be accessed by these on their own. It is recognised, known, accepted, seen (or not by the spiritually blind) but it is not verifiable by empirical evidence as that phrase is normally understood. It should be self-evident but cannot be proved by any of the ways materialists demand proof.

At the end of these lectures Lewis provides a compendium of sayings illustrative of Natural Law drawn from many different sources and traditions ranging from Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Chinese to Christian, Hindu and Jewish to Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, American Indian and Australian Aborigine. But there is nothing from the second main monotheistic religion. 

This might seem a strange oversight, if oversight it is, but it reminded me of the time I first became interested in spiritual matters and studied scriptures from all the main traditions. I already knew the Bible reasonably well but reread the New Testament in the light of my new-found interests and beliefs. I read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, the classics of Taoism and Zen and also some collections of wise words similar to Lewis's compendium. All these spoke of mystical understanding, perhaps in different ways and on different levels and some more than others but they all had an insight into higher reality. Then I read the holy book of the second main monotheistic religion expecting to find more of the same. What a disappointment. There was nothing in this frankly hotch-potch collection of writings that approached the profundity of other scriptures. It barely reached the level of Old Testament spiritual understanding, never mind the New Testament. It was clear that the compiler of this text, which seemed like a New Age channelling, albeit in the context of its time and place, was nowhere near the spiritual level of the founders of other religions. 

Now, maybe these teachings were a step forward for the people of that time and place but they have little to say to us today unlike other scriptures which can transcend time and place and still speak to us across the centuries. It is often said that the three monotheistic religions worship the same God but they approach him in such different ways that that is hard to maintain in any seriousness. For the Christian, God is a loving Father but the God depicted in this holy book demands total allegiance as a despot does from a slave. He may be a benign despot if you obey him but he leaves no room for you as a free individual.

I'm not disputing there are many pious worshippers of God in this religion but there are also encouragements to violence and though these are often glossed over and excused by believers they are plainly there in the source texts which are the holy book and the recorded sayings of its founder who was a war leader as much as he was a prophet. The extremism in this religion is fundamental to it. The West used to know that, and from hard won experience.

Despite what you might be thinking I am not writing this in the context of the present conflict in the Middle East. It's not the Middle East I am concerned about but the West. The second main monotheistic religion is not willing to share power. It will accommodate itself to its perceived rivals in the short term only for long term advantage. That has been demonstrated historically repeatedly. If the modernist ethos of relativism, as described by C.S. Lewis, is one way of abolishing man so too is an absolutist religion which gives all power to the deity and leaves no freedom for the individual human soul. It must obey. It must submit. It's in the name. But God does not want obedience. He wants love. 

Is God all powerful or not? If he is why does he not intervene in human affairs more or even at all? If he is not can he really be considered a proper God (capital G type God)? I understand the arguments on both sides but would like to offer my take which potentially reconciles them. Here we go.

Let's start with the basic argument in favour of a supreme Creator, the One without a second from whom all things derive. This is an intellectual argument which is fine though it is not the point from which I would personally start. That would be intuitive or from the point of direct knowing. This, however, cannot be shared and could be seen as open to error through wishful thinking or some other kind of mental/emotional distortion. When all is said and done, we take the subjective route in matters of belief but in sharing our beliefs an objective stance, as in one deriving from reason and logic, is usually more persuasive. So, here is the classic argument in favour of God. 

Everything that exists has a cause but there must ultimately be something that is the cause of everything else, a causeless cause, or the process could not get started. Something has to kick everything else off and be the ground from which everything else grows. No uncaused first cause means no nothing. Literally. There cannot be anything but there cannot be nothing either as nothing implies an absence but there can't be absence unless there is presence to begin with. What would there be if there wasn't anything? Don't go there!

This something cannot be reliant on anything else or it would be an effect and therefore not the first cause. It must be absolutely self-sufficient. It cannot be limited because there is nothing that could limit it, everything else deriving from it itself and subordinate to it. Not being limitable means it is all-powerful. It is (is not has) Being-Consciousness or timeless Awareness, existing in total self-sufficiency on a formless level, form being something that comes about along with time and space as the structure for creation. It must be Being-Consciousness because otherwise there could be neither being nor consciousness deriving from it.

Properly trained theologians could develop this train of thought more thoroughly and they have done so. The point I wish to make here though is that this line of thought affirms the omnipotence of God given that he is the cause, ground, root, source and fountainhead of everything else. He is the Creator and this universe is his creation. He can change any part of it at any moment by a thought. Or, at least, he could do that if he had not renounced some of his power. And this is precisely what he has done.

In creating individual creatures with free will God has given up power. He must do this or we could not have free will. If he could intervene as and when he felt like it our free will would be a mockery, something that could go so far but no further. Conditional free will is not properly free. It is true that the rules of the universe which God has set up do not allow for unlimited expression of free will. If it is exercised against creation there will be consequences, call it karma, reaping what you sow or whatever. But that is a different thing. There may be consequences of free will exercised in the wrong way but our freedom in itself is still sacrosanct, never overridden.

God gives part of his creation, maybe all of his creation eventually, free will for two reasons. The first is love. For love really to be it must be free. Constrained love, necessary love, automatic love? It makes no sense. Only creatures with free will can love and only they can be loved in the highest, most rewarding sense. 

The second reason is that this makes creation more interesting for God. If his creatures start creating themselves that will make creation come alive for God. That may sound naive, absurd even, but think of a universe endlessly expanding from within, one that is dynamic, free, without regular or predictable pattern, with a bit of grit in it that makes pearls. That is so much more creatively exciting than a clockwork universe. Human free will is like the little lack of balance that can take creation in intriguing and unpredictable new directions. You might think that nothing is unpredictable to God but even if he sees everything at one time it is still new to him as he sees it. If it doesn't come directly from him then even if he sees it before it happens from our limited perspective, it is still new to him.

Human freedom can be bad as well as good. Giving us free will is a huge risk. If we exercise this will in accordance with the laws of God and creation then the sky's the limit but if we go against those laws then we become creatively destructive. It's not hard to see what the tendency is at the moment and it may be that there is a fail safe device installed in creation that will not let the process go too far. Myth and religious tradition tell us that is exactly what has happened in the past. But for God the potential gain is worth the risk because a universe without freedom would be a semi-dead universe. 

Here then is my conclusion. God, or the creative Mind behind everything, is omnipotent but he renounces some of his power to give it to us in the form of free will.

Now, this leads on to an important point. In the past human beings have accepted the omnipotence of God and this has often led to varying degrees of fatalism. We just have to accept God's will. But what if God wants partners rather than servants? Partners who can work with him in making creation more magnificent instead of workers whose only function is to maintain it. This means that we have to accept our power and use it wisely. As potential co-creators we are called to work with God but not for him. Certainly, we work according to the laws of creation and under the overall headship of God, with life rather than against it, so our work is loving cooperation as opposed to individualism. (A core spiritual teaching is be individual but not individualistic). But God gave us power so that we could exercise it and work alongside him. This is where we are now and where the changes in consciousness that have come about over the last few centuries should be taking us. At the moment our heightened sense of individuality has brought more evil than good as it is working out on the material plane. But as we evolve it may be that it will begin to transfer itself, in some of us anyway, to the spiritual plane and then God's transference of power to mankind will start to bear good fruit.

Many people think they believe in God but often it is not the true God in whom they believe but a personalised image of him. That's because they see God in their terms rather than his. When you acknowledge God you must have some idea what he is and what his laws are and you must keep, or at least try to keep, these laws as God and his laws are one. You must fit yourself to him not try to fit him to you but this is just what many religious people at the present time try to do.

How can you have any idea what God is? Obviously, the first port of call would be religion and revelation but nowadays the unfolding nature of human spiritual development means we have to supplement that with our own intuition. Intuition is the knowing faculty in man and it is never wrong. It cannot be wrong because it is a direct link to reality. However, in the case of humans as we are at this stage of our spiritual development the intuition is often mixed in with the thinking and feeling faculties and so errors can be made.

A case in point is same sex marriage. This is promoted on the grounds of love but love cannot ignore the claims of truth, and the truth is that the complementarity of masculine and feminine is a basic law of creation. Laws of creation are not like human laws. They are sacred and inviolable. To break them is blasphemy, unpleasant as it may be for the human ego to hear that.

Those promoting a same sex agenda mistake human happiness for spiritual fulfilment. If they are religious their religion is a worldly religion for it seeks happiness and validation in this world. They fail to understand that seeking self-gratification and self-expression is not the work of love because love, spiritually understood, has to do with the forgetting of self not its satisfaction. This is a difficult truth and no one is worthier of respect than a person born with homosexual tendencies who does not deny this in him or herself but does not excuse or justify it either. In God's eyes there is no difference between a homosexual or a heterosexual person. He loves both. But that does not mean that the physical expression of homosexuality is in line with divine truth. It is a mischanneling of the creative energy for egotistic purposes. I repeat, homosexuality in itself is not a sin any more than any tendency is. It is the succumbing to a tendency that is the sin and, more, the denial of its sinfulness.

An image of God is one based on human thoughts, desires, emotions and fears. It can easily become an idol. Christians can have idols just as much as pagans for what many do is adjust the reality of God and Christ to fit their prejudices. One of the most important tasks of the spiritual aspirant is to learn to discriminate between true intuition and what we might call wishful thinking. Only when you start to do this can you make any progress towards the goal of knowing God, and you cannot become one with God until you start to know him as he is. Otherwise what are you becoming one with?

 Among those who believe in a spiritual reality there are those who maintain that God is personal, the great I AM of existence, and those who hold that this is a restricted view and that behind the personal God there must be an impersonal Universal Principle transcending all form and limitation, and that this is the real truth underlying the appearance of life in a phenomenal world. You might almost call these two views the Christian and the Buddhist though there is some overlap. Intellectually, you can see the attraction of the latter view. It has a kind of natural logic to it in that it might make sense that behind every thing there must be some one thing and then no thing.

And yet if no thing lies at the heart of reality and the personal is just a veil obscuring that then where does it come from? Also, what meaning would love or beauty or goodness have? Ultimately, these things would be no more than pointers to truth, to be discarded when truth was reached. To think like this is a kind of nihilism even if it's a positive kind as the no thing is not an empty void but a ground of unmanifest potential. But then even potential is something and must derive from somewhere. The fact is that if God is not a Person then he is less than a human being because, when all is said and done, it is the personal that gives meaning to existence. It turns out that the personal is in reality much more profound than the impersonal which latter is the real state of limitation. The unconditioned is like space without stars.

 Gnosticism has a bad reputation among ordinary Christians but I believe there are elements of it that can complement conventional religious understanding. I would reject the idea of a Demiurge on a lower level of spiritual reality to the transcendent God who is responsible for the creation of the world with its inbuilt flaws. A basic truth is that God saw Creation and said that it was good. Matter is not evil but it is matter and therefore a more constricted state of being than spirit. The absolute duality of good and evil, spirit and matter, that exists in some versions of Gnosticism, most notably the Manichaean, is also based on a misconception. The world has fallen into darkness but darkness or evil has no separate reality independent of God.

Where I think some Gnostic ideas are useful is regarding the nature of the soul. For the conventional Christian souls are made (as far as I understand the matter) at conception but I think this is nonsense. Souls exist on the spiritual level, in realms of light, and come down to earth to experience life in a body and a sphere of being in which they become separated from God. This is so that they may grow, become independent and, ultimately, if all goes well, return as fully functioning members of the Kingdom of Heaven. John 3:13 says "No man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven." Now, I know the verse goes on to say "even the Son of man which is in heaven" and I imagine this is normally understood as a reference to Jesus, but what if it can also refer to men as spiritual beings who incarnate in this world to further their evolution? The seed falls from the tree into the ground from whence it grows up and returns to the sunlight.

The Gnostic idea of man being a divine spark trapped in matter from which it must extricate itself has merit. Where I would differ from Gnosticism is in saying that this is intended. There is purpose behind it. It is not simply that the soul has fallen into darkness and ignorance but that it has come to this state in order to learn and to grow. On its own level it is perfect but passive. Bathed in bliss perhaps, but with no chance to deepen its understanding or develop its creative powers. In order to do this it must come to a world where it is thrown back on itself. This is the world of separation which is the material world.

But things are not quite that simple because this world is not only material, that is to say, outside pure spirit, it has also fallen and so is worse than it might have been. This is where the Gnostic misunderstanding comes in. Yes, the world has been damaged. No, it is not on that account evil. Evil is nothing in itself. It can only inflict harm on good. Good is the reality and evil is just the shadow of reality in a dualistic world of light and darkness. Darkness is not a thing. It is just the absence of light.

So, the soul comes down to earth in order to return to the heavenly realm but as a conscious choice rather than automatically. This act of choosing qualifies the soul to go to a higher level than that from which it emanated but it also means there is an element of risk involved. This is required because the soul needs to form itself by consciously allying itself with God and Creation. God makes the raw material but the soul then has to build itself up from that raw material if it is to be, which is the intention, a real individual hence a potential god itself. 

Gnosticism means knowledge. The soul is required to have spiritual knowledge. That much should be obvious. But which is more important, knowledge or faith? On a spiritual level they are the same thing. It is only in worldly terms that they become separated and sometimes even in conflict. But that just means that they are both very imperfect in this world. The aim is to unite them and realise they are two sides of the same coin.

 I have been thinking about sin and what it is today because while we still acknowledge most of the traditional sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, sloth and gluttony, we fail to recognise the deadliest sin and this is the one that is more prevalent now than ever.

There are sins of action, robbery, murder, rape and the like, and these we continue to regard as sins though we may not use that word any more. Then there are sins of desire and emotion such as anger and envy and these we often excuse unless they have real world outcomes that lead to crime or violence. And then there are sins of thought and the only ones of these we recognise now are those that go against the ephemeral fashions of the moment and are called racist, sexist, fascist etc. None of those were traditionally regarded as sins unless they included in their make up a real sin, pride or envy, for instance, or else real hatred. However, there is a real sin of thought, a spiritual sin, and this is not only not regarded as a sin but can even be seen as a positive thing, a virtue almost. At worst it has a neutral significance.

This sin is rejection of God. The rejection of God is more than unbelief. Unbelief nowadays is generally a passive thing but rejection is active. It is a deliberate denial of God not simply a lack of belief in him. I would say that even passive unbelief is a sin because God is real and if you are not for him you are against him but it is a sin that can be forgiven, assuming repentance and acceptance, of course. But the fully conscious calculated rejection of God is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and that, so we have been told, cannot be forgiven.

I have labelled this post under free will because that is what all this is about. We are sent to this plane of being because here our innate tendencies can be brought out and this is especially true at the present time which, I would surmise, is why so many souls are alive now. This is a unique testing period in human history. Only those who actively choose to accept God will pass the test.

 I got into trouble the other day because I described someone as an atheist. "She's not an atheist" I was told, "She believes in God". I didn't pursue the subject but what I thought to myself was "No, she doesn't, she only thinks she does."

What I meant by this was that this person, like so many, believes she believes in God because in her mind she thinks that God might exist and she would like God to exist though on her terms. But she doesn't really believe. Her behaviour is not that of a person who takes into consideration what the existence of God might actually mean. She doesn't have any kind of inner connection to the reality that is God. God is not  more real to her than this world. Worldly culture influences her far more than spiritual reality does. Her belief in God is actually a form of humanism with a small serving of God on top. He might be the cherry on the cake but he's not the whole cake.

The Pharisees thought they believed in God but they didn't. They believed in a construct of their own making not the living God at whose glance angels tremble (in love and awe not fear). The bishops in the Church of England think they believe in God but the only conclusion one can draw from their actions and words is that most of them don't. These people believe in the human race and they like to think there is some sort of spiritual component in humanity but they don't behave as if they have any understanding of the truth of God. If you don't have any understanding of God what is it you actually believe in?

To believe in God requires that you take God as the foundation of everything else you believe. He is not one ingredient among many. Everything else is seen in the light of that reality and is subsidiary to it. It also means you must have some understanding of what God is, how he expresses himself in creation and what he requires of you personally and human beings collectively. You might ask how can any mere mortal understand God? Obviously you can't completely but you can insofar as a human being can. He exists within your heart and will make his presence known to you if you listen properly, look correctly and remove, as far as possible, preconceived ideas and wishful thinking. You can understand God if you look at yourself in his light but never if you look at him in your light.

So, yes I would say that many people might intellectually acquiesce to the idea of God but they don't really believe in him. Of course, a lot of these people would feel insulted if you told them this but if they were honest with themselves they would see the justice of it. The problem for them is that until they see the truth of the accusation they will remain in illusion, thinking they have put themselves right spiritually while in fact they are as far away from the truth as any regular atheist. 

You only really believe in God if that belief overshadows, indeed determines, every other belief you have.  And nowadays if you say you believe in God but still go along with the worldly agenda, much of which grew out of the specific denial of God, then frankly you are no different from a non-believer. We live at a time of not just materialism but the assimilation of religion and spirituality to the materialistic ethos with the consequences that many of those who would call themselves believers fail to realise that believing in God means rejecting all the trappings and priorities of this world. Seeking to serve two masters they simply become absorbed by the world. Just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

You must believe in the head and you must believe in the heart. If it is just the former then what you believe in is not God. It is only an idea you have about God and that idea will be formed from things other than God, very often things of this world - just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

I would like to relate a personal experience of mine to the wider experience of humanity as a whole over the last three centuries. It's not an exact analogy by any means but there are parallels which I find instructive.

Those who have read my Meeting the Masters book will know that from 1979 to 1999, a period of about 21 years, I was spoken to by spiritual beings who seemed to me then and I believe to be now the embodiment of wisdom and holiness. They instructed me in spiritual understanding and development though made clear that this was a long, slow process. That has turned out to be very true. They spoke through the medium of a man some 35 years older than myself. He was, as I was informed, taken out of his body during the procedure and one of them would then use his physical frame to speak to me. He, of course, had agreed to this. The voice was not the medium's, the manner was not his. It was quite literally another person or persons since more than one was involved over the years. I envisaged them as a group or extended family. They were all male except on a  couple of occasions when it was a female spirit who spoke. Even though these beings spoke through a man the female spirit was clearly female. I won't go into more detail here as it's all in the book except to say that this process started as a regular  and frequent occurrence but became much less regular and frequent as the years went by. I mention this because it brings me to the point I wish to make.

As anyone who studies myth and religious history will know, God or the gods were much closer to humanity in the past. The points of contact were many. It wasn't an everyday occurrence insofar as recorded history is concerned (it may have been in the very ancient unrecorded past) but it took place and did so on many levels. This decreased as time went by and by the time Jesus was born it seems to have been rare and exceptional. After the Incarnation it probably picked up a bit again but gradually over the centuries spiritual contact faded until it belonged only to the past. It was accepted as having taken place once but it didn't happen any more. Then, with the Enlightenment, it began to be doubted and was seen as belonging to the realm of imagination or even mental illness. This idea has taken a firmer hold until in the present day most of us regard any supposed contact with God or the gods as purely fictitious.

It is not fictitious. It happened but, by and large, it doesn't happen now. God has withdrawn from humanity and he has withdrawn so far that his existence is denied. We are unable to see that conditions have changed but we live in a different world to that of our ancestors, a different psychological world and, I believe, even a different physical world. It's the same as the child of 5 is the same person as the man of 50 but it is different as these two are also different.

So, God has withdrawn but why has he done this? Is it because of our wickedness? That would be a reasonable supposition but I don't think it is entirely correct. God has withdrawn to see how we get on without him. We have reached a certain stage in our unfoldment, one at which we have to start developing spiritual insight within ourselves. We couldn't do this if God were there holding our hand all the time. Therefore he withdraws to give us the opportunity to grow but also to see whether we will grow like this or whether we will refuse the opportunity. At the moment it seems as though most of us do reject God when he is not there to remind us of himself. We are failing the test of the heart. But perhaps as the situation changes and our material comforts are removed more of us may turn to God. He is merciful and will surely give us every chance to repent. At the same time, the repentance must be sincere. It must come from the heart.

The Masters spoke to me for around 21 years though this was substantially reduced as time went by. Their object was to awaken me spiritually but after a while I had to show that I could do this on my own. They acted as a bridge not a prop and once a certain stage was reached they left. Their medium then died. He was 79 and had done his work in this world. Before he died they told me they would still speak to me but on a spiritual level which means through impression. It was up to me to be receptive to this and to translate the impression as clearly and in as undistorted a form as possible. This was the test of my own inner discernment.

Something like this is happening to humanity. We are being encouraged to leave spiritual childhood and start to become spiritually responsible for ourselves. Humanity is going through a kind of initiation, both collectively and on an individual level. The collective initiation does not appear to be going well but the individual one depends entirely on you. Your individual success may even help the collective.

 The great achievement of the West, culminating over the last 500 years, has been the creation of the full individual. In no other culture anywhere in the world has the individual had any real value, and although there are tributaries feeding into this river from classical times, essentially from Greece, its real source can be regarded as Christianity and specifically Christ, the God who became Man and was both fully human and fully divine. No doubt, the actual human type of Western man counted for a good deal as well but the philosophical, intellectual and spiritual underpinning of the importance of the individual was rooted in the Christian concept of the person.

It is sometimes said that Man adds nothing to God. God is the Absolute, the infinite and the eternal to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken away. If that were the case, why creation? But let's not reduce God to a mathematical concept or an abstraction. He is the Living God and he is Love. Note we say he. This is no linguistic accident. God is not it (if he were, there would be no love) and he is not she as he is the impregnating spirit that gives life and form to matter. He stands outside creation which is generated by him not incubated in him, and all creation is receptive, i.e. feminine, to him.

God is a person, the Person, and we are made in the image of God. What is a person? It is a free individual. Many religions discount the idea of freedom and that of the individual, seeing man as either nothing in relation to God (Islam) or part of God in a way that completely emphasises the divine over the human (most Eastern religions). Only in Christianity, the religion in which God became man, is the individual and his intrinsic freedom truly valued. In this way, man, each individual man and woman, can add something to the spiritual life of the universe and therefore to God once they realign themselves with divine being. Our God-realised individual self makes the universe a richer, more creation filled place.

Don't worry. I haven't taken leave of my senses. I just want to address a common spiritual misunderstanding. Common, that is, for those who move a little way beyond conventional religion into the idea that God dwells within us and can be known directly, but not far enough to see how He dwells within us and in what way He can be known. This is all one with many forms of Eastern mysticism. I am God. You are God. We are all God. Everyone is God. Everything is God.

Actually, this is true but only up to a point. God is indeed within every bit of His creation which could not be unless He was so present, but He is also transcendent to it and His transcendence ontologically precedes His immanence. Put another way, He is immanent in part but transcendent in toto.

I want to keep this simple and not go into elaborate differences between pantheism and panentheism. I will leave that for the philosophers. But I will say this. God is in everything but at different degrees of closeness. For Christians He is fully in Jesus but He is in everyone. However, you can only know Him to the degree that a) you have opened up to Him - this is faith or acceptance, and b) that you are able to manifest Him. A pint pot cannot contain a gallon of liquid let alone a whole ocean full. And the ocean that is God is infinitely large.

Therefore, while I may be God if I am fully transparent to Him through faith and a wholly purified soul, even then I am not God as God is God. I don't even approach that. God may be in His creation but He stands outside it in His fullness and no created being can ever know the wholeness of God. What that being can do is become attuned to God and thereby become godlike, and from that initial stage become ever more aware of the unplumbable depths of God, but he can never be God.

The mystical forms of religion and esotericism, both East and West, that identify the soul with God are confused. They mistake a star for the source of light. It is, forgive me for saying this, the error of the spiritual beginner. Or else, and forgive those that succumb to this, Satanic inflation. I am God and you are God insofar as God dwells within us and can be known as the ground of our being. But I, William Wildblood, am not God and never will be in the whole of eternity. I may eventually grow so far into God as to be able to wield godlike powers, as may you, but that is an entirely different thing. The gap between created and Creator can be bridged but it can never be completely overcome.

That's what I think.

I had a conversation recently with someone about religion. I had said how odd it was that the local town council here in the south of England had hoisted a blue and yellow flag on top of their offices. I was referring to the way we have all been swept up in a wave of emotion and speculating on why this may be. I was not belittling the suffering of people caught up in war but questioning the attitude of those who seem to care deeply about this because the media tells them to but ignore similar things which occur all over the world all the time in greater or lesser forms. 

But the person to whom I was talking took a different approach. "I thought you were a religious person and yet you don't seem as upset as most people about the terrible human suffering in Ukraine. Surely anyone who believes in God should be concerned about relieving human suffering?" This attitude seems to encapsulate so much about the materialistic attitude to religion (shared by many believers not just the attitude of non-believers) that I thought I might address it in a post here.

What is the purpose of religion? Is it to make people happy and comfortable in this world or is it to prepare them for the next? Is it to relieve suffering or is it to understand suffering? Now, obviously it is important to relieve suffering where one can but that is not the main issue from a spiritual perspective. Nothing I say here should be taken as refuting the simple fact that we should always seek to heal wounds when we are able to do so but there are deeper matters to consider. Relieving physical suffering is clearly a noble act but it should not be used as an excuse to obscure spiritual understanding.

If you believe in God, really believe in a spiritual God, then you have a different attitude to the world and to human beings. Human beings then become not what they appear to be in the phenomenal sense but souls with a spiritual purpose and in need of spiritual development. They are not just minds and bodies as we would ordinarily perceive them. They are spiritual beings and that puts them in an entirely different light. To fulfil them in the earthly sphere might have a detrimental spiritual impact. That does not mean you turn a blind eye to suffering but that the real significance of life lies elsewhere. It lies in developing first an awareness of and then a relationship with God and with God as a spiritual being, seeing yourself as a soul not the incarnated personality.

Most people live entirely in the world of appearance. They identify themselves with their outer being, their human body, emotions and thoughts, and when they think of God they think of him interacting with this person or saving this person. Even many, maybe the majority of, religious people materialise spirituality in that they think the earthly human being is what matters. But the earthly human being is inherently and by default a sinner, and a sinner can only be saved by renouncing his sins and not just his sins but his identification with himself as an earthly human being. The earthly human being can never get to heaven. This needs to be understood. You only get to heaven, which is to say fulfil your divine purpose and destiny, by transferring the focus of your being from the earthly self to the spiritual soul. If you don't know what this means you are a materialist whatever your beliefs.

God is not a humanitarian. At least, not in the sense we normally understand the meaning of this word. That is because although he loves the whole human being there is a hierarchical dimension to this love and he loves the soul more than the body. This is not to discount the body but to put things in perspective. It is good to feed and heal the body but not at the expense of the soul and if the focus on the body is used to obscure the reality and prior claim of the soul then you are not acting in a godly fashion. It is hard to escape the sense that in recent times the humanitarian impulse, in itself a true and noble impulse, has been twisted and is being used to advance an attack on deeper spiritual values.