Is Rejecting Religion for Spiritualism a Good Thing?

The dictionary defines religion as a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith. So what is your objection to a system of beliefs? Progressivism, Marxism, socialism, communism, and spiritualism are all "systems of beliefs." These are all faith-based systems. The only commonality between all these religions is that they have no God to trouble them or offer them guidance. They are all self-centered systems of belief, not God-centered. You get to make up your system of comfortable beliefs, principles and causes.

The ardor and faith of the God-free religions is obvious if you dare challenge their beliefs or (worse yet) defend your own beliefs. They work up all kinds of ardor and with total faith in whatever herd ascribes to their shared beliefs. Don't ask them to go to church, though. A nice peaceful riot or burning a federal building, however, is a wonderful spiritual solidarity building activity. Just don't call it a religion. That implies you might be expected to sit in a pew.

The demonization of "religion" is, in my humble opinion, a strategic tactic of the forces of the dark side. Basically it says forsake the assembling of yourselves together as Christian denominations do and go out and worship in "nature" or assemble yourselves together to "peacefully" protest organized religion because organized religion is a bad thing.

Bad for who?

No question that some members of the would-be leader class have claimed religious authority and abused it for their own purposes. The devil, always a good military strategist, never attacks from just one direction. Even today he attacks conservatives from below and liberals from above.

And by encouraging us to disparage each other and fight interminably he causes the sort of chaos that helps his guerilla campaign against God. He has to make God and God's followers the bad guys. He does this, I believe, by introducing this nebulous spiritualism in which we get to believe we can find our own truth from within ourselves. No objective truths. No firm principles and only one's own self-defined "truth". Be wary. Religions as systems of belief provide us with an external framework. It assumes original sin - that we aren't by nature really good people. Spiritualism assumes we are by nature, good from birth. Well, we aren't. Don't believe that? Try raising a two year-old. Hard to find a more stubborn self-centered creature in all creation. If they weren't so cute, many toddlers would never survive to become adults. Our jobs as parents are to civilize the wee barbarians. In the same manner, God's job is to prepare us for eternity. We need His guidance. We don't carry goodness within ourselves.

That all comes from God and even when we think it comes from our own naval gazing, we find we become better people only by adopting into our lives external principles like the 10 commandments and the principles we learned in Sabbath school. By beholding we become changed. We are saved by Grace, not by sitting on a pole contemplating our own goodness. It doesn't work.

Eliminating "religion" wholesale is a very bad idea. Even the rhetoric of those who would selectively eliminate religious ideas and getting rid of institutions that make me uncomfortable, encourages pride and a haughty spirit. Spiritualism isn't about rapping on walls in the Fox sisters' bedroom in upstate New York. It's about turning inward for truth and rejecting the outward search for God and the assembling of ourselves together for mutual support in becoming better people.

When I took counseling studies in graduate school, I learned that one of the best ways to change our behavior was through studying, positive self-talk and performing ritual acts which challenged our own negative behavior. It struck me how similar much of the behavioral change techniques advocated by psychology were strikingly similar to those practices and rituals in many Christian churches. Apparently, when Jesus set up the Christian church, He knew rather a lot about how the human brain works.

Seek Him and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart. Searching for some sort of ultimate truth within your "spirit" is a pathway to what Yoda in Star Wars called the "dark side".

Okay, by now my anti-religionist friends are locked and loaded. You may fire at will.......

© 2024 by Tom King