This is one of the greatest problems of modern society--spirituality. I consider myself to be rather deeply spiritual and a bit superstitious, though much less of the later, because spirituality is generally more compatible with philosophy and I try to honour spirits without holding in myself beliefs about various activities which directly contradict science. This sort of detached spirituality is likely related to my profession of engineering. On the other hand, engineers, who I prefer to refer to as applied scientists, are the most religious of the scientific professions. I suspect this is a degree of self-selection; I chose engineering because I want to see my accomplishments before my eyes, because I want to have a constructive feeling most especially of contributing to the world in which my chiildren live, and then of course due to the very practical fact that engineering professionals are the only real people with stable careers in the modern United States. Cascadia is too subject to the whims of the US government--I am a Cascadian nationalist--and therefore cannot institute the worker protections it otherwise might be able to pursue. This means I chose the most stable career constantly because it allows me to protect and nurture children most effectively.
Modern religion, however, is not something very conductive to spirituality. The temple of the Mega-Church has overcome any kind of older traditions, and Vatican II gutted the ritual and ceremony of American Catholicism. I was, personally, raised in Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tradition was an eye-opening exposure to a genuine spirituality which left me deeply at odds with my parents' later meddling in protestantism, for long reasons I shall not relate. I could see the pointlessness of the religion even as a very young child, and my heart ached for the Marine tradition of the Theotokos (God-Bearer, for those increase numbers of disadvantaged to whom the modern schools have denied knowledge of the Greek Tongue), of that little remnant of female spirituality which protestantism crushes entirely which I was fortunate enough to spend the first few years of my thinking life with. My ultimate reaction to that dreadful hollowness of Protestantism was in adulthood a gyration between atheism and paganism which settled down to a comfortable acknowledgement of a distant sort of polytheistic paganism. I will trust that the Goddesses shall forgive me for the lack of passion in my faith, and carry on thusly in life.
Few people in this country are so privileged. Modern American spirituality, and to a large extent that of the British Commonwealth and Europe as well, is a fundamentally bankrupt experience. This is far worse than the moral bankruptcy of the modern Russian Orthodox Church, as a creature of the state security apparatus. This is about the spiritual bankruptcy of western Christendom, because it is possible for a religious organization to be at once morally bankrupt and spiritually redemptive, or a moral voice and spiritually bankrupt. The Catholic Church mostly sustained the later position until the hammer-blows of the priestly paedophilia scandals of late. Protestantism shed any kind of connection with the spiritual almost from its creation. It has been the enabling engine of global capitalism ever since, and with more and more terrifying rapidity it has reached a point where it serves as nothing more than the temple order of a capitalist society.
It is this organisation of Jesus-promotes-wealth (the most contemptible lie ever proclaimed in the entire Universe from here unto Domesday) which is the ultimate purveyor of spiritual bankruptcy. Gone, gone, is the sublime of the Pythia, of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of even the divine wonder of old gold and jewel encrusted Icons of the Theotokos. Now we have a man, stnading in a room which is often used as a basketball court on other days of the week, preaching a doctrine of adherence to a set of moral principles in which we are supposed to believe... Because God told us to. The redemptive power of spirituality is completely lost. The point of those rules--to enable the rituals of supernatural force which save and ennoble the human spirit--is missing, and thus any kind of validity to the pronounced doctrine has ceased to exist.
It is in this environment that Gentlemen of Letters and Sciences rightfully proclaim that religion is unnecessary, that we have no need for it, that it is a false and harmful doctrine which holds back society. All of this is true about modern western Christendom, and not in a single way false, at least, when applied specifically to that peculiar doctrine. And indeed, where is Domesday? The End Times were never supposed to be something terrifying, and were something that Christendom dwelt extensively on as an escape from a flawed world. It was imperfect, but it was spiritual. Now, however, the doctrine assures that tithing and obeying these moral commandments will result in wealth and prosperity on this earth, which is a service to the modern corporate culture. Once, Christendom promised only torment and death on this Earth, while holding forth the banner of hope, of spiritual power and redemption, in the eternal award of the Initiates to the Faith. Now, the power of the beauty of Iconography, of the sacred mysteries, of the chanting of priests and swinging of censers which was shared with the worship of the Goddess at Ephesus, is no more, and we listen to the pronouncements of the Chief Officer of the Country Club in how a few ancient doctrines, ripped from their spiritual foundings, shall provide for us on Earth and provide some sort of spiritual award reduced to a vague feeling of happiness and watered down from an understanding of the transcendence of the human spirit.
In this sort of world, it is only perfectly fair that atheism prospers, and that I support the propounders of the atheist doctrines, for when this hollow brand of religion which does nothing for its adherents slews away like rotten flesh, we may hope that a more genuine spirituality will take root in its place. This is one which necessarily is, in all the panoply and confusion and grandeur of how such systems operate in practice, nonetheless fully able to communicate spirituality to the people through art. For as Schopenhauer realized in the mysticism of the Buddhist east and customs of India, and expounded as filtered through the philosophical lens, art is the only way for the common person to reach enlightenment. Art was the business of the ancient church, and of the faiths of the mystery cults and the Mother Goddesses. Art was the connection of enlightenment with the common person, and the conduit through which their spirituality could fill the fundamental psychological void of the human existence: That we are both self-aware and mortal.
Until then, we must support the atheists, for they till the sod under, that we might hope that in their wake, seeds of a new and genuine spirituality founded in the old knowledge and comfort of the Mother Goddesses may take root in the West and make good some of the psychological damage caused by the absence of any nurturing promise against this terrible realization of chronologically limited self-awareness. Their interests and mine furthermore may very well not diverge within my lifetime, so my beliefs become a matter for family, and rationalism as something to propound, for the most part, in public. This may thus be the rather complex summary of my feelings on the subject of religion, spirituality, and the modern atheist movement to which so many of my dearest friends and confidantes adhere.
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