It only requires the most minimal of study and thought to realize that the non-spiritual human is exactly as rare as the non-breathing human. No matter how hard one may work to differentiate themselves from "the breathing class" (say Indian meditation, holding of breath for very long times like free divers, etc), that more the actual focus is on breathing, modified though it may be.
So with the spiritual. Those that are absolutely most certain that they have completely "abandoned religion" and "have no faith" are often the greatest "Puritan zealots", even if their "purity" is pure evil as in the case of the Gang, the Prison Culture, the Nazis or the BO cabinet.
So we have "political correctness", gay rights, animal rights, veganism, coops, local foods, environmentalism ... the list is endless. As the linked article puts it:
We live in a spiritual age, in other words, when we believe ourselves surrounded by social beings of occult and mystic power. When we live with titanic cultural forces contending across the sky, and our moral sense of ourselves— of whether or not we are good people, of whether or not we are saved— takes its cues primarily from our relation to those forces. We live in a spiritual age when the political has been transformed into the soteriological. When how we vote is how our souls are saved."soteriological" - providing salvation.
One of the extreme advantages of religions that are thousands of years old is that when you are raised in one and embrace it, you know what you are doing. The analogy of the cute little boy that takes his toy apart becoming less cute when he dissects his puppy is apt. "Science" and "left wing paganism" has dissected Western Culture and Christianity with an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and decided "that was easy". The kiddies may think that yoga, gardening and expanded gender identities" are a good replacement for what they believe they blew up, but the fascination with monsters, vampires, demons, body piercings and tattoos might not be entirely metaphorical.
Perhaps there is more to this breathing thing than they thought?
How durable is post-Protestant culture? Missing from Bottum’s portraits of the “poster children” is any mention of the children they are—or aren’t—raising. Fertility rates among members of the secularized Mainline churches are so low (just as they are among “progressive” Jews) that one is tempted to regard post-Protestantism as a one-generation wonder. While the children of the Mainline occupy themselves with yoga, organic gardening and expanded gender identities (Facebook now offers more than fifty categories to choose from), popular culture becomes moribund. The 20th century’s variations of the social gospel seem genteel next to what populates America’s metaphysical realm today. Americans spend more time with supernatural monsters than ever did the Christians of the Middle Ages, from vampires to zombies to demons of every hue. In 2012, the horror genre supplied one out of eight American feature films; a decade ago it was roughly one out of twenty-five. Strip away divine immortality from American spirituality, and it embraces the undead variety.
Oh, and that is in the current, supposedly nominalist, scientific, "modern" world. Many of our current youth might well compare tattoos and body piercings with even an African tribesman of the year "800" and not detect any irony.
It is the season of Lent as I write this. God came down and took human form to die on a cross to save humanity from ETERNAL spiritual "non-breathing" (spiritual death) 2000 years ago. Of course each generation would DEARLY love to make that "eternal" word part a MYTH, in the sense that "myths" may be in "detail and particulars" not "data factual", but are far MORE "human factual" than "data reality".
The Mona Lisa is a better "likeness" for humans than a terapixel photo of the subject. On this failure of understanding falls much of the sadness of our declining culture and community.
While "Avengers" was an eminently forgettable film, the scene where Loki declares to Hulk that "I am a God" might give a tiny insight into how the underlying spiritual reality of the universe ultimately deals with humans that are certain of their deity ... or that try to hide what they are really thinking behind the idea that "there is no god" (translation in reality, they have decided that THEY are god!).
'via Blog this'
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