When we speak of the New Religious Mode we mean a new mode of thinking from which to critique religion and within which to create religion anew.   The New Religious Mode is a secular event unfolding since the 19th century.  Its essence is the dawning of the end of the two-story religious metaphor and the replacement of that metaphor with a new way of discussing the profound depths of humanness that have been explored for so long in that two-story manner.  The new manner of talking might be called “transparency” in the sense that the profound depths are now viewed through the ordinary as the ordinary turns transparent to those depths.

Religion

When we speak of religion in the context of this New Religious Mode, we mean a humanly invented means of accessing the depths of profound humanness.  We interpret the history of religion and the future of religion through this fresh clarification about what we mean by the term “religion.”

When we speak of a new myth or a new “religious” story we are speaking of one of the core aspects of the creation of religion. There are other aspects: new icons, new rituals, new communal organizations, new religious methods, and other topics related to this list of topics.  Religion is basically practices that assess profound humanness, but religion also includes the theoretics that examine and perfect those practices and the political and economic institutions that house those theoretics and practices.

Truth and Religion

When we speak of any of the above matters we are assuming some understanding of how the truth of these matters can be ascertained.  “Truth” itself is an important word.  We have been told in John’s Gospel that Jesus is the Truth, the Life, and the Way.  So following Jesus means following the Truth.  We have also noted that “God” is a devotional word for Reality.  So if Truth is our awareness of Reality, Truth is our awareness of God.  The Holy Spirit is also referred to as the Spirit of Truth.  So, a philosophy of Truth is crucial for any attempt to validly recreate the Christian religion, or any other religion we might wish to validly recreate or invent.

Following is my philosophy of truth – built with a lot of help from Ken Wilber, A. H. Almaas, Joe Mathews, Richard Feynman, Susan K. Langer and a host of others. I have concluded that there are three and only three basic approaches to truth: the scientific approach to truth, the contemplative approach to truth, and the workability approach to truth.  I contend that these are the only three approaches to truth functioning in the lives of human beings.

1. The scientific approach to truth is the rational assembly of order from the sensory experiences by a peer group of  observers that we trust to be competent with this method.  However sophisticated this approach becomes (satellite telescopes, huge particle accelerators, etc.), the scientific approach to truth boils down to the sort of knowledge it takes to light a candle with a match.  You have to bring the flame of the match into contact with the wick of the candle in order for this to happen.  All science is an extension of this kind of “certainty.”  Scientific truth has its limits, rooted in the limits of the human mind and the limits of our empirical experience.  In the case of the candle lighting, we may not have noticed the importance of oxygen.  If we ran the experiment of lighting a candle in an oxygen free space we would notice the impossibility of even getting the match to burn.  In the case of the behavior of light, we find we need two sets of mathematics – one based on the image of the particle and one based on the image of the wave.  At the present time in our study of light, we cannot say whether light is a wave through some medium or a stream of particles.  We simply cannot currently picture the nature of light with one human image. And this may always be the case.  It may be that light is an empirical actuality that is beyond human imagination.  And the most serious limitation of scientific knowledge is that it only deals with objects of observation that a  group of people can observe.  It does not deal with subjective truth, with the contemplative experiences of the solitary person.  Science can only deal with the reports of solitary persons or the behaviors of solitary persons. Scientific truth is important for scholarship on the history of religious practices and for the dismantling of obvious superstitions, but the essence of religion requires another approach to truth.

2. The contemplative approach to truth is the noticing of conscious living by a singular conscious human who is “noticing” the functioning of his or her own consciousness.  This becomes a group process through comparing and contrasting such noticing by a number of singular persons.  In spite of this group work, our perception of truthfulness in the contemplative arena is only experienced by and within the life of the singular person.  Each person has to experience these truths for himself or herself, using guidance from others perhaps, but using those guides as guides to the inner life that we share in common but experience alone. This approach to truth is fundamental for the critique and creation of religion, for religion has to do with outward cultural forms and methods that assist us to access those states of consciousness we name “Spirit” or “Profound Humanness” or “Sacred” or “True Self” or “Human Essence” or other such names.

3. The workability approach to truth has two closely related subparts; the workability of interpersonal relations and the workability of processes of commonality.  By interpersonal relations we mean what goes on between two people as they seek to share their inner lives with one another.  Such interpersonal dynamics go on in larger groups, but the one-to-one dynamic remains basic to understanding those group experiences. By commonality we mean the cultural, political, and economic forms that human use to communicate and organize their common lives with one another.  It should be obvious that religion is basically an invention of commonality – stories, icons, rituals, methods, organizations, and so forth. A religion begins its formation in the cultural arena with language, art, wisdom, and styles of living, but a developed religion also includes political forms for decision making and economic forms for enabling its ongoing functions. Religion is a crass, down-to-Earth set of humanly invented commonalities useful for the sake of enabling a vital interpersonal sharing of states of consciousness experienced by solitary individuals at the  boundaries of human contemplative experience.

The Critique and Creation of Religion

This philosophy of truth and its application to the critique and creation of religion could be expanded into a library of books, but this simplified summary can be useful for keeping our minds focused on this very deep topic.   The above provides enough clarity to dismiss some erroneous views of religion.

First, religion is not the same as what we mean by “Spirit”; religion is a humanly invented means of accessing Spirit.  Sometimes the practice of a religion works as a means of accessing Spirit and sometimes it does not.  This success or failure of religion to access Spirit depends both upon the willingness and readiness of the persons involved and upon the quality of the religious practices for these persons in this time in history.

Secondly, there is no such thing as a spirituality separate from a religion. Anything we could possibly mean by the term “spirituality” is simply a form of religion.  Spirit itself is not a spirituality or a religion; it is a structure of the cosmos, a gift of our essential being.  “Spirit” indicates the unavoidable aspects of what it means to be fully human.

“Spirit” is a word best used to point to the positive Truth of being fully human.  “Evil spirit” is a misuse of the word “Spirit.”  Spirit cannot be evil.  Evil needs to be defined as the flight from or fight with Spirit.  Evil is not Spirit; it may be viewed as having a spirit quality only in the sense that it is a substitute for or a warping of Spirit.  Evil, so defined, is an illusion made “real” only by the effort of human imagination.  Evil, so understood, is not an essential structure of the cosmos, but a fall from the Truth created by a human revulsion for the Truth or simply by a human confusion about the Truth.  Once the Truth of our Spirit lives is understood and accepted, evil is overcome.  It is the core role of religion to assist humans to make this ongoing journey: (1) seeing the lies of evil in their own current living, (2) noticing that Truth accepts us home to the Truth without punishment, and (3) opting to accept this acceptance by the Truth for the ongoing Truthful living of our lives. 

Finally, the journey from evil to Truth is ongoing, because evil is very widespread in the life of humanity as well as in the complex patterns of our own individual lives. The journey from evil to Truth is always partial in the sense that each step toward Truth  reveals more layers of illusion/ignorance/evil to be experienced and moved beyond. Herein is revealed the necessity of an ongoing practice of religion – to assist us to keep going, to keep going on this ongoing journey toward what Paul called the Full Stature of Christ.  It might also be called the Full Stature of Buddha, for both of these exemplar portraits are just religious images.  We actually do not know if Jesus or Siddhartha actually reached full stature, or merely a huge portion of it.

The comparison of Christianity with Buddhism is an important topic for it reveals that all religious practices are finite efforts to assist us toward the Spirit Truth.  Therefore, all religions are subject to perversion, obsolesce, reform, and renewal.  The New Religious Mode is the historical advent of an awareness that has catapulted all religious practices into an era of extreme critique and into a new era in the creation of religion.