01 February 2001, 805 words
People who claim to be spiritual but not religious irritate me even more than religious fundamentalists. The latter at least have a definite position and definite beliefs. How the former's spirituality manifests itself is, to me, more than a little mysterious.
When such people are asked to define what spirituality is, they usually spout phrases like "the part of us that is connected to God", "the higher planes of consciousness", "our oneness with the universe" and such meaningless pap.
What I observe is that their so-called spirituality doesn't affect them in any concrete way at all: they fornicate, horn, deceive, underpay their employees, cheat customers and support the UNC quite happily. Religious fundamentalists at least have to pretend to be following moral standards.
As far as I can tell, the real difference between religious fundamentalists and spiritual people is one of class more than anything else. Most of the former are working class, whereas nearly all of the latter are upper-class. But, in both groups, their beliefs are shaped primarily by insecurity, ego, and the need to find meaning in life.
The spiritual people, however, consider themselves too sophisticated to follow traditional religions. What they don't realize is that their mystic belief-system is just as daffy and, being better-educated, that makes them even dumber than the average fundamentalist (who at least has the excuse of being too ignorant and oppressed to know better).
Mysticism is entirely bereft of intellectual content. That is why people who claim to be spiritual are almost invariably ready to believe in things like psychic healing and feng shui and ESP. It is this brainlessness that I find especially irritating about them.
Take, for example, the mystic concept about "cosmic balance" - yin/yang and karma and so on. This is supposed to be a deep insight into the nature of the universe and life. Yet the fact is that the universe wouldn't even exist were it not fundamentally unbalanced to, literally, begin with.
The standard model of particle physics says that for every sort of particle matter is made of, there is an anti-particle that is its mirror-image. So far so good, except that if there was a perfectly opposite universe, the particles and anti-particles would have annihilated each other and matter would never have formed. So our universe actually exists only because it lacks "cosmic balance".
"Cosmic harmony", an even more popular mystic concept, is just as nonsensical. The basic belief of all religious belief-systems is that the universe exists mainly to produce and care for conscious beings like us.
In the face of such conceit, scientists find it quite ironic that religious people so often accuse them of arrogance. They know that the most distant known galaxies are too young to have metals for the formation of Earth-size inner planets, and the frequent supernovas and quasar-like energy bursts make the evolution of intelligent life very improbable. Were there sound waves in space, the music of the spheres would be a very violent cacophony.
Still, here we are: inhabiting a small planet near the rim of a spiral-shaped galaxy with a medium-sized yellow sun. And, say both the religious and the spiritual people, look how organized Nature is, how balanced, how well-designed. If only we would live in harmony with our natural environment, they hold, everything would be hunky-dory.
Uh-huh. In the past 500 million years, the Earth has experienced 15 mass extinctions, five of which eliminated more than half of all species on the planet. The last major one occurred 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth and caused atmospheric changes that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Scientists estimate that 90 percent of all species which ever existed have become extinct. All this occurred long before homo sapiens appeared on the scene: the environmental damage we have done in the past 100,000 years is trivial compared to what Nature accomplished all on her own. And, though Nature's blind achievements rightly arouse our sense of wonder, they do include the ichneumon wasp which paralyzes a caterpillar and lays eggs in its body so her hatchlings will have living flesh to feast on.
But you may ask: aren't spiritual claims harmless? Aren't the batty beliefs of mysticism far less pernicious than those of religious fundamentalism? Mightn't they even do some good?
Perhaps. But when Sean Harribance is given a forum at UWI and on TV6, and when his corganization's bogus lecture on ESP attracts a capacity crowd with people outside literally pleading to be let in, and when that crowd includes some of Trinidad's wealthiest and most influential citizens - well, any rational person would naturally be concerned.
Never mind, though: in this society, that probably totals less than 30 concerned people.
Copyright©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh