I feel it might shed some light on how much and how far religious fanatics go and go literally in control and discipline if one is seen as deviating from the official line. Owing to belief in miracle and miracle-making as the central spirit of their mysticism, they have become ready and have not at all hesitated to use any and all known tools and know how to badly influence, coerce, control and subjugate any and all real and perceived deviants.
I believe this letter is a continuation of an article by Daniel Dennett on religion in The Guardian UK Thursday 16th July 2009. Although I do not agree with his ideas about what religion and spirituality are and how they should be practiced, I strongly agree with his descriptions of harmful practices by some and even by the vast majority of organized religion authorities. Organized religion is about interest, material class, and group fulfillment rather than an inward search for truth and individual and social self-fulfillment despite the bold portrayal of the self. In terms of making the most vital decisions in our lives in consultation with our inner voices, I can’t understand the objections to that because we all make our vital life and death decisions in consultation with our inner voices and I see no exception to that. But if our inner voices somehow become the inner voices of the authorities of our religions, the inner voices’ as is so often the case, the concern is justified.
Organization presupposes professionalization of classification, specialization and division of labor on the basis of this stratification. Is it surprising, then, that all social class structures, those at the higher end of the structure, have an interest in confounding practice and making it shrouded in secrets to defend their acquired or given status. If any irrationality is condoned or encouraged in any social structure, there is no need to explain that it can only be by those who are able to do it and who are in a position to do so, and it is clear who these are who need no explanation. The only important observation here is that all hierarchical social structures are prone to encourage irrational actions and irrational abundance to varying degrees (the anathema of division of labor and social stratification).
As these religious institutions and social structures have given rise to science and the scientific establishment and the latter’s incompetence in finding answers to the fundamental perplexing issues of our beginning of life, our present existence, and our future destiny; It has generated, and continues to generate, an enduring attraction to the practice of religion and spirituality. It was the truth of spirituality for Milena and I am sure it will continue to last in an effort to find in the inner self the truth and self absent in the physical and scientific world, here and everywhere. This search for the gaps in itself between the physical realities of yesterday, today and tomorrow, what we can only reach with our intuition and what we can only imagine and which we cannot define or define in all other ways and means available to date, will always draw us to spirituality individually and collectively.