In the pursuit of “truth”, Enlightenment and Religion come together. Universal (catholic) Religion is a “universal call” - vocation. The universal “call” for every person, for every community is to become Godlike, i.e., to be harmonious (symbiotic) in all relationships.
How do we ascend into “Godlikeness”? By appropriating (OWNING) Godlike Virtues, FAITH (fidelity); HOPE (confidence in things unknown); LOVE (altruism, self-donation, Eucharist). We have opportunity to exercise these in all relationships.
In Christian tradition, for example, God is WORD (the Trustful Communicator); God is LIGHT (informed in all things); and God is LOVE (Total Self-Donation, Eucharist). By TRIMORPHIC RESONANCE, by trustful communication, by informed consciousness, and by altruistic conscience we grow into Godlikeness, moment-by-moment, day-by-day.
In Christian insight, growth into Godlikeness is THE NEW DISPENSATION! Not an institutional ideology, but personal quest of the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as nature enables conscious ascendancy into Divine Consciousness, into harmonious relationship — the HYPOSTASIS of divinity/humanity in Natural Ascendancy.
How do Enlightenment and Religion come together in us personally, communally? BY INDIVIDUAL BECOMING GODLIKE, BY OWNING TRIMORPHIC RESONANCE, by trustful communication, informed consciousness, and altruistic conscience.
We are endowed by nature to grow out of small-world culture, out of closed faith ideology, and to affirm our commonalities as well as individualities. In the way of personal affirmation, Enlightenment and Religion come together in communal consciousness and mutual purpose. Coming together begins with the realization that belief and reason, faith and science, and religion and civility are inseparably essential to each other in the joined unfolding (evolution) of religion & civility and personal authenticity.
Background: in conjunction with and after the Thirty Years Wars of Religions (1648), faith and reason were set against each other and irreconcilably divided; we are now experiencing the fruits of their schism in the continuing mean-mindedness of fideism and rationalism toward each other. Vatican II pointed the way to crawling out from under the heavy load of desperation caused by fixity in fideism and rationalism — and that is by updating and evaluating failures of faith/reason culture, causes of their historical breaches, and updating and reconciling evolved consciousness in light of the mutual necessities of faith and reason. In short, we need to recognize the essential “suppositions” of faith and reason in nature (primary scripture), and to update our personal worldviews with the informed insights of quantum-electric consciousness (relationships).
There are many more questions that need asking and answering. The many centuries of neglected updating have put us in a nearly overwhelmed circumstance of ecological waste, but neglect to deal with it now is not an option because the outcome of neglect is too high a price to pay. It's going to take a lot of serious and committed effort.
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Comments: 4
"The Enlightenment" rationalists, as a "school", sought to deconstruct the notion of spirituality as but a "mechanical" aspect of the human condition and the quantum universe. I propose a "Second Enlightenment" that reconnects spiritual-material, energy-matter as the joined organic continuum of life on Earth. The uncapitalized word "enlightenment" is to me the ongoing evolution of self-reflective consciousness, engaged continuously in the linked processes of communication, consciousness and conscience, and being changed by intentional and unintentional inputs.
I invite you to check out my website www.secondenlightenment.org and I think meanings will come together. Also, I invite you to read other of my postings at this website. Thanks for asking, George.