CULTURE WARS: Religion vs. Civility

Ours is an epic time marked by wars between religion and civility, but also a time of the apocalyptical enlightenment of ignorance and arrogance. Each of us has a capacity to be irreligious and uncivil; but each of us also has a capacity to be religious and civil. Incivility betrays religion; irreligion betrays civility.

“Quantum religion” is good news, the Word behind rising consciousness; “religion and civility” are about the primacy Word/Work of conscience, of faith, hope and love — these harmonize the primacy relationship of word and work, and they authenticate personal self in relationship to other. Growth of consciousness into broader and deeper understandings of universal truth enables ascendancy over ignorance and arrogance.

Culture wars are waged in the shadows of burned out lucifers. State sponsored violence throughout history has been justified for many reasons, but the meanest violence often occurs “in God’s name”. This is true not only in Middle East circumstances but also in ancient indigenous cultures and in the Medieval/Renaissance cultures of Christianity. It should now be abundantly clear from the evidence of history that neither individuals nor civilizations can abide dogmas of worldviews whose credibility has crashed. The need is much overdue to tailor religious dogma to fit the evolutionary worldview globally shared.

The fratricide being waged between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq today has an etiology not unlike the Christian faith/reason, orthodoxy/secularity conflicts of the present time fed by Vatican I/Vatican II polarities and aggravated by the static worldview (SWV) and evolutionary worldview (EWV) divide. Analogous also is the orthodox/secular divide that persists in Judaism. The family feud inheritance of Abrahamic religions has been spectacularly violent and globally destructive. But it isn’t too late to learn from history if we open ourselves to its lessons.

The wars of religions are generally in contexts of faith orthodoxies forcibly exerting conformity on the populace to the beliefs and rituals of organized religion, whose “holy” men, priests, rabbis, imams, gurus, etc., interpret the divine for the consumption of the faithful. Determinative of Western cultures is the history of Europe from Constantine (c. 350) to the present time, for it was inside this time-frame that orthodox Catholicism fixed its worldview, defined its dogmas and developed its rituals under presumptions of patriarchal/hierarchical right (and imperial might) in matters spiritual and secular.

It was but natural that, as cultural belief advanced understandings of the divided and conflicting realms of the spiritual and the material, an orthodox belief would develop around the presumed higher valuation of the spiritual over the material, and that the realm of the “secular” (material order) would be derogated and dominated by the “higher” spiritual realm. In effect, religious culture has been set against the secular (civil) culture, and in the Holy Roman Empire, culture wars, wars for hegemony of the spiritual order over the secular presumed on the credibility of faith dominion over reason, of the spiritual order over the material.

So long as the belief (that spirit and matter represent respectively “good” and “evil” and that one realm is “godly” and the other is “ungodly”) is legitimized in the minds of the people, the culture of dominion can be rationalized with some credibility and imposed on all. But when the worldview of spirit/matter dualism loses credibility and justification, so does the justification of its dogma and the dominion control of religion over politics.

The evolutionary science of quantum-relativity changes worldview understandings. The process of energy (“spirituality”) becoming matter (substance), and of the economy of organic life sustained in wave/particle transformation changes understandings of creation. Energy (spirituality) and matter (materiality) are a joined unity of soul/body. By radically disconnecting energy and matter for purposes of worldview understanding, humankind has in fact fictionalized a schism upon itself and created a disconnected worldview that internally alienates the human persona from authentic self-understanding.

The soul/substance of life is a gratuity of nature’s symbiotic paradigm evolved over billions of years, and is still evolving. The fictional valuation of the spiritual apart from the material extrapolates schizophrenic consciousness on the religious/civil persona and causes consciousness to disconnect the spirituality of organic life from its matter; by so doing, understanding of ecological economy is misinterpreted, and ecology is disrespected and radically degraded. Soul and substance inevitably suffer when their oneness is not understood. The global ecology is wasted and mortally threatened.

Man-written scriptures (religion and politics) are fraudulent except they derive continuity from the Primary Scripture of evolutionary life and the joined reality of spirit/matter. The global ecological/environmental crisis is a civil/religious crisis. Recovery from the crisis begins with healing the religion/science rift, the faith/secularity rift, and with putting religion and secularity on the same page with nature in the new worldview paradigm of evolution.

The schismatic culture of energy/matter, of the soul/substance disconnect, is a burned out lucifer that no longer enlightens religious/civil consciousness/behavior in a sustainable manner. Religious consciousness must open itself to evolutionary enlightenment.

Unless religion and secularity awaken to their joined and essential mutuality, and come to a worldview ethic and dogma that is consistent with faith/reason, religion/science mutuality, humankind will continue on its path of self-disintegration and ecologic-economic dissolution. The lie of the static worldview has to be laid bare if human self-destruction is to be reversed.