Secularization, Spiritual Subjugation and Atheism
1 Comment | January 9, 2009 at 9:23 pm by mahud
Filed under Atheism, Mircea Eliade, Sprituality
In my previous post On the Threshold Between One Life Path and Another, I said that, “I’m a big believer that everyone whether they are secular or spiritually inclined are, in the larger scheme of things, on the right path towards whatever it is that their life is ultimately about.” By this, I am not asserting that secularization is a good thing. Especially in our modern world culture that attempts to negate the sacred aspect of reality. We have been force-fed a world view that subjugates us and keeps us in a state of complacency. Once upon a time it was an erroneous Christian world-view propagated by a wealthy Church that subjugated the masses. Now secularism is the new “opiate for the masses,” and the wealthy continue to tell us how to live our lives and who we should be, and consequently, we never learn who we truly are, and never get to truly live.
Probably practitioners of secular Atheism (and other intellectual types) are less likely be to bound by the shallow aspect of secular culture. Admittedly I do not know any philosophical Atheists and need to learn more about their ethics and such, but I’m guessing that they have a more enriched view of the world than those who give no thought to what life is actually about.
I’m a believer in reincarnation. Similarly to Ali who so eloquently said in a recent post,…
…the idea of cycles of birth, death and rebirth made intuitive sense when I looked at the world and all its wide, sweeping patterns.
Meadowsweet & Myrrh: Re-Membering Theology: Part I
I do not have a developed philosophy of reincarnation as found in Hinduism and Buddhism for example (I’m not entirely sure where I’ll be ending up after I die—or if it will even be mahud any more—, but I believe that the wheel of death and life will inevitably keep turning). It has intuitively become a truth for me. After rejecting Eternal Damnation and then the Zoroastrian/Christian concept of Universal Salvation, I adopted Reincarnation. Further, a large proportion of my Pagan mythos is based on the phenomena of death and life in the natural world.
Reincarnation is the principle behind my adherence to the belief that we are all on the right path.
What can the Path of Secular Atheism teach those who walk it, I wonder?
Both Jeff and Terri, shared some thoughts on an Atheistic world-view. Both of whom have gone through periods of Atheism:
As you point out, it’s a journey, a very personal one, but I always hold out hope that new Atheists will eventually ‘get better’, as I did. Trick lies in keeping the mind open, and in believing the evidence of your senses.
I was atheist, or borderline atheist, for years. I know what lies down that road.
Druid Journal: Irrational Paganism?
I went through a rather brief atheistic period and became hardened toward the revelatory truth of the Biblical scriptures. So I definitely agree with you Terri when you say the “Trick lies in keeping the mind open, and in believing the evidence of your senses”. Later on, I softened up a bit and become more open to the Spirit and received some much needed healing.
But can an Atheist truly not appreciate life, because they do not consider it sacred as such? Surely Atheists can appreciate the wonder of life in all its rich diversity, without seeing it as divine or the product of a divine being?
Finally, I thought It worthwhile to include Mircea Eliade’s thoughts on the subject of secularization and the non-religious Who believed that it was impossible to wholly become desacralized:
…the nonreligious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of “reality,” and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence. The great cultures of the past too have not been entirely without nonreligious men, and it is not impossible that such men existed even on the archaic levels of culture, although as yet no testimony to their existence there has come to light. But it is only in the modern societies of the West that nonreligious man has developed fully. Modern nonreligous man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demystified. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.
…in the last analysis, modern nonreligious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness. But this nonreligious man descends from homo religiosus and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. In short, he is the result of a process of desacralization. Just as nature is the product of a progressive secularization of the cosmos as the work of God, profane man is the result of a desacralization of human existence. But this means that nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to “empty” himself of all religion and all transhuman meaning. He recognizes himself in proportion as he “frees” and “purifies” himself from the “superstitions” of his ancestors. In other words, profane man cannot help preserving some vestiges of the behavior of religious man, though they are emptied of religious meaning. Do what he will, he is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he is himself the product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being.
Eliade, Mircea, 1987[1957], ‘Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion’, p.202-204 (Harcourt Brace & Company)