But beneath all these attacks on organized religion there was a more fundamental target: the spirituality of man, your own basic spiritual nature, self-respect and peace of mind. This black propaganda may have been so successful that maybe you no longer believe you have a spiritual nature but I assure you do.
In fact, you don’t have a soul, you are your own soul. In other words, you are not this book, your social security card, your body or your mind. You are you. . . .
Convince a man that he is an animal, that his own dignity and self-respect are delusions, that there is no “beyond” to aspire to, no higher potential self to achieve, and you have a slave. Let a man know he is himself, a spiritual being, that he is capable of the power of choice and has the right to aspire to greater wisdom and you have started him up a higher road.
Of course, such attacks on religion run counter to man’s traditional aspirations to spiritual fulfillment and an ethical way of life.
For thousands of years on this planet thinking man has upheld his own spirituality and considered the ultimate wisdom to be spiritual enlightenment.
The new radical thought that man is an animal without a spiritual nature has a name: totalitarian materialism. Materialism is the doctrine that “only matter matters.” The apostles of this new thought are trying to sell everybody on the idea that people really down deep are just a mass and what the person wants to do is cohese with this mass and then be protected by the mass.
This philosophical position was very handy to militaristic and totalitarian governments and their advocates of the last hundred years who wished to justify their atrocities and subjugation of populaces.
One of the tricks of the game has been to attack religion as unscientific. Yet science itself is merely a tool by which the physical universe can be better controlled. The joke is that science itself can become a religion.
Gerhard Lenski on page 331 of his The Religious Factor, a Sociologist’s Inquiry, defines religion as “a system of beliefs about the nature of force(s), ultimately shaping man’s destiny, and the practices associated therewith, shared by members of a group.” Scientific activities can be as fanatical as religious ones. Scientific groups can themselves be religious “orthodox science” monopolies. The Einsteinian concept of space and time can itself become a holy writ, just as Aristotle’s writings were converted into dogmas by the orthodoxy to squash any new ideas in the Middle Ages. (Einstein himself until late in his life was looked upon as a maverick and denied admittance into learned societies.)
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