Christopher Hitchens wrote: “How Religion Poisons Everything”. How did he come to that conclusion? It’s on the cover of his book: “God Is Not Great.”
If you reas this website you know Fr. John Rispath’s definition of religion. “Religion”, he believes, “is a set of mystical views about the universe”. That’s true regardless of which religion is being analysed. It’s not a pleasant thing to say partly because science opposes mysticism. Spiritual? Is there a spiritual side or a spiritual component of science? No.
Is there a spiritual component of the individual person? Generally, yes but not a component of mysticism which is the realm of religion. Spiritual refers to the mind and the way it works.
Spirituality belongs in a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction “ethics,” the realm of values, man’s code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has improperly and incorrectly arrogated to itself . . .
Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics makes it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.
It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
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