I wonder sometimes how one could characterize in the future the path of spiritual evolution. I dont whant to say I would know the answer but I like in this regard this statement in this article: "But what does it mean to find yourself between a dying rationalism on the one hand and an inarticulate pietism on the other? Rather than rest on the doubtful laurels of the middling, we should aspire to what rises above it: to a genuine confrontation between reason and revelation that might serve to revitalize both."
http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archiv ... icle2.html
I have also the impression that at the end among all the different religions and spiritual pathes a new one will appear, or is already on its way, one just has to enter in one of the bookstores this days, which will respond the best to the spiritual needs of all the souls and theyr understanding of today, or what other think? I know, when I was bying my first book at the end of the 70´s, "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" by Dr. Joseph Murphy which until today remaind one of my favorite author, the bookstores had only very fiew of this so called esoteric books, now they have an own bookshelf filled with countless authors.
http://www.josephmurphy.wwwhubs.com http://www.albertgrier.wwwhubs.com -
http://www.louisehay.wwwhubs.com -
http://www.williamwalkeratkinson.wwwhubs.com
http://www.websyte.com/alan/ssmr.htm
"Reason and revelation
The secular side of American thought, too, at its higher levels, has been compelled to acknowledge itself as religious. In posing the question between humanism and theism as one of reason versus revelation, one risks being branded as passé in the most advanced secularist circles. This is not because the reigning theorists there will crow that reason has triumphed, but because they take it for granted that its pretensions have been decisively refuted. The earlier John Rawls, he of the Theory of Justice (1972), might have seemed to argue that secularist liberalism was the dictate of universal reason. This invested his enterprise with weight, as if he really was participating in the grand style of political philosophy. Later, however, he crumbled on this point, conceding that such liberalism was merely "our" perspective, no more grounded in the truth about things than any previous moral horizon. He thus made his peace with postmodernism.
Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist, candidly admits that at the end of the day liberalism is a matter of faith, not reason. Indeed, he goes further than this: He concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay "Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism," he describes secularist liberals like himself as "freeloading atheists." They continue to rely on the Judeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern.
This twofold admission"”that liberalism is merely a faith that remains dependent on an earlier faith, the authority of which it has rejected"”should not, claims Rorty, dismay liberals in the least. No rational or coherent alternative to liberalism exists; all "foundational narratives," upon inspection, will prove equally arbitrary and groundless. Thus our allegiance to liberalism progresses from the naive to the "ironic," but the allegiance itself survives this transition unscathed. Through his supposed practice of unprecedented candor, Rorty achieves unheard of feats of having his cake and eating it too. Liberalism of this postmodernist sort pillages the Biblical tradition for everything up to and including its own moral core, while still priding itself on remaining a faith of the atheistic variety.
On the one hand, this development implies a certain rapprochement between secular liberalism and Biblical faith. They no longer glare at one another across the chasm between faith and reason. The younger "faith-based" alternative that liberalism now stands exposed as being can reach out to shake the hand of the older one. It no longer claims to be more reasonable than it; no longer claims to be truer. Just as (from the liberal point of view) Biblical faith had its day which has now passed, today belongs to liberalism. But in days to come, new times will see the emergence of new faiths. On the other hand, precisely by conceding its arbitrary dependence on Biblical faith, postmodern liberalism keeps its distance from it. It need not face the challenge that the older faith poses to it, because by redefining itself as a faith it thereby evades any such challenge. In the land of the arbitrary, the one-eyed man is king.
For Rorty, God is dead but secularized Christian morality continues. This is precisely one of the scenarios envisaged by Nietszche in The Gay Science: "God is dead, but given the way men are there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown." True, only 125 of those years have now passed, but on the evidence of Rorty’s thought, it’s hard to believe that his sort of shadow play still has centuries to run.
But is God dead? The current vigor of evangelicalism in American society gives no answer, any more than does the crypto-atheism of European society. Nor would it be settled should these two spirits change places, with Europeans all professing to be born again and Americans all following the Bobos in seeking the sacred in herbal infusions. To the eye of the believer, the ways of God are mysterious, and it’s not within human capacity to infer what future the present conceals.
Nor should any partisan of reason forecast the future with any confidence. In one corner of the American ring today perches a secularism (whether of the Left or Right) that grows ever more dogmatic politically even as it finds itself ever more groundless theoretically. In the other lurks an avowedly traditionalist faith that has yet to produce an important meditation on the tradition it claims to continue. Most Americans are in between. But what does it mean to find yourself between a dying rationalism on the one hand and an inarticulate pietism on the other? Rather than rest on the doubtful laurels of the middling, we should aspire to what rises above it: to a genuine confrontation between reason and revelation that might serve to revitalize both."
