Monday, May 26, 2014

Humanism and Religious Experience

“THE anti-supernaturalist view rests fundamentally on the hypothesis of a universe in which quality and value have no meaning and where everything is reducible to matter and energy. If we once admit the possibility of a mode of spiritual consciousness or being which transcends the biological, there seems no reason to regard the human mind as its only field of manifestation.

“It is no less reasonable to suppose that the metabiological plane is the point at which a higher order of being has inserted itself into the life of humanity than to suppose that it is a completely new order which has “emerged” from below. Even in the sensible world we have an example of the way in which a higher order of being can intervene to modify the natural development of a lower order. From the animal’s standpoint, man himself is a supernatural being whose action governs their life in a mysterious way and who even creates, as it were, new creatures like the setter and the racehorse, and admits them to a certain participation in his own life. And why, then, is it irrational to believe that, as Plato says, mankind is “the flock of the Gods,” that human life is susceptible to the influence of a higher power which fosters in it those new capacities and modes of being which we call spiritual and metabiological? Such a belief may seem to us incredible, but it is not really irrational. It would indeed be strange if reality did not transcend man’s comprehension qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The refusal to admit this possibility rests not much on reason as on the humanist prejudice which insists that the human mind is the highest of all possible forms of existence and the only standard of reality.”

~Christopher Dawson: from Christianity and the New Age.

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