Wilson's Holy War: Unneeded, Unheeded, and Superceded

Ethics and Religion

Truth unites, dogma divides.

Wilson denied not only his own experience of God, but other people's as well. He believed that faith in God was a regrettable trick of epigenetics played on humans lacking adequate reasoning ability, a comforting mental artifice, a convenient illusion. And as scientific evidence about the brain accumulated, the inspirations to pray, to repent, to rely on God would all be illuminated as groundless in truth but providing a biological advantage. At times he not only disparaged religion but faulted people for lacking the courage to not believe in God.

Wilson's science, like an astronomer missing the sun, denied the evidence of God.

The humanist disability of the Great Purification. Scientific knowledge made it possible for many millions of people to live in a level of comfort that had been available only to the rich prior to the twentieth century. Humanism fostered "pride of lifestyle," a tendency to attach great siginificance to one's home, possessions and social circumstances. We recall that this mass affluence and possession hoarding caused imbalances in the natural environment that befouled the earth and contributed to mass extinctions. However, wealthy people, humanists and scientolators did not attribute these environmental problems to their own material attachments. They found it easier to blame the loss of biodiversity on a general problem of human overpopulation. Humanists were preoccupied with biodiversity as a pleasant setting for these all important lifestyles they pursued, so there developed a tendency in humanism to care more about the lower life forms that human beings. Ironic, given the title of the movement. Humanists of The Purification fiercely rejected the sacredness of human life. They were like children who loved their pets better than their family.

Wealthy humanists like Wilson passionately hoped that other people would also reject the sacredness of human life. He wrote specifically about the Catholic Church, which continued to uphold the sacredness of life through The Purification. He hoped that Catholicism would give up protecting the youngest humans in favor of protecting biodiversity. That world view did not cite a specific species as being more sacred that the human species, but promoted a general view that if people could be influenced to dispose of their own offspring it would be good for biodiversity. That hypocrisy is immediately apparent to us. The wealthy humanist did not wish to impoverish himself. He hoped that some poor father and some vulnerable mother could be brought to sacrifice their own. In my lifetime of reading the words of those times I have never come across any scientist or humanist saying that biodiversity would have been served if their own children had not been born, only somebody else's.

Intellectual debate about God has never been a significant factor in spiritual experience, although it was crucial to Wilson.

Wilson claimed that theologians and religious people had always told us God is "out there." No. No lover of God, even the intellectual theologian who could provide Wilson with the debate he craved, experienced God as wholly external. If Wilson had read his Bible one more time, he might have noticed the term Holy Spirit. He might have noticed Christ's words "I will never leave you, but my spirit will be in you." Theism is the experience of God within, as immortal soul, as atma, as divne love within. All the avatar-based theistic traditions identify God's presence within. Wilson imagined that others, like himself, had no experience of God within. Wilson's arrested relationship with God was the basis of his inability to experience the absolute imperative of life above the animal form.

Materialism always had trouble with "everywhere and in everything, and also beyond everywhere and beyond everything" (In the world of physics at that time, that conceptual difficulty began to break down with the concept of bosons.) That everywhere-ness and nowhere-ness is what makes God God. "You are imperceptible and independent, on all planes and beyond all planes." The Awakener deepened the experience of God as simultaneously independent and internal, but the Old Humanity also had that experience. Whether as spirit or soul, they experienced the internality of God. So Wilson conceived of God as an imaginary external being or concept, at an unspecified location Who transmits to people from elsewhere their morals, ethics and religions.

During the Great Purification, unnatural sanskaras and spiritual longing both intensified. That is why intelligent people preoccupied with the "intellectual problem of God" could have been so goofy. Wilson describes his two (incorrect) alternatives as "different as life and death, matter and void." He wanted to draw the lines for the battle raging in his own atypical intellect.

Not at all. Transcendentalism was the process of looking into the mind. Individual religious experience, with or without social religion, is determined by the sanskaras carried in mind across lives and associated with the dropSoul during the incarnation. God is relatively revealed or concealed in the heart depending on the momentum of the sanskaras. Across ages and ages of reincarnation the revelation of God in the heart intensifies. These are the immutable dynamics of a soul's journey to God realization. People did not relate to God based on their opinion of Him. God makes Himself as present within the heart as possible as He works clearing the dense growth of sanskaras. God wants to be seen, loved, known. And souls of the Old Humanity did not say in their deliberations, "I have a high opinion of God therefore I have faith."

If God were outside, then intellectual opinion would be important. People might have made an appraisal of God and how he was behaving. But such a scenario is absurd, and it was absurd 300 years ago. Only somebody as intellectually dependent as Wilson could have made this silliness even superficially plausible. Their experience of God's presence was less clear and immediate than ours because of their heavier karmic burden but they still experienced God as internal.

Wilson gave the term transcendentalism to a nonexistent form of God consciousness wherein God and truth are somewhere "out there." Then he presented a bizarre and tortured argument for this false dichotomy. What was he talking about? I have spent my life studying the religious experience of the late Americans. They did not believe in a "creator deity." I have never found anthropological evidence of prayer, song, or any form of adoration for a creator deity. Their natural religious experience was undoubtedly theistic. This convoluted dichotomy belies his own statistic.

Old Americans positively experienced God unseen within the heart, and not as a creation starter switch that kicked things off and then went away. The natural theism of the Old Humanity reached its fullest fruition among the Americans. Who would care about an absent deity, who would believe in an abandoning instigator? I do not suggest there was no atheism among them. Especially during the Great Purification, many were largely indifferent to God. As The Awakener said anti-God thinking had to reach a zenith. But this "creator deity" was a dry, intellectual explanation that did not figure significantly in their spiritual and religious lives.

Wilson saw religious experience as dichotomous, rather than as a range of God-centered consciousness. But if a dichotomy existed among the Old Americans, it was between those who experienced the divinity of Christ and those who did not. When we try to understand the wacky transcendentalist-materialist dichotomy of Wilson it becomes apparent that he misunderstood the divine inspiration of great Americans, a nation whose motto was "In God We Trust." He mentions two people, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King as progenitors of "America's civil religion." King was an ordained Christian minister who believed he was doing God's work. This civil religion existed, but it did not supersede their love for God, as Wilson seemed to suggest. These two leaders loved God and referred to God. They are a better example of the spiritual dichotomy between non-Avataric theism (Lincoln) and Avataric theism (King).

Wilson prosecuted his case for scientific materialism through a debate between a transcendentalist and an empiricist. We remind ourselves as we review his debate that for Wilson the supreme human faculty was not love, but reason. He presented the case for and against God upon its merits without reference to the heart. He used the word testimony to describe the behavior of his theist, but did not use the word love. We understand that the strongest love a human being can feel is for another human being. That is why God descends into human form, to inspire the strongest possible love and impel the journey of the soul. Perhaps Wilson would have understood that love is stronger than reason, if he had contemplated the strongest love he possessed for another human being and asked himself if any intellectual argument could remove that love.

Page 263 The other reason he had for making his transcendentalist a theist is that there can be no such thing as an transcendentalist-atheist. Transcendental experience is a working synonym for experience of unseen Truth. However, his debate does not work any better than his dichotomous model. Because, while he knows what a skeptic is, being one himself, he does not know what a theist is. Theism is independent of religion. Just as God is simultaneously everywhere and in everything, independent and internal to human consciousness, theism is independent of and internal to religion. Theism is wine, religion is bottle. But wine can be held in many different vessels. And must be tasted to be experienced. But Wilson thinks theism is synonymous with social religion.

His theist says, "How can you explain away the three thousand years of spiritual testimony from the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam?" Wilson did not mention Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism or other permanent theistic approaches to God.

Page 265 Wilson's theist: "Unlike science, the idea of God is concerned with more than the material world given to us to explore. It opens our minds to what lies outside the world." God is the deepest, truest insideness of the world.

Page 265 Wilson could not disguise the theme of scientolatry that religious people lack the courage to admit that morals are man made. He put these unlikely words into the mouth of his theist-debater: "There is an urgently practical reason for belief in ethical precepts ordained by a supreme being. To deny such an origin, to assume that moral codes are exclusively man-made, is a dangerous creed." Theistic love is gratitude repaying grace. A spontaneous response of the heart does not calculate precepts. This quote repeated Wilson's theme that people claim to love God because they are afraid not to.

As Wilson perceived God primarily as law-giver and ruler, it is no wonder he thought poorly of Him. God is love above law, forgiveness above judgment. If God were only law giver and ruler, smiting and smoting, nobody would love Him. The Awakener expanded our theology of Will and Wish, of Law and Love. We sincerely and continuously experience the predominance of Love above Law. But they also experienced that God is Love.

Wilson's empiricist was concerned with the harm that religious persecution had done to the Old Humanity. The Awakener said many times that separative religion was obsolete and had to go. He unified the natural love of all religions. But it was easier for Wilson's empiricist to point to the misuse of religion than to understand the minor role social religion played in advancing the soul's progress to Self. Social religions were husks that developed around the kernel of divine love. God's Wish must be fulfilled, the soul must journey back to itself, with or without social religion. God descends as Avatar again and again to push the process along. As The Awakener, Meher Baba unified all religion. Wilson admired the great Christian saints and decorated his book with their words. Especially St. Theresa, understandably because of her great intellectual power. But Wilson did not understand Theresa described the interior castle, the interior soul.

Anger filled Wilson's text when he argued the case against transcendentalism. His empiricist said to the theist "If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other." Again overlooking love, the inspiration of natural theism, the empiricist nags the theist: "I know true believers will be scandalized by this line of argument. Their wrath falls on outspoken heretics, who are considered at best troublemakers and at worst traitors to the social order." What century was he talking about? Americans in 1998 were not scandalized by anything, especially by religious heretics. Their President was about to be tried for outrages against women that I will not even write about. He was acquitted even though everybody knew he was guilty. Their society was in the darkest chaos. The notion that atheists were troublemakers or traitors to the social order is absurd.

In the same paragraph Wilson went on to state that according to a 1996 survey 46% of scientists were atheists. Nobody was scandalized by this fact. I doubt if many Americans knew or cared about it. Remember one of the archetypes of scientolatry is Scientist as Hero and World Savior. The fact that almost half of scientists were atheists was important evidence for empiricism as far as Wilson was concerned, but it had little impact on the majority who experienced God's presence. Truly, it was the scientists who were afraid to look into their own hearts. And the notion that these scientists suffered the wrath of true believers is anachronistic hysteria. Far from being persecuted for atheism, scientists tended to be affluent and venerated. Americans loved the comforts and safety which scientific knowledge brought them and they neither knew nor cared about the spirituality of the person in the lab coat.

Page 262 No such choice ever existed, not in the 21st century or any century. Love is not a choice, it arises spontaneously from within in response to love itself. Life is not a choice, it is a gift from God, the chance to make forward progress, impelled by love, toward the Goal of creation. Creation is not a fluke, it is the vehicle of God realization.

The great majority of the Old Humanity including the Old Americans experienced God's love and expressed their gratitude for the gift, with or without religion. Scientific materialism and scientolatry were aberrations. We know what the coming century brought and Wilson could not have been more wrong about the struggles it encompassed. We know the course of the Manifestation and the Great Purification. We know that unnatural sanskaras were swept into a huge pile, we know of the material destruction, and of the desperate longing for God. We know of the removal of three quarters of the unnaturalness. We are the benefactors of their struggles, their ignorance as well as their truth. We appreciate the brilliance of their science, we are children in the garden they planted.