I am not really a religious person. I am actually born as a third-generation atheist. I therefore do not really understand religion, nor why people believe in a god, pray, nor feel a need to take superstitious precautions. As a child I found churches incredibly scary, especially the ones with gothic decorations. Haha. However, as I grew up in Africa and travelled the world, I began to understand how religion both keeps people in a controllable space where they wont revolt and provides them with a grain of hope and a means of keeping up spirits in livelihoods that otherwise appear entirely hopeless. In particular in conflict and war zones, in Africa from the 1980s and 1990s and on, religious revivals played a major role in keeping people’s hope alive and at the same time giving them strength to try to bring up good children. Seeing this is humbling.
It has also become clear to me that philosophical and political materialism contains a void, lacks a spiritual element. Clearly, there are strong energies in our universe that we cannot quite explain, just as science is not capable of explaining everything in life. That is the law of relativity applied to science (I will explain this point in a later blog). Meeting the indigenous Shamans in Africa, Indonesia and South America, I learned a spirituality, which is not like religion – but which is much more bounded in energies which have far more material thread to them than the “God-believing” religions notions of idealist spirits disconnected from matter. Much of the problem of all three major religions that grew from the middle east, is their language, and how they describe their god in their own image, rather than the other way around as they claim. They are so obviously fraudulent that I keep being surprised how many millions of people are still believing in the letter of these books – but they do.
On the other hand, I am also not neo-religious in believing that there is a universal energy that unites everything. In this way I am not exactly in line with the new-age and Gaia type of movements/religions who are seeking how to connect with this universal energy in ways that expands consciousness, nourishes the mind, body and soul, and facilitate a higher collective consciousness. But the aspirations of these movements are beautiful. Anyways, this part of my blog is dedicated to spirituality, and my views and experiences with these aspects of life that are so important for us.
