What About The Spiritua

l Life?

Im getting tired of
hearing from
Christopher Hitchens in
the media, and his
fervid and all-toofamiliar religion-bashing.
I happen to like the guy,
and also very much
appreciate such diverse
opinionshe is brilliant,
after all, and has some
valid points, which is
why I bother to read
him-but overall he goes
way too far and keeps
grinding the same ax ad

God Is Not Greatis a fine book title but a weak thesis. Rest assured
that I myself have plenty of similar criticism about religions,
including my own; but doesnt he know that there are hundreds of
millions (and have been billions) of very spiritual people, as well as
intensely religious ones, who need little or no deity in order to
pursue a spiritual path and live and embody a beautiful, wise and
loving spiritual life, both within and outside the formal traditional
religious denominations? Moreover, there are plenty of theists who
have a much more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the
divine, of prayer, and of reality than that which he lumps all deists
together with.
There is a difference that can be made between religion
(organized, for the most part) and spirituality itself, which is the
heart of it all; and moreover, spirituality has no Crusades,
Inquisitions, book burnings, isms and schisms, and so forth.
Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their skeptical postmodern atheist ilk seem far too extreme to convert true believers
or even to sway the moderate middle; their dogmatic arguments
are more often than not one-sided monologues lacking in balance.
Although their points of view and critical analyses and reflections
are certainly not without merit, and deserving of serious

Hitchens himself seems to evince little or no expertise on the subject of

Eastern spirituality and practice, although he did live in Rashneeshs
ashram for a little whilein order to write about itan extreme example of
a place to study in India, if there ever was one. I have read things about
the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere from Hitchens that I personally know to
be inaccurate.
I have been reading the new biography,Einsteinby Walter Isaacson, and
thinking about the need for us to reconcile science and religion in our
postmodern technological information age. Einstein was a deeply
spiritual man whose personal beliefs went far beyond any old fashioned
patriarchal creator-God, and was one who evinced genuine mystical
insight and spent his last decades searching for a true Unified Field
Theory. He believed that Buddhism has the characteristics of what
would be expected in a cosmic religion of the future. It transcends a
personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and
the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the
experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
The Dalai Lama of Tibet himself is involved regularly in scientific
research, especially regarding neuroscience and the effects of
meditation, and has said repeatedly that if science proves certain beliefs
of Buddhism as erroneous Buddhism will have to adapt to that new
knowledge.