What About The Spiritual Life?

1
What About The Spiritual Life?

• Im getting tired of hearing from Christopher
  Hitchens in the media, and his fervid and
  all-too-familiar 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 nauseum. 

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God Is Not Great is 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
post-modern 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
consideration, one might also notice that
scientific-minded ultra-rationalists are not
without their presuppositions, blind spots,
superstitions and beliefs, not unlike those very
people of faith whom they roundly criticize.
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Hitchens himself  seems to evince little or no
expertise on the subject of Eastern spirituality
and practice, although he did live in Rashneesh?s
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, Einstein by 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. For more details
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