By BRYAN PATTERSON 04may03

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art –George P. Marsh

RELIGION, Karl Marx said, was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world – the opium of the people”. Marx was not advocating the destruction of religion; he viewed it as often the “sole solace” of the oppressed proletarian classes.

Other leaders have viewed religion as a handy way of maintaining control. As Napoleon put it, “Religion is great for keeping the poor from murdering the rich”.

There is a strong yearning these days for a life beyond the material, but not necessarily for religion. People are hungry for sustenance of the spirit. Spirituality is seen as religion’s unfathomable essence.

Religion, though, is sometimes seen to be promoting disunity, fear and guilt. And that, unfortunately, makes low-commitment pop spirituality attractive to growing numbers of Westerners.

Freud thought adhering to religion was a way that guilt-ridden people cleansed themselves and forced God to bless them.

Nietzsche asserted that anyone claiming to have “the truth” was making a power play.

These critiques are powerful because they have a ring of truth. They are the reasons many who seek spirituality reject religion.

Religion was the reason an Iranian actress was this month sentenced to 75 lashes for kissing a film director on the forehead during an awards ceremony. Physical contact in public between unmarried men and women is a religious taboo in Iran.

Religion came under fire again when Anglican authorities in England decided this month to charge visitors admission to several cathedrals. Didn’t Jesus deal with the merchants in God’s house years ago?

And what about George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden all claiming they were leading Holy Wars? No wonder religion has a bad name.

The words “God’s will” have been used to justify human rights, but also ethnic cleansing, apartheid and war.

Clearly, the ways of God are not always the ways of men.

Jesus himself suggested that religion – as opposed to truth – could be more spiritually dangerous than overt immorality.

Theologian Mary Ford-Grabowsky recently said that religion subscribed to a unique body of beliefs, but true spiritual experience was the same for all people in all religions at all times.

But does rejection of traditional religion, and the rise of New Age practices and neopaganism mean we are actually more spiritual?

Clearly not. Pop spirituality is often about belief in the supernatural without the need for truth or authority.

The flaw in the concept of spirituality without God is that each person has a right to his or her own “truth” – that there’s no such thing as objective, absolute truth.

This view essentially makes each person responsible for deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad. The result is that there is no truth; people do what is right in their own eyes.

Another popular notion of pop spirituality is that all spiritual quests lead to God.

They don’t.

The television clairvoyants are deemed OK because they exhibit spiritual gifts. Yes, they sometimes might, but not every spiritual gift comes from God. Some come from the kingdom of deception.

Is the clairvoyant who seems so knowledgeable actually “contacting” your dead grandmother, or something far less benign?

A common concept of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is that human reasoning alone cannot always discern spiritual truth from spiritual lies. We need help from God, literally.

Sure, there are hypocrisies in religion and countless examples of religious practitioners who do not live up to their own teachings. But the basis for religious faith remains pure. Those desperately seeking true spirituality eventually face the fact that there is an absolute truth; an absolute certainty about life and death.

New Age spirituality says we can shape reality by the power of our thoughts, rather than recognising God as the source of all power to shape reality.

When we hit rock bottom, as we all inevitably do sometime in life, New Age spirituality will not help us. Only God can save us then.