…So from any religious perspective there's reason to worry about a society where structures have broken down and a mass of people are going searching without maps, or playing around in half-belief, or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once.
Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.
But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.
Me, writing as a non-desperate materialist:
Re: "materialism and despair"-
We too, we humanist/naturalist/pragmatist/humanist materialists, can seek and sometimes find transcendence. That's a slippery term, but I define it much as the novelist Peter Ackroyd suggested: break it into its syllables and take them seriously - "trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The fear of death... was part of a greater fear of life."And, I agree with William James (who did not always say flattering things about materialists, especially medical materialists):
"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III
Materialism is not a danger. Despair is. But those are two very different things, Ross. Matter is not the root of despair. Self-sealing isolation happens to materialists no more than to immaterialists, and so far as we can tell matter does indeed lend itself to all life's purposes. Spiritual maps are not the exclusive province of clerics and other institutional gatekeepers. We can "move beyond the end," many of us, without their escort.
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