Atheist Rants About Christianity
I’ve included the video below because the person ranting away about Christianity does have some valid points.
However…
He has missed an important point, and it is this.
Life is a process, and all individuals start at Square 1, or birth. Speed of progress along the continuum, or through the process, depends on environment, peer influences, personal aptitude and desire, and family background.
Religion is a necessary step towards what Ken Wilber refers to as second tier thinking. In other words, the desire to become involved in a religion (any religion) is an encouraging sign that the individual is progressing along the continuum. That said, an individual who commits to a single religion for life, and cannot transcend beyond that religion into true spirituality, has stopped their progress towards second tier thinking. They are no longer moving along the continuum.
The challenge is to first embrace any religion, then embrace ALL organised religions, and then transcend them. By simply negating a religion, the antagonist is simply demonstrating where they are on the continuum of life, that is, they have yet to acknowledge the need to believe in something greater than the individual.
Another way of looking at this is a model called Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering work of Clare Graves. Graves proposed a profound and elegant system of human development, which subsequent research has refined and validated, not refuted:
“Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other states of being. When the human is centralized in one state of existence, he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning system, belief systems, conception of mental health, ideas as to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, and political theory and practice are all appropriate to that state.”
So, the only criticism I have of the following video is that the presenter has not acknowledged that religion will never disappear, since there will always be individuals passing through that stage of life.
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