Quote of the day, courtesy of The Anchoress: "“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do" -- Anne LaMott.
To which The Anchoress adds,
You can also safely assume that you’ve created a “spirituality” based on your own conscience (or your subconscious self) when it turns out that all God really wants of you is for you to do what makes you happy. Oh, and “love and forgive and stuff.”I wrote about this back in February.
I wonder what Romero would say about the current (and, frankly, cowardly) trend among the sophisticates to exempt themselves from messy, judgmental and possibly-offensive religious identifications in favor of being “spiritual,” which happily offends no one and challenges nothing.
Glenn Reynolds commented on the goal of "spirituality" rather than religion, "Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible."The Anchoress recommends David Mills' "awfully good essay," which she excerpts thus:
Well, yeah. "Spirituality" is religious Calvinball, a game featured in comic strip, "Calvin and Hobbes." The rules of Calvinball are simple: there are no rules. Players make them up as they go along and any player may change any rule for any reason. That's what "spirituality" is.
So we find Lady Gaga, the pornographic songstress, telling a reporter for The Times that she has a new spirituality just before taking her out for a night at a Berlin sex club. Asked by the reporter, “You were raised a Catholic — so when you say ‘God,’ do you mean the Catholic God, or a different, perhaps more spiritual sense of God?”, she responded, “More spiritual. . . . There’s really no religion that doesn’t hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.” [. . .]
Even academics don’t see the problem. A few years ago a much-reported study of college students’ religious practice found that they become more “spiritual” as their observance of their childhood faith declined. The researchers defined “spiritual” as “growth in self-understanding, caring about others, becoming more of a global citizen and accepting others of different faiths.” They simply dressed up their favored attitudes by calling them “spiritual.” That kind of spirituality, detached from anything specifically religious, is just materialism in a tuxedo.
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