Here is my religion analysis:
Eastern religions must be wrong because the universe did have a beginning due to scientific observation. Trinaritary Christianity must be wrong because older Bibles never even reference it, an explicit statement > implicit statement, and older Christians believed 1 in 1 God. Avant-garde religions are also false for obvious reasons (just look at doctrine–Pastafarianism? Scientology?)

Therefore, this is how I see it: Judaism, Unitary Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, or Atheism must be true. Or, of course, there is a different deity who never contacted us earthlings.

I believed in Christianity my entire life, then converted to Judaism, then Buddhism, then Hinduism, then Zoroastrianism, then Atheism, and finally Islam. When I go into a religion, I try to LEARN everything about it.

In the eastern mysticism traditions, where liberation from ego and “clinging” are the route to directly experiencing transcendance, “material”, “rational” or “objective” perspectives are not considered the highest form of consciousness.

Lots of work has been done on the spiritual and psychic unhealthiness that comes from absolutist thought. Atheists point out that much religion tends to be absolutist, but fail to see how rationalism can also become the basis for absolutism. The frequent pattern of psychological violence used by “rabid” atheists against religious and spiritual people is usually based on a shallow understanding of the spiritual traditions, and of a great deal of work in consciousness studies and related “scientific” fields.

A holistic approach to consciousness does not exclude being open minded about understanding how religious/spiritual experience is rooted in archetypal psychology, and the human brain’s evolutionary wiring for complex emotions such as compassion and altruism.

Atheist that are absolutists need to deal with the fact that brain science in the postmodern age quickly reveals the shortcomings of some of the classic “anti-religion” arguments used by atheists.

James Hillman on the emptiness (unfulfilled yearning for beauty, goodness, truth) and lack of concern for reverence, purpose, meaning, redemption, and social bonding (etc.) in classic psychology:

But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMOs — limiting patients to six conversations and those kinds of things — then we’ve lost the art altogether, and we’re just doing business: industrial, corporate business.

London: Doesn’t this have to do with the fact that, at a certain point in its development, psychology adopted the reductive method in order to gain the respectability of science?

Hillman: I think you’re absolutely correct. But as the popular trust in science fades — and many sociologists say that’s happening today — people will develop a distrust of purely “scientific” psychology. Researchers in the universities haven’t picked up on this; they’re more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

London: As people rebel against the scientific approach, they often wind up at the other extreme. We’re seeing many new forms of self-help and personal-growth therapies based on non-rational beliefs.

Hillman: The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it’s also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don’t see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that’s been there all along.

London: In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers of The Soul’s Code have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?

Hillman: Well, some reviewers have a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.

My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as “new age.” If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn’t go far enough — it’s too rational.

London: I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.
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Hillman: I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It’s hard to get out of that box. That’s the dominant situation all over the world.

Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don’t think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one’s well-being on earth.

—end excerpts—

Also: http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/saul.html

The cult of expertise is one of the defining characteristics of today’s rational elites, as Saul sees it. “Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise,” he writes. “The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application.” The division of knowledge into “feudal fiefdoms of expertise” has meant that general understanding and coordinated action are increasingly difficult and often looked upon with suspicion, as evidenced by our systems of education which reward the specialist and disdain the generalist. It has also resulted in a fracturing of society into smaller and smaller and increasingly insulated professional groups. While the emergence of professionalism has paralleled the rise of individualism over the last two centuries, the result has not been greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation.
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The great schism between the principles of democracy and the practices of modern rational governments has brought about not only widespread public frustration and anger, but also a general contempt among the ruling elites for the citizenry. While they cooperate with the established representational systems of democracy, Saul says, they do not believe in the value of the public’s contribution. Nor do they believe in the existence of a public moral code.
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http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html

London: The university has done a lot to foster this concept of expertise. You’ve talked a great deal about the whole managerial ethos and the rise of business management schools and so on.

Saul: Yes. When I talk about expertise, what I’m talking about is the way in which we approach education. We’re clearly not following the humanist approach, which is a sort of integral view of human intelligence — putting together things. Our education system is a) based on the taking apart of things and the isolating of smaller and smaller elements of knowledge; and b) increasingly, whatever the area, it’s essentially a management, rational approach toward education. So it’s not the content that matters, it’s the methodology that matters. It’s not the content, it’s the form.
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http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptD/part1.cfm

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In Excerpt C, we focused the urgent necessity to create an Integral Post-Metaphysics, which possesses the explanatory power of the great metaphysical systems but without their ontological baggage (which cannot be sustained in modern and postmodern awareness—not philosophically, not critically, not phenomenologically, not scientifically). Instead of attacking the paucity of the modern and postmodern worldviews—which is the standard move by spiritual and new-paradigm advocates—it is perhaps more adept to reformulate and reconstruct the premodern interpretations of Spirit in light of modern and postmodern developments, such that the enduring fundamentals of the premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of Spirit’s own display can all be honored by trimming their absolutisms and acknowledging their true but partial natures (which is surely what Spirit does as it moves through its own manifestations in the premodern, modern, and postmodern world: just who did you think was authoring all that?).
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Even if we say, with the materialist, that the world is composed of nothing but physical atoms, nonetheless “atom” is already a third-person symbol being perceived by a first-person sentient being. And if we try to picture an actual atom, that too is a third-person entity prehended by a first person. In other words, even “atom” is not an entity, or even a perception, but a perspective, within which a perception occurs (i.e., all perceptions and feelings are always already within the space of an actual perspective). But surely, the critic would say, we can still imagine a time that there were only atoms, not humans, and therefore atoms existed without arising in a human perspective. (That again is still a third-person image held by a first-person awareness; but let’s imagine that we can imagine a time without human perspectives.) It is true there was a time before humans emerged. But if the world is actually panpsychic, then each atom had a rudimentary awareness or proto-experience of other atoms, and hence a first atom aware of a second atom is already and actually a first person in touch with a second person. In other words, these perspectives are indigenous to all sentient beings; if sentient beings go all the way down, so do perspectives. Thus, sentient beings and perspectives, not consciousness and phenomena, are the “stuff” of the Kosmos.
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The point is simple: in order to deny the legitimacy any of those methodologies, you have to violate their native perspectives and the sentient beings holding them. Integral Methodological Pluralism refuses such violence. Rather—following the integrative guidelines of nonexclusion, enactment, and enfoldment—Integral Methodological Pluralism attempts to construct a framework, after the fact, of that which sentient beings are already doing anyway, with the hope that such a framework, in making room for what the Kosmos already allows, will help us find our way more generously in such a roomy world.
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