Monday, January 4, 2010

RELIGION: AN AID OR HINDRANCE TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT?



By Fiona Whata

Whoever we are, we are all the same. We all want the same things in life: happiness, fulfilment, not just in our lives, but also within ourselves. What makes us happy, what motivates us? As no two people are alike, the desires and goals of people are varied. Yet, through whatever walk of life, through whichever era, some common themes tend to emerge of what drives us through our lives: who are we? Why are we here?
Spiritual wholeness is an eternal quest for the human race. The two most common pathways to this goal are religion, which I define as an organised system that believes in the spirit world and adheres to a specific set of practices designed to bring them closer to God, and what I call spiritualism, which has the same goal as religion but without its structural aspect. Attending church regularly would fall under the category of religious, while I would regard reading tarot cards and exploring one’s psychic potential as spiritualism. The aims of the two are the same, yet there is a curiously uneasy relationship between the two. In trying to understand why this is the case, we may understand ourselves better.

Christianity’s hostile attitude towards all things psychic is well acknowledged. The King James version of the Bible states in Leviticus, ‘A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.’ Deuteronomy further elaborates,
‘There shall not be found among you….anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD.’

However, what the Christian faith has failed to acknowledge is that the construction of its own religion appears to heavily rely on psychics, and that the chronicles of its saviour reveals him to have been, perhaps, the greatest psychic who ever lived. The Bible, in particular the Old Testament, is full of prophets. An online dictionary defines a prophet as an authoritative person who divines the future. In modern day parlance, this would be a psychic. Holy men such as Moses, Isaiah, Samuel and Daniel either spoke with God, saw visions, predicted the future, or all three. The psychic gifts of clairaudience, clairvoyance and fortune telling are clearly at work here, and the display of psychic activity become more abundant when Jesus makes his appearance in the New Testament.