2008 July 21 | Between Asgard and the Western Paradise

Archive for July 21st, 2008

Jul 21 2008

Pope: “A spiritual desert is spreading”

Posted by: 阿偉 in Current Events, Religion

Yesterday in Australia, Pope Benedict addressed a crowd of 200,000 saying, “Side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading – an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair”. He also told young Catholics to avoid that “falsely conceived freedom” and instead turn toward Christian values to build a more placid lifestyle.

This is some excellent advice which Catholics need to listen to. As I have addressed before, we live in a time when people are socialized towards making the so-called means of production ends in themself, perpetuating the need to continually make money to become “distinguished” in society. In such a society, people are always occupied with petty matters and have little time to devote to spiritual affairs. Thus, they are unhappy and dissatisfied with the quality of life. Even when one does manage to break free from the dominant materialist mentality and build a higher course, the world today is such that one is required to advance within the maze of materialism before one can actually exit it.

The Pope’s words ring true that spirituality is on the decline, but he was also correct about the fact that people seek false freedoms. In a secular society, many people use the word “freedom” to connote the right to do as one pleases at any time. It is used as a justification by liberal fundamentalists for hatred of religion and love of sin. For example, for some time now, the media in America has been most vociferous in decrying the so-called “lack of freedom” in Islamic nations. Forty years ago, the same liberal fundamentalists had already launched a brutal and effective attack on Christianity in much the same manner, also in the name of “freedom”. Therefore, we can see that a secular notion of freedom is not always beneficial for religion.

In the Bible, Paul wrote to the Galatians regarding the idea of freedom. He was much concerned with the way that man viewed freedom. This is clear in Galatians 5.13 where he writes, “do not use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge your flesh”. This is an exhortation for them not to follow worldy, secular freedoms, but to seek freedom of the spirit.

What, then is freedom of the spirit? To be consise, freedom of the spirit is obedience and submission to the law and will of God, which later was revealed to Muhammad (SWT) as Islam. True freedom is not the freedom to act on base carnal impulses, but rather the will to power of overcoming those. This is the same power against the force of flux and degeneration into confusion and lawlessness, recognized by the Buddhists as the “Eightfold Path” through prajna, sila, and samadhi. In other words, the freedom to which Pope Benedict referred is that which gives us the ability to rectify our lives.