Spencer Heath Archive

Item 111

Penned on lined notebook paper, Claremont, California

December 1960?

     When any set of precepts and beliefs has been formulated under the presupposition of a divine sanction such a system is taken as the religion of the people so accepting or at least professing to accept and to abide by it. These formulations are highly diverse in different ages and among different peoples. But as all mankind are alike in those qualities and characters in which they are specifically human and diverge from the racial type which do not effectively distinguish them from all other forms of life, so do their systems of religion differ accordingly in many perhaps non-essential respects — not essential to what is authentic and common and distinguishably religious in them all. We may in fact reverse the order and say that /in/ what the many systems have in common, or at least in this field, is to be found all that can identify them as authentic and give them credit as divine in origin and in their influence in the minds and hearts of men.

     Prime among the specific characters common to all is the presumption of a single unifying principle or person in which or from whom proceeds all the order and all the beauty that are intrinsic and increasingly discoverable in the world including man. This single principle or person presents itself to the human imagination in the unity of its three essential yet unlike aspects. At the base of this triune unity is the aspect of substance or mass, a constant property of which is force, weight or inertia which is manifested in every motion or change of motion as the second of the three aspects of the single unity. In these two aspects is generated what is called action or power — the power to impose motion or change of motion upon other masses in proportion to their respective magnitudes. This motion always manifested by mass is not homogeneous but interrupted and impulsive, thus proceeding in rhythms or frequencies which taken cumulatively constitute duration or time as the third and final aspect of the triune unity. These three aspects of the universal principle or person, being numerically measurable and thereby in various proportions related, constitute the entire cosmic process of happenings, actions, phenomena and/or events. In the Christian philosophy these three aspects of the total Reality, taken in their unlimited magnitudes, are called Substance, Power and Eternity and are symbolized separately as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in their unity as the Supreme Christian Divinity. Considered abstractly and quantitatively the three aspects of the total cosmic Reality are Mass, Motion and Time; considered representationally, imaginatively, poetically and subjectively they are as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all depending on whether the conception be entertained by the rational and objective or by the intuitive and inspirational, the poetic and esthetic faculties of mankind.

     Now, in the course of the human journey from the inorganic (the cosmic dust) to the organic, from the vegetative to the animated world, through the animal to the beginnings of their specifically human form, men in general in some degree and some in very high degree are becoming reborn above and beyond the limitations of their animal and so-called natural condition, from creatures at the sufferance of circumstance into the freedom of their divinely commanded reciprocal relations with one another and thereby into the beginning of their promised rulership, their creative and thereby spiritual dominance over themselves and, no less, over their objective world as well.

     This is the meaning of Christianity /?/, of civilization — that mankind (and man alone) through procedures of reciprocal benefit (and thereby of mutual love) shall realize their potential creative dominion over their material world and transform it into such order and beauty and abundance as will yield to them their dream of ever lovelier and thereby ever lengthening days.

     By and large, the religion of people in any place or age reflects the culture they have attained, and their gods represent the ideals they practice and admire or to which they aspire. They feel they must conform to the divine will as expressed in their system of belief and behavior or forfeit favor and incur the wrath of their divinity to whom they impute all origins of their world and of themselves.

     Discounting the lowest savages whose gods are demons and destroyers even more than they and attending only to the religions of peoples who are in some degree productive and practice the creative arts, it is characteristic of them all that their gods are their creators, that their spirituality is manifested in their power to create. The hall­mark of divinity lies in its creative power.

     In all the higher religions at least the gods are creators. Creativity is the hall-mark of divinity, the manifestation of spiritual power, and its emulation /is/ the human ideal. The Christian religion is pre-eminent in this. Some two thirds of the people in the world are so little creative that they are chronically underfed and in consequence over populated with young, for death so decimates the tender flowers of life that only in their profusion can enough survive to maintain the race.

     There are many comparisons between the Christian and other religions as ways and guides to the good and more abundant life. But let them be judged by their fruits: The Christian religion is at least nominally dominant in about one third of the population and here it is that some two-thirds of /the/ world’s wealth — the subsistence and amenities of life — are created and produced. Here it is that the generations are born to live and not mainly to die, for as a creative and thereby spiritual population it brings forth so abundantly the needs and amenities of life that by contrast with all the non-Christian world, they live increasingly into and beyond maturity and attain to an average span of life more than double that of all the non-Christian world.