The Secular and the Spiritual

Sometimes in today's materialistic world in which traditional values have been turned on their head and good and bad redefined, a person who approaches the spiritual path might be confronted with some version of the following question. This question might come from someone else or it might even come from within oneself. We have all been brought up in the modern world and its attitudes cannot help but rub off on us. We are taught that certain beliefs are moral and good and others are immoral and wrong so if and when we turn to the spiritual path we already have preconceived ideas about good and bad derived from the world. It is important to know whether spirituality is supposed to build on these or to supersede them, putting them in a different light.

The question is this. "What is your position with regard to (any or all of these) homosexuality, racism & feminism?" These issues have become sacred cows of the modern age and usually when the question is put there are inbuilt assumptions as to the correct answer but I would like to approach this question from a spiritual level rather than the secular one from which it it is posed because that is the only way to answer it properly. Consequently, I would respond to it along these lines.

You are thinking in terms of a materialistic society and what seems good for human beings as they are in this world.  However, you need to change your fundamental principles and think in terms of God, the soul and creation. Then either those questions will answer themselves or they will have no meaning. I can't answer them because, coming at it from a secular position even if it is a spiritualised secular position, you would not understand my answers.

You must know that people can have wrong views because of compassion or what they think is compassion. Compassion is good but doesn't make what is wrong right. This compassion is human rather than divine, being mixed with human emotions and understanding. This is where problems can arise, and I would ask you something in return. Are we here to be happy in our mortal lives or to grow spiritually? The correct answer to that question will answer your original question.

The fact of the matter is that these are issues raised by a secular worldview that sees human beings in terms of their material selves only. This view is, if not actively anti-spiritual, certainly non-spiritual so cannot be responded to in the way you want from a spiritual perspective. 

Essentially, these are questions based on a false understanding of life, and would have to be completely reframed to have any spiritual relevance. I might even suggest  that they are distractions into which are poured the energies of the moral impulse after the loss of proper religion and the sense of the transcendent. They are false trails as is clear when you understand the reality of God and the laws of creation. Everyone should be treated with the dignity and fairness appropriate to his station but spiritual truth cannot bend to human emotions and desires.

A big problem today in the spiritual world is that people turn to it while retaining Enlightenment values which values came about in a world that denied spiritual truth. It certainly downgraded revelation and took human reason, cut adrift from spiritual discernment, faith and intuition, as the only guide to knowledge. The Enlightenment was based on rationalism and empiricism and had no truck with the spiritual unless it could be incorporated into that mindset. But the spiritual cannot be incorporated into anything worldly. So indoctrinated are we with Enlightenment values and the Enlightenment definition of what is good that we take those with us when we adopt a spiritual worldview or pursue a spiritual path without realising that the spiritual changes everything. It's as though we have accepted a 4 or 5 dimensional world but continue to have a 3 dimensional attitude towards it, cramming those greater dimensions into our constricted box.

The best direct answer to the question posed is to say that God is love but he is also truth. For him love and truth are one. Seek truth in love and love in truth and you will know the answer.