An Astrological Case Study

 Some 25 years ago I made a serious study of astrology and found, beyond any possible doubt, that it is a true science. I use that word but in reality astrology is a mixture of science and art which is why the materialistic scientist will always have a problem with it. A horoscope requires interpretation which is not to say that anything goes, but astrology is a symbol system and symbols can work out in more than one way depending on the subject. However, anyone who seriously engages with astrology on the more than rudimentary sun sign level will find that it offers a genuine description of many aspects of reality. The branch I found most interesting was that which describes an individual's personality based on the position of the planets at his birth, otherwise known as psychological astrology. Thus you have the Sun, Moon and various planets in the solar system all representing different aspects of human nature, and their position in the sky in the various constellations tells us what form those aspects will take. There is a lot more to it than that and I won't go into detail here. I will just say that of the many birth charts I studied not one was inaccurate as a map of the concerned individual's psyche, and many people expressed surprise that I had described them so well. This was not down to any skill of mine. I just said what I saw in the chart. Knowing my own birth chart has also given me greater insight into and understanding of my own character, and this, I think, is the most useful part of astrology. "Know thyself" is the old maxim. Astrology is one of the best ways to do just that.

I never had much interest in predictive astrology. For one thing, I don't think the current state of astrological knowledge is far enough advanced to be very helpful in this regard but, more importantly, I don't think God wishes us to know our future except, possibly, in the vaguest of terms. And I have no time for the fatalistic, superstitious side of astrology but that is not the fault of astrology itself. It is ignorant, self-seeking human reaction to it. You may as well blame love for jealousy.

Having said that, I certainly do think astrology can be used as a predictive method, and sometimes I have looked at the astrological significators after a particularly momentous event to see if the event could have been foreseen or, better put, was described in the planetary pattern. In my book Meeting the Masters I related how the solar eclipse of 1999 coincided with a heart attack and subsequent death of a friend of mine whose Jupiter was right on the point of the eclipse. More recently I was involved (peripherally) in an incident which also brought out the profound interconnection between the signs in the heavens and events on Earth.

A person I know  was involved in a bad accident. He was cycling round a roundabout when a car drove straight into him and knocked him over. The driver, who was a woman in her 90s (surely, incidentally, such people should not be allowed to drive or, at the very least, have to take regular tests?) was completely at fault. The right of way was his. She had been stationary, waiting for a car to go round the roundabout and presumably didn't see the cyclist directly behind that car and just drove right into him. The person's injuries were considerable. He had to be airlifted to hospital where it was found he had broken his ribs, collarbone, shoulder, femur and hip and in addition his spinal column was severely damaged. He was placed in an induced coma for 48 hours, underwent several operations, one of which lasted for 9 hours, and his chances of ever walking again are slim.

I happened to know this person's horoscope, having once done his chart. It occurred to me that something as life-changing and dramatic as this should be shown in the chart so after it was clear that he was beginning to make some kind of recovery (it would not have seemed decent to do so before) I looked at the progressions and transits for that day to see what they indicated. If astrology had any kind of substance to it they would surely have indicated something. Even with my limited knowledge it seemed obvious that Mars should be involved.

And it was, heavily involved. Before I describe exactly how I should briefly go over just what progressions and transits are for the uninitiated. These are the two main methods of prognostication. Transits are simple. You just compare the current position of the planets with their positions in the natal chart. On your birthday every year the sun makes a conjunction with where it was when you were born as should be obvious since we have a solar calendar. But every planet will have some sort of angular relationship with all the other planets in the birth chart at any given time. The most important are conjunctions (same place), squares (90 degree angle), oppositions (opposite or 180 degrees) and trines (120 degrees). Some of these are harmonious and some challenging but that also depends on the nature of the planets. It is also important to realise that the ways in which interactions may work out often depend on the person and how well or badly he or she is able to handle and channel the energies involved. This is one reason why the same thing will work out differently for different people. Every soul is unique and no two souls react in quite the same way to the same thing.

That's transits. Progressions are slightly more technical but not complicated. The theory behind progressions is that the greater is contained in the lesser and cycles repeat themselves. Thus, in the most usual form employed, every day of your life starting from birth has the same basic pattern as the equivalent  year. So one day after you are born contains the pattern for the first year of your life, the second day contains the patterns for the second year, the third day for the third year and so on. To see what is going on in your 50th year you would look at the chart for 50 days after you were born. Then you would compare that chart to the birth chart or else to the transits for the time in question, what the planets are actually doing now, or else subject it to internal analysis to see how the planets are interacting between themselves in the progressed chart. It would have been quite time-consuming to draw all this up before the advent of computers but now it is very simple even if I believe all would-be astrologers should certainly know how to draw up a chart themselves by hand using an ephemeris. That will give them a better insight into the mechanics of the thing. That, at any rate, was my experience when I started.

Another predictive technique is to use what are called solar returns. This is to cast the horoscope for that time when the sun returns to its natal position, i.e. your birthday, and use that as a forecasting device for the ensuing year. I've never used this before but when I applied it to the present case it did have something interesting to say.

I looked at the progressions for the time of the accident and the first thing I saw was that Mars was indeed very active. It formed an exact (less than 1 degree of difference) opposition to the progressed Sun. Standard interpretations of this would point to a time of anger, irritability and conflict on the one hand and, externally speaking, a tendency to suffer accidents and danger of injury on the other. What makes this worse is that both these planets are square, again to the degree, to progressed Jupiter which would have the effect of blowing up and exaggerating any of these tendencies, Jupiter normally inflating what it touches. In this case, with the 90 degree angle, negatively. The precise placements are Sun at 25 degrees Aries, Mars at 24 degrees Libra, less than a degree off the Sun, and Jupiter at 25 degrees Cancer. This makes a very tight T square, as it is known, which is regarded as one of the most challenging configurations in astrology. 

Now, one has to be careful. In terms of the progressed chart which, let us recall, moves one day for each year, this very close configuration will have been in place for a couple of years and it has another year to run. It may have been even tighter a few months ago. But this just means that psychologically the subject may have felt an inner anger and frustration. I believe this was the case though it wasn't expressed and that may have been the problem. What is bottled up and suppressed (which is quite different to controlled) has a tendency to burst out and manifest externally. But why, if this configuration had been in operation for almost 2 years, did it express itself with such violence on the day it did?

The answer again lies with Mars. I mentioned transits. On the day of the accident Mars was at 24 degrees of Libra making an exact conjunction with progressed Mars and therefore an exact opposition with the Sun and square to Jupiter. This triggered the whole thing and you could not ask for a more dramatic demonstration of the truth behind astrology. Astrologer Robert Hand in his book Planets in Transit says of Mars conjunct Mars that that any repressed aggressive energies, which will be running high at this time, will out "either physically through an accident or by projection: that is, you will experience the energy through another. This means that you may have to endure another person's aggressive acts, which may bring you harm." Another work speaks of violent acts and tendency to suffer injuries. The point could not be more clear. This is just what one would have expected to see. Astrology is not always so precise but here it reveals itself plainly.

Earlier I spoke of the solar return, that being the chart cast for the ensuing year on one's birthday. When I looked at this what jumped out was an exact (to the degree again) conjunction between the Sun and Saturn and, with less than 2 degrees of separation, another between the Moon and Pluto. This speaks without the slightest ambiguity of hardship and trial in the year ahead with deep emotional upheaval and upset involved. It could not be more plainly stated that there will be suffering in the year to come.

Possibly some readers will not be interested in the subject of this post. Some may even disapprove of it. But if the heavens declare the glory of the Lord they also show his wisdom. Astrology is not a substitute for religion or spiritual understanding but it can be a very helpful adjunct to it. The signs displayed in creation are ways to help us engage with it and understand it on a deeper level. At the very least, they can show us that there is pattern and purpose. In this case, the person involved is not a believer in astrology. Indeed, he specifically rejects it as superstitious nonsense, and from a scientific rather than religious point of view. However, it is possible that if, somewhere down the line when he has come to terms with what has happened to him, he engaged with it then it might help him see his new situation in a slightly different light and be able to find a positive aspect to an otherwise wholly negative experience. I hope so while recognising the enormous challenge anyone in this position would face. May God bless him and help him recover from his traumatic experience both physically and emotionally.

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

 This is an article I wrote to publicise By No Means Equal which comes out tomorrow. It recycles some sections of earlier posts here but is mostly new.

Is Equality a Spiritual Principle?

 

What is the goal of spirituality? What is its end point? Some would say it is a return to oneness, the transcending of all limitations associated with the individual self and absorption into the universalized sea of consciousness in which the individual becomes one with the all and time is replaced by eternity. For this no personal God is required. If he exists then he too is ultimately part of the cosmic ocean. In fact, the French writer Romain Rolland coined the term oceanic feeling to describe this experience which he seems to have become aware of through his study of the life of the 19^th century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna who would frequently fall into spiritual raptures. The search for it is what lies behind many people’s attraction to mysticism, especially of the Hindu and Buddhist variety.

 

I am not much of an enthusiast for the theories of Sigmund Freud but what he apparently thought about the oceanic feeling is worth considering. He envisaged it as a reversion to a pre-ego state, something experienced by the infant before it becomes aware of self and other and sees itself and its mother as one. The fact that Ramakrishna was an ardent devotee of the divine Mother, conceived by him as the goddess Kali, lends some incidental support to this theory.

 

I would go a little further back in time than the materialistic Freud and suggest that the mystical sense of oneness in which the ego is blotted out is a reflection of the pre-incarnation state when the soul is bathed in the bliss of non-separation before being born into this dualistic world in which subject and object are radically divided. Thus, the oceanic feeling is a real thing but it may not be the indication of advanced spirituality it is sometimes taken to be, and especially so since it can sometimes be brought about by drugs or even certain forms of mental illness. I see it as consciousness slipping outside the boundaries of the solid core of the rational self and becoming immersed in the universal substance from which individualised consciousness is drawn but that is like the self returning to the spiritual womb rather than growing up and becoming transfigured, in the process retaining full individuality but expanding that into divine being.

 

This means the world of the oceanic feeling is not where we should be headed but where we are coming from, and that means that attempts to recapture it are misguided. No doubt, it will be recapitulated on a higher turn of the spiral once the lessons of incarnation have been learned but the oceanic feeling is entirely passive whereas we are called by God to be co-creators with him which means being able to wield divine powers for the benefit of all creation. The soul submerged in the oceanic feeling remains inert. We are called to be eagles not fish.

 

What has all this to do with the title of this essay? If return to oneness really were the point of the spiritual path, then we could say that equality is a spiritual principle and one which we should be pursuing with vigour. The attempt to establish equality in the world would have the stamp of divine approval. But if this state of undivided oneness is a primordial state signifying the world prior to creation that may not be so. The sea is the state of chaos or formlessness. In the beginning God divides the waters. Creation separates. It disrupts oneness and brings about differentiation. Now, you might say that, yes, it does do these things as it must if anything is to be, but we must return to the primordial state eventually.

The question then would be, in what way do we return? Do we do so in the same way we left, that’s to say, simply go back where we came from as if nothing had happened in the interim, or is there a point to creation? For that is what it amounts to. Does God have a purpose in creating individual souls or not? Surely, we must assume he does or creation is meaningless. The journey through creation changes the souls making that journey. They are not intended to return to the spiritual cradle but to gain something they could not be given without earning. They are to become spiritual adults, gods themselves. They return to the source but in full consciousness of themselves as divine beings, more individual not less.

 

Equality is not a spiritual principle. For anything to be, it must be something. One thing is never like another, even blades of grass are different, and the more a thing develops, the more it unfolds of its divine nature, the more individual it becomes. True equality is found in one place and one place only and that is in the realm of non-manifestation. Equality directly contradicts individuality which is a spiritual principle, one grounded in freedom, freedom being perhaps the fundamental spiritual quality and impossible in a purely material world. Inequality is only a problem when it is used as an excuse for the strong to dominate the weak but that is a corruption and no reason to try to enforce equality any more than the possibility of hate might lead one to suppress love.

 

In the Book of Revelation there is an intriguing passage which reads “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea.” I’m not so foolhardy as to attempt to explain this most enigmatic of religious texts, but an interpretation of this cryptic passage has been suggested to me which has a bearing on the subject of this essay and so is worth including here.  We are looking at the end of time when all things are completed and the earthly creation has run its course. Everything has been brought to fulfilment and the unrefined raw material of pure consciousness represented by the sea has been transformed into the glorious company of saints, the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem. The sea is that from which life emerges. In its primordial form it is the one place there might be said to be equality, and egalitarianism is the desire to return to the pre-created state where there is no distinction. It is not the mark of proper spiritual understanding for that sees every individual soul as unique which, by definition, means different and therefore not equal.

 

The goal of establishing equality can either be regarded as well-meaning and motivated by good intentions and a desire for fairness or else as an attempt to impose conformity on a populace to make it more controllable and separate it from higher aspects of reality. In fact, the former group can be used by the latter to bring about a society in which all the mountain tops have been levelled and eventually nobody even believes in mountains. Is egalitarianism not so much socially progressive as spiritually reductive? Could the drive towards equality turn out to be a means of enforcing spiritual slavery?

A Trilogy

 It didn't occur to me until after I had written it, but my new book By No Means Equal has turned out to be the third part of a trilogy, the first two being Remember the Creator and Earth is a School. On the most obvious level, the three might be seen as meditations on words of my teachers, those words being the titles in question. But there is more to it than that for while the first book focuses on the reality of God, the second looks into the reason for our lives on this planet and the third is about the soul and how that is a real immaterial thing. The book is framed in the context of a discussion on equality, that most sacred of cows of our modern secular age, but the ideology of equality is shown to be false by the fundamental reality of individuality and freedom which are spiritual qualities and the defining characteristics of the soul.

Thus we have God, the world and the soul or absolute reality, objective reality and subjective reality, the three facets of our existence. These are all intertwined and at the same time separate but part of an over-arching unity. Problems arise when you give one too much significance so that the others are thereby diminished such as Islam does with God Transcendent (God is all, Man is nothing) and certain forms of Indian mysticism do with God Immanent (the world and the individual soul are illusion), or scientific materialism does with the world or much modern thought does with the soul, or its phenomenal aspect, that being all it recognises, which is regarded as totally sovereign and independent of any higher authority, able to do whatsoever it wishes long as that is within the laws of society. In fact, God, the world and the soul are all real and all important even if God remains the source of the other two.

By No Means Equal brings this run of books to a conclusion. Here is the introduction to the book.

"All cultures have a defining belief or myth on which they base themselves. In most cases it is a religious one which takes various forms but all of them are rooted in a reality beyond this world. However, that of the contemporary West does not follow the traditional pattern for it derives from a belief in the primacy of matter rather than spirit. The modern myth is egalitarianism, the insistence that all men are equal. This idea blossomed at the time of the French revolution with its rallying cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité though the seeds were sown much earlier, going back to certain streams of thought in the medieval period. But, in the sense we understand it today, it is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Egalitarianism did not form a part of traditional Western belief except for the idea that we were all created by the One Father, God. But that doesn’t mean we are all equal. The natural order in tradition, not just in the West but more or less everywhere in the world where civilisation has developed, was hierarchical and this reflects the belief that there is a vertical dimension to life. That implies transcendence, the denial of which is virtually the definition of modernity which, with a singular lack of imagination, has reduced reality to the world of appearance or what can be grasped by the senses, ignoring the fact that the senses filter as much as they reveal.

Now, in the twenty-first century we have arrived at a belief in radical equality through the spread of communism for communism, whether we realise it or not, underpins the philosophical assumptions of almost all contemporary thought. Not so much in the overt political or economic sense but culturally speaking it does where it has become deeply embedded since the 1960s. It has reached the point at which to challenge this assumption marks you out as an immoral person.

Communism is atheistic and materialistic. There are occasional rather feeble attempts to dispute this but they fail as they must since communist ideology is entirely concerned with this world and has no sense of a spiritual goal for humanity. Hence, it should not be hard to see that egalitarianism, though it too sometimes claims to have a spiritual basis, is in fact a thoroughly materialistic and atheistic doctrine. This makes sense chronologically since the two came about at the same time. The belief in equality in the form it is held nowadays did not arise from any religious principle but from a rejection of religion and its substitution by a belief system centred on the human being in its earthly form. If you want to associate it with religion you would have to say it took what belongs to the spiritual level and applied it to the material level, in the process abolishing the spiritual or, at the very least, making that secondary to the material.

In this book I will start with a series of essays that examine the modern ideology of equality and show that it is essentially an anti-spiritual doctrine, one that denies the reality of the soul using that word to mean the non-material essence of our individual self. Some of the arguments might appear too simplistic to cover all the complexities of socio-economic and political life but I am looking at the question from a metaphysical point of view here, and ultimately everything is downstream from metaphysics anyway. Whether this ideology has arisen now as a natural outcome of humanity reaching a stage in its growth roughly analogous to adolescence when it throws off outer (transcendent) authority and tries to go it alone or whether it is a well-meaning attempt to create a morality in a materialistic society with no higher values or whether it has been put through by forces antithetical to spiritual development specifically to derail higher values, for when everything is equal there is a strong tendency to revert to the lowest common denominator, I shall leave the reader to decide as we go along.

Then we shall proceed to looking at ways in which the egalitarian ethos has affected and corrupted the spiritual search. For it undoubtedly has. Religion is not democratic any more than science or art are but in many instances it is being made so. Misunderstanding the true idea that God is within all of us, we fall into the trap of thinking that he is equally within all of us. Even if that were true, he does not manifest equally in all of us. Like all heresies, if you can call it that, egalitarian ideology takes a piece of the truth and exaggerates its importance while minimising the significance of other aspects of truth. Truths that apply on the level of the One do not apply on that of the Many, and certainly not to the Many as the Many. The Absolute and the Relative are both part of the totality of life but they are different and should not be confused."

A Foretaste of Heaven

 Apparently at the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Dublin, which took place in 1742, a member of the audience was so moved by Mrs Cibber's performance of the aria "He was despised" that he rose from his seat and exclaimed, " Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven." I feel similarly about the Agnus Dei from the Missa L'Homme Armé Sexti Toni by the 15th century composer Josquin Des Préz.

Agnus Dei

This version by the Tallis Scholars was the first I heard. It's from their famous recording of the two L'Hommé Armé masses* but there's another by Oxford Camerata which is a minute longer and possibly even more sublime. It's the third Agnus Dei (starting at 3.41) which is so heavenly. It's 5 minutes of bliss but it's also a technical masterpiece for in it Josquin increases his 4 voices to 6 and then "combines a retrograde canon based on the armed man cantus firmus with two other canons moving at one beat's distance."

* The whole recording of the two masses is here.

Read Not the Times

 It may seem a little redundant to write pieces on general spiritual themes with all that is going on in the world today but in fact that makes it all the more important to lift our mental focus above the chaos of current events to the deeper reality beyond. It's easy to get caught up in external conflict and take sides but for the spiritual person that temptation should generally be resisted. I'm not saying there is not right and wrong nor that in a dispute both sides are equally good or bad. That is clearly not the case but we do need to fix our minds on the eternal rather than the times (pace Thoreau). Was it not because Jesus did just that that he was betrayed by Judas who wanted him to take a more active position with regard to Jewish liberation from Roman rule? That is one theory anyway, and it is true that Jesus did not involve himself in politics or worldly disputes anymore than any bona fide spiritual teacher has done. Passions can be aroused, the sense of justice can be appealed to but we have to see that our emotions are being played upon to bring us down from a higher standpoint. This does not mean we make ourselves insensitive to human suffering and evil but we do not become psychologically involved because if we do we will lose connection to higher truth. This is what resist not evil means. It does not mean we let evil have free play but we do not let it into our hearts by reacting to it on its own terms and according to the agenda it sets. This can be a tricky balance to strike.

There will be many attempts to distract the spiritually focused from their proper task of following God. To inflame their minds so that their judgment is clouded and they allow themselves to be drawn into worldly battles. I am not saying we should always stand aside but we must be alive to the manipulation that is going on and not react emotionally. That can be hard, especially if one is personally involved and it is equally important that one remains alive to worldly suffering or you risk falling into the spirituality of self-satisfied solipsism. But you must be careful not to let evil pull you down to its own level which is something it is always trying to do to those who seek to extricate themselves from its clutches.

Surely you can see how first thing then another comes about to engage our emotions and pull us into earthly concerns? When one starts to grow stale up pops something else. We will be told we are unfeeling, inhuman, not to take sides especially in the face of evil actions but that is where discernment is called for. Evil is always seeking to draw us into its net and has no compunction about tactics. Don't react to its provocations unless you are directly concerned and even then never lose sight of God, and the real spiritual truth of God not an image of him that may have been created for some non-spiritual purpose as exists in all religions, especially the ones currently involved. This is not a call for pacifism nor for tolerance of evil but now more than ever is a time for detachment and discernment and to remember that love is not an emotion.

Don't Worry, This Was Inevitable

 It's hard to watch the civilisation of which you are a part destroy itself, especially when that civilisation has created many great and noble things and reached heights that earlier civilisations had not attained both in terms of art and science on the human scale and religion on the spiritual. And it's perplexing that so many people don't see this though I suspect that more are beginning to do so as the suicidal nature of our civilisation becomes increasingly evident and its behaviour increasingly absurd.  

It's also strange that so many members of that civilisation seem hellbent on dragging it down into the mire. We talk of envy and resentment and these are obviously major drivers in this scenario, but are they really sufficient to explain the sheer lunacy of much present day behaviour? I don't think they are. Large numbers of people in the modern age suffer from a profound spiritual disorder and one can only speculate what has caused this. Is it the self-hatred of the decadent? Or is it the rebellion against God of the proud?

And yet although it is difficult to stand by and watch things get worse by the day, disguised by our relative prosperity for people can put up with a lot if their stomachs are full, it is important that we do not succumb to despair, and the best way to avoid this is to realise two things. One, nothing lasts in this world. Everything goes through a spring, summer, autumn and winter cycle. This is how things are in a world in which decay or entropy is the backdrop to everything as it must be in a material world since only spirit endures. We are now in deep midwinter. Then we must realise that the West had the defects of its qualities. For a while the latter dominated but now the former have emerged and are bringing the whole thing down. Our civilisation contained the seeds of its own destruction and these have now sprouted and the weeds are choking the flowers. The main quality of the West was the strong sense of an individual self and the concomitant idea of freedom. This has made our civilisation. But its downside is the egotism and, more especially, the tendency of self to remove God from his throne and instal itself there. This is what we have done both collectively and individually. The idea that we can remake creation in our own image is a consequence of that. The West also birthed the machine through its exploration of natural science. This had the benefits we know but it was also a Frankenstein's monster that has certainly turned against us. Materially miraculous but spiritual deadly. Would we have been better off without it? That's the wrong way to look at the situation. The advent of the machine had to be as all possibilities must work themselves out at the end of an age which is where we currently are. We could have reacted better to it but the descent of consciousness into matter made it inevitable in some form.

The second bulwark against any despair that might arise as our world crumbles is to realise that our true home is not here but Heaven. This life is a learning experience. We are only visitors and the world is a bridge not a home. If we are alive now that is because we are meant to be alive now. There are lessons we can learn and service we can render and perhaps the most important is the one I have just stated. We should value the past but we cannot preserve it because nothing in it can last forever. On the other hand, nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. Anything good here is but a dim reflection of a reality elsewhere. Perfection exists but it is not here. This world is just to make us worthy of it. The material civilisation of the West is passing but all the good in it will be taken up and absorbed into Heaven.

Agree to Disagree?

 There is a very civilised and reasonable view current today that we should respect those whose opinions we do not share. We may disagree with such people but we should not demonise anyone just because they might think differently to us. There's room in the world for all sorts of ideas and to condemn another person because he sees things in a different light is to fall into a confusion between person and ideas. It might even lead to violence.

How appealing is such a thought. How sane and just. And yet I disagree with it. Just as faith is a matter of will rather than intellect so there is right and wrong thought and often, not always but often, those who embrace wrong thought do so because of some spiritual flaw in their character. Their beliefs are the result of their personal shortcomings. 

This is becoming more and more the case as things come to a point and the sheep are separated out from the goats which appears to be the over-arching theme of the present time. A time, be it noted, when the teaching of Jesus Christ really has been spread to every corner of the globe as was given as a necessary precursor to the End Times. Perhaps at one time it was viable to have the wrong ideas if you were genuinely engaged with the search for truth. After all, none of us is right all the time or even wholly right any of the time. But we have to see why people think what they think or argue what they argue. Increasingly, those who have put themselves on the wrong side, which is the side against God and the natural order of creation, do so because of the disordered state of their soul and we cannot grant them equal rights. It is quite reasonably said we should always attack the argument not the person but sometimes the argument is the person.  

When I first became interested in spiritual matters I adopted a universal approach, taking nectar from a variety of flowers, from both temperate and tropical climes, from gardens, forests and jungles. (Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.) But I learnt a lot thereby with different approaches filling in the gaps of others. Christianity, and specifically Jesus Christ, was always central to my spiritual understanding but it was supported by other approaches. However, as time has gone by and the dire spiritual state of the world becomes more exposed I see that only the person of Christ can really save us from the assault. Pretty much everything else, including official Christianity, can be incorporated into the anti-God agenda and often is. Only Christ can offer real refuge against spiritual evil. I don't say other spiritual approaches cannot be valid on their own terms but the centrality of Christ is becoming ever more evident.

Relativism is one of the curses of the modern age. You have your truth and I have mine and both are equally good. No, the unalterable fact is there is truth and there are lies and they are not to be given equal consideration.