I think most of us are realistic and level-headed enough to acknowledge that the great world religions are not completely devoid of worth for guiding one’s actions in life. Like any other body of ideas, a religion must be carefully examined and weighed, keeping the pro-life elements and discarding the rest. For a person to do otherwise, living in a significantly religious culture as we do, is to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

That is why I found two essays in the most recent issues of The New Individualist to be very helpful and encouraging.

In them, I learned that: even when there is no iota of the supernatural involved in a particular social or political issue, conspiracy theorists can behave as dogmatically and rationalistically as the staunchest religious fundamentalists—-and even when a particular social or political issue has arisen due to theistic influence and supernatural associations, secular people can reframe that issue and approach it with as great a sense of sacredness and spirituality as the staunchest religious fundamentalists.

That is the two-pronged message I came away with, upon reading the excellent pieces by Robert Bidinotto (“It’s a Conspiracy,” November 2006) and Edward Hudgins (“Secular Spirituality,” December 2006).

It is clear from Robert’s article that conspiracy theories reek of the Primacy of Consciousness, the idea (devoid of any evidence to support it) that some conscious being is acting behind the scenes to direct a state of affairs. His alternative explanation, that the “Invisible Hand” and the Law of Unintended Consequences are the complex causal factors at work, is well-stated and a much-needed antidote to the widespread virus of “conspiratorialism.”

What is less clear, but which Ed nicely explains, is that the sacred and the spiritual, the emotionally elevating and the deeply fulfilling, have no necessary connection to the disembodied, unearthly elements of world religions, but instead derive ultimately from our very earthly, human powers of reason, self-awareness, and goal-directedness. We regard as holy—-and we worship—-that which we and others can and should be, and we celebrate the achievement of those potentials by ourselves and others.

I hope these two essays are reprinted some day as part of a book on how and how not to incorporate aspects of spiritualism into a rational, secular outlook.

Roger E. Bissell

Orange , California

[The above Letter to the Editor was published in early 2007 in The New Individualist.]