21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

community wherein people may find fulfilment of desire, compassion, well-being and flourishing, there may yet be hope that churches and spiritual groups can provide this. The 2012 ‘Occupy London’ campaign, whose aims were perhaps not altogether clear and articulated, was nonetheless prescient in choosing St. Paul’s Cathedral as the centre of their campaign. It was almost as if people were saying, society has failed us, values now need to come from elsewhere. Someone needs to help. That someone needs to be grounded elsewhere than in corporate greed and the politics of spin.

But this is to get ahead of ourselves. Let us return to the idea of spirit and start by looking at how it applies firstly within religion itself. Chapter 9 will explore how spirit — the economy of ascendancy — has come to dominate secular culture. In using the word religion, please take this to refer primarily to Western Christianity. This is mainly because this is the dominant religious influence in the West and its history is so much wrapped up in the development of philosophy, science and culture. I will however refer briefly to other faiths when this is relevant to the discussion.

Heaven is always above us and therefore always something to aspire to rather than something that is already with us. A more fundamentalist faith contrasts Heaven not with Earth but with Hell. The aspiration thus becomes all the more urgent. There is a strange kind of ambivalence in the image of Heaven that is presented. On the one hand it is a wedding banquet — a celebration of all things physical — eating, drinking, marriage and love-making. On the

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