God Reconsidered by Scott S. Smith

Author:Scott S. Smith [Smith, Scott S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motivational Press
Published: 2015-03-20T23:00:00+00:00

Earth Life as Opportunity

There is another problem with the religious understanding of earth life as an opportunity for spiritual and moral growth: it is wildly inconsistent with the facts on the ground.

Humans have always had to spend most of their time concentrating on simple survival, making this a very poor laboratory for significant inner growth. Even under optimum conditions, a third of our lives is spent sleeping and most of the rest must be devoted to mundane matters, such as work or education for worldly goals. In our limited free time, few of us spend most of it in pursuit of the deepest truths.

Another complication that undermines the grand theory of spiritual evolution is that many of us are also affected by mental problems that impinge on the ordinary circumstances of life. There are the 157 mental illnesses detailed in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychiatric handbook. A staggering 26% of Americans suffer from one or more, including the 90% of those who commit suicide (32,000 a year), 10% of those who commit homicide, 2.4 million with schizophrenia, one-half to 3.7% of females who at some point will suffer from an eating disorder, and the 4.5 million with Alzheimer’s disease at any given time.

Reincarnation only results in multiplying the original dilemma. Were the Eastern theory true, there would presumably be a significant increase in the percentage of the population that is enlightened in modern India, where the positive impact of growth over multiple lives ought to be recognized. But having spent time there, I can assure you that no Indian of any religious persuasion asserts that their society is more spiritual today than any time in the past.

The importance of this life for personal development is complicated by the problem of early child death. As Tony Volk and Jeremy Atkinson noted in “Is Child Death the Crucible of Human Evolution?” (Journal of Social Evolutionary And Clinical Psychology 2008), in classical Greece and Rome the death rate for those less than one year old was 25-35%, with another 15-25% of children dying before puberty. The figures did not change much through the 18th century in Europe.

In the 1850s, the U.S. infant mortality rate was 217 per 1,000 births for whites and 340 for African Americans. Now it is an overall average of just seven. Is the difference likely now due to the need for fewer infants to die from bad karma or due to improved understanding of disease prevention?

But for those who survive infancy, the programming of thinking and behavior occurs very early, militating against spiritual growth later. As psychologist Harville Hendrix documents in Getting the Love You Want, we are all very heavily influenced at the earliest age by family and social values. So even if each infant is born with a genetic inclination to take some action, this is influenced to a great extent by our culture. This is why it takes years of psychoanalysis for a patient to begin to understand how his or her subconscious causes irrational acts, often injurious to the self.

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