6. ABOUT RELIGION AND THE NEW AGE MOVEMENT
WTM FAQ 6.4 What is your definition of a prophet?
With reconciling understanding of the human condition now found (see Video/Freedom Essay 3), it is at last safe to demystify prophets and admit and confront the fact that they were simply humans like everyone else, albeit ones who were exceptionally nurtured in infancy and exceptionally sheltered from all the upset behaviour in the world during childhood and thus, as adolescents, did not have to resign to a life of living in denial of the truth of Integrative Meaning and the human condition like the vast majority of humans. (Read more about the process of ‘Resignation’ in chapter 2:2 of biologist Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, and more about Integrative Meaning in chapter 4 of FREEDOM.)
Not being resigned to living in fearful denial of the subject of the human condition like most people, these rare unresigned, truthful thinking people that we call ‘prophets’ could look into, and talk openly about, the human condition. Christ, for example, was recognising the power of the unresigned mind to think truthfully and effectively when he compared the clever but dishonest thinking of the resigned minds of nearly all adults to the truthful thinking minds of unresigned children, when he said, ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25). He also recognised that, unlike him, most people were living in a resigned state of extreme denial of the truth of Integrative Meaning when he said, ‘why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say…The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God’ (John 8:43–47). (The explanation for why we personified Integrative Meaning as ‘God’ is given in Freedom Essay 23 and chapter 4 of FREEDOM.)
In pre-scientific times religions were founded around unresigned, denial-free, truthful and effective thinking prophets. During this time, prophets legitimately put themselves forward as sources of soundness for people to associate themselves—to be ‘born-again’ through—when they became overly corrupted. However, with the development of science, the role of prophets is the very opposite to that of creating a religion. Their task now is to bring understanding and amelioration to the human condition and by so doing make the need for deferment of self to a faith obsolete.
There are many contemporary or modern-day unresigned, denial-free, truthful-thinking prophets—for instance, Sir Laurens van der Post, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Koestler and R.D. Laing. However, as is being stressed, no contemporary prophet has been concerned with creating a religion around themselves. Having grown up in a scientific age, in a world dedicated to explaining existence, they have only been concerned with bringing understanding to the human condition, and a person simply cannot be concerned with demystifying the human condition and with it religion, while, simultaneously seeking to create a religion.
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Read more about denial-free-thinkers or prophets in Freedom Essay 39 or in Jeremy’s 2003 book, A Species In Denial, in the chapter ‘The Demystification Of Religion’. Also, the relative innocence and thus soundness of prophets is talked in about in paragraphs 744-745 and 929-935 of FREEDOM.