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THE DIVINE SUCCESSION


by Alfred de Grazia


CONCLUSION


THE DIVINE AND HUMAN

Having begun with a pessimistic understanding of the divine succession, I have concluded with an optimistic belief that the search for the supernatural is a virtuous, healthy, and constructive activity. The divine exists and can be achieved to a significant degree by all who properly seek it. It is probable that the divine extends to the existence of gods, regarding whom the question of one or many is probably nonsense and should certainly not be sloganized.

Religion is the system of relations sought for and maintained among the humans and the divine, the divine being more extensive than the human. Religion or religiousness is morally effective and can often change secular behavior with beneficial effects upon human life and the satisfaction of human needs. Rituals are exercises of the human character and are beneficial in the context of a proper religion.

The search for religion is the most civilizing and lofty human experience; the claim to have found religion has been usually a disaster. Religion came with the first kit of mankind, mentally and physically. Religion covered all existence and does so even today and will do so. Neither the purely secular nor the purely sacral type of person is suited either to study or to maintain the divine search.

Secularism has never been fully accomplished because it contradicts itself when it reaches its psychic and moral origins. As the method of secularism, science can help greatly sacral man achieve the divine, provided that it accepts the help of theology.

Historical religions, based upon the terrible power of natural forces, limited strictly the extent to which humanity could pursue divinity. The gods were born as disastrous natural occurrences playing upon the existential fear of the self-aware human.

The theory of quantavolution explains, thus, substantially the history of religion and culture. It strengthens the scientific basis of religion by cutting off the claims of traditional religion to authorize personal miracles and to arrange divine intervention. Quantavolution furthermore discerns and pursues the consistent delusional schizoid syndrome of human nature from its beginnings. It explains the unbreakable connection between the sacred and secular.

Still, varieties of historical religions, such as Platonism, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Bahai, have often approached the divine by the same routes as we have ourselves. They enlarged the human perspective and performed experiments; they organized social and intellectual infrastructures for launches into the future.

The goal of religious practice is the revelation of the divine through the human, and the integration of the human with the universally divine. This aim, which may be infinite and unachievable, promotes operations extending beyond the blinded box in which the human mind must work and seeks to establish relations with divine probabilities wherever they may exist and be sensed.

The world of entropy is the dying universe of the second law of thermodynamics, and of the dying mind. Entropy is confronted and contradicted by theotropy, no less valid, nor less empirical, which is diffused through the universe as creation and life. Many glimpses of the universal titanic effort of the forces of light against the darkness have been afforded by historical religions operating at their best, and many unconventional and scattered secular and religious voices presently sound a call for a new religiousness that can use all that the scientific and secular might afford. Under such circumstances, religion need not depend upon its past. It can become a new kind of divine procession into the future.





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