Janie raises some very interesting issues.

I suppose the differentiation has to be made between the individual spiritual horizon, whatever that may consist of, and the cultural accumulation of dramatizations, irrational practices and authoritarian data which comprise the knowledge body of many religions. Because all the evil that Riginslinger cites comes not from individual spiritual experience but from man's endless appetite to control others.

I am not sure about this extension of pure objectivity ending up classifying man solely as a herd-forming animal. At least, I think the differences in degree and kind of creativity are so great between our species and that of any other primates, that it points to some major qualitative distinction. I understand it as an intellectual exercise, of course, but I think it has to set aside too many points of difference to be compelling as an approach to understanding.

But in any case, the impact of Riginslinger's class of "evil" cannot be denied, even if the provenance of it is perhaps less spiritual events than a grand confidence scam using core human impulses like love and spirituality of some sort to make attractive what is essentially a large-scale exercise in human aberration and derangement.

The evil lies not in the inherent impulses behind religions, but in the resorting to deny the individual, suppress and channel his perception, enforce agreements, deny and enforce his natural ability to communicate, and trample on his natural affinities by forcing the individual to mold his feelings around arbitrary, false, overblown or destructive ralities (see Old Testament for some examples). When important information is shoved down your throat your thinking gets corkscrewed into totally unpredictable paths of irrational behavior.

Mind you, religion is not the only arena in which this sort of thing happens. Advertising has a similarly deadly impact, only slightly less formal in its tacit and corrosive beliefs.

Advertising itself is of course, as any business person knows, not an evil thing. But enforcing desires for objects and thereby enforcing beliefs about what is important to one that have no bearing on his or her native ability to reason is really wicked, whether done by priests or pitchmen.

A