Most Catholics will not lightly forgive those demonstrations, because of the open blasphemy committed against the Eucharist on the streets of San Francisco. Yet neither the Cardinals nor any of the theologians present at the Amsterdam gathering appeared unduly troubled by Tielman’s attitude or his actions. In fact, the open joke repeated at their expense in stage whispers among the delegates was that Humanists sat on both sides of the conference table in Holland!
The year 1988 was a bumper year for the Humanist harvest, it would seem. For by that year as well, they succeeded in organizing the Church of the Good Humanist in the United States. And they succeeded in attracting representatives from the Catholic Church establishment in America and from several mainline Protestant churches as members. One major project in which they will all have a hand, surely, is the planned launching of the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network (VISN), which will beam the message of HM-II even more effectively over America’s airwaves.
Not surprisingly, Pope John Paul’s assessment of the effect of the Humanist assault on the world from its position in the globalist arena is a sober one. He sees the Humanists’ revolution, which has succeeded beyond even their most sanguine expectations, as the cruelest and most radical kind of revolution imaginable. For it has not only denuded public education and university studies of any positive religious content. As Italian editor and commentator Alver Metalli wrote in 1989, it has affected “that point of human conscience, inviolate up to now, where desires, aspirations and one’s life plans are formed.”
John Paul has no need to look at any action models that might be open to view in the Humanist situation room in order to see into the future they prepare for us all. For that future is already upon many of us. Though their process advances at varying speeds in different quarters of the world, the Humanist ideal of the happy consumer enters the home and the personal life of every individual.
Cultures remain diverse, and the world’s religions remain distinct. But that diversity is of secondary importance. According to the Humanist principle, in fact, the only true difference between the various cultures and religions is merely a chronological one. Each of them simply happened to develop and flower at different moments in history. Each represents no more than a different step along our common path toward material happiness and fulfillment. Whether you are talking about nations or religions—about America or Europe or Asia, or about Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism—it is a fact of the Humanist view of life that each simply needs to be synchronized with all the others. Once they are all brought up to speed, as the current saying has it, it will be clear to all that there is nothing to squabble about.
True to the Humanist formula for progress, little by little men and women of every culture and faith are now marked increasingly by the same characteristics in all areas of their lives. Whether in New York or Bangkok, Warsaw, Palermo or Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa or Nairobi, all have the same Humanistic aspirations. Everywhere, vital institutions and activities—sexuality, marriage, family planning, religious practice and preference, public rituals, public and private education—change and recolor themselves continually according to the Humanist principles of synchronization. And everywhere, culture and religion alike bow before the goddess of happy consumerism, kowtowing to her promise of the equitable distribution of luxury items and convenience goods for all.
As single-minded and effective as they are, the Humanists pale in many respects by comparison to their upscale counterparts, the Mega-Religionists. Take the sheer number of groups involved, for example. Where the Humanists have a respectable sixty or so groups around the world, the Mega-Religionists have some five hundred.
Or take their ability to ride piggyback on the structural setups of governments, religions and associations already in place around the world. Where the Humanists must seek the control and direction of such institutions in the best way they can, Mega-Religionists are very often expected to—and do—control and direct those institutions as a matter of course.
Or take the flavor of acceptability each group can foster on the basis of the names it can bandy about. The wish lists of the Humanists are the actual membership rolls of the Mega-Religionists, some of the most distinguished, widely known and wealthy men and women of the past sixty years, people whose names are frequently household words around the world.
In one Mega-Religionist group alone—the Temple of Understanding, centered in the United States and most often referred to by its initials, TU—there are more than six thousand such names: Nobel laureates, prominent individuals who hail from sixty-two countries on all five continents, people who, in one way or another, live their lives as though all political borders were already extinguished, who are as easily recognized east of Suez as west of it, who are as likely to turn up north of the equator as south of it and may do so for vacation or for business—or to attend a Mega-Religionist gathering, like as not. People who call themselves—and were for a while called by the world—the “beautiful people” are Mega-Religionists, people of the caliber of Yehudi Menuhin, Carlos P. Romulo, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Henry R. Luce, George Meany, Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl Mountbatten, Spyros Skouras, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Pierre Trudeau, Robert McNamara, John D. Rockefeller IV, Pearl Buck, Leo Cardinal Suenens.
Given the noticeable difference in the membership of Mega-Religionist groups as against those of the Humanists, something of a difference in purpose inevitably shows up as well.
Humanists are still preoccupied with what they call the “bane of religion.” The Mega-Religionist mind, by contrast, is devoted to the proposition that comfort is not always as exclusively physical as Humanists like to insist. Religion, too, is essential to the comfort of human civilization, and to the comfort of its differing cultures. It’s just that separate religions are neither necessary nor desirable. In fact, for the sake of peace, all religions must fuse into one great religion—one mega-religion—as quickly and painlessly as possible.
According to the University of Buffalo’s Paul Hutchinson, once that fusion takes place, “the whole of Humanity shall remain a united people, where Muslim and Christian, Buddhist and Hindu shall stand together, bound by a common devotion, not to something behind, but to something ahead, not to a racial past or a geographical unit, but to a dream of a world society with a universal religion of which the historical faiths are but branches.”
It is to just such fusion between all religions that the Mega-Religionists are principally dedicated. A fusion that is to be accomplished in a world of plenty; there is no quarrel with the Humanists about that. But the Mega-Religionists will entertain no question of liquidating the more harmless elements of each religion; for these have a folkloric and colorful function, and perhaps a certain function in terms of appeasement and camouflage. Still, all such details must be “absorbed,” as the vocabulary of such groups puts it, into a “higher dimension” according as mankind matures in its own godliness.
The aim of this process of fusion was set out by a man of many interests. Writing in 1948, the Marxist, millionaire, publisher and Mega-Religionist Victor Gollancz said, “The ultimate aim should be that Judaism, Christianity and all other religions should vanish and give place to one great ethical world religion, the brotherhood of man.” Farther, said Gollancz, that aim should be achieved by “believers with different opinions and convictions … [who] are necessary for each other … [and who] work out the larger synthesis.”
That process itself was given a name: “syncresis,” or “syncretism.” As part of the Mega-Religionists’ special jargon for quite a while, those two words were shorthand for the Mega-Religionists’ action plan. Meaning, basically, “to pour together,” they were a letter-perfect description of what was to be accomplished.
All religions of mankind were, and still are, likened to wines—some mellow, some bland, some with a heady bouquet, some of young vintage, some with the cachet of greater age. Believers from each religion—“believers
with different opinions and convictions,” as Gollancz wrote—must gather small, select tastings; and then each of these choice tastings must be poured with all the others into one great new wine jar. The resultant blending will nourish the whole human community in a new harmony of thought and feeling. Finally, all political systems will follow the religions into the jar; they will be fused into a one-world political community under a one-world government.
The expected Mega-Religion that will accomplish all that has also been given a name. According to D. H. Bishop, writing in World Faith magazine in 1970, “since it would contain elements of every religion and would be universally acceptable,” it would be called “monodeism.”
The function of monodeism is to create and maintain among men a universal brotherhood. In fact, “brotherhood“ is one of the most important, if not always one of the clearest, terms of the Mega-Religionists. For it describes the geopolitical condition of the world they envision once Mega-Religion has been established for us all. And it also describes the somewhat mysterious group—the Brotherhood, or the Elders—that Mega-Religionists often speak of as the behind-the-scenes guiding force of their movement. No one has ever identified the members of such a Brotherhood in public. The Elders remain unknown. And at least for the uninitiated, they appear largely as figments of the Mega-Religionist desire: a little the way the Wizard seemed to Dorothy, perhaps, in her dream state, longing to get home to Kansas by way of Oz.
Leaving aside the Brotherhood, and to give credit where credit is due, the names of two men—both from the Orient and both long dead—must forever be listed as the prime forces that made possible the widespread and influential movement of the Mega-Religionists today. The first, a Persian named Baha ’U’llah, contributed the basic ideas and principles. The second, India’s Swami Vivekenanda, developed the technique for spreading those ideas and principles. These two men could not have complemented each other more perfectly had they set out to do so.
Baha ’U’llah, having reached the age of fifty, proclaimed himself a divine figure with a new revelation for all the world. Baha’i, as his revelation is called, has three million followers and runs establishments in some 350 states and dependencies. As a religion or an ethical grouping in its own right, Baha’i has not set the world on fire in terms of its numerical membership. The principles of Baha ’U’llah’s new revelation are quite another story, however; for to say those principles have gained widespread acceptance would be to understate their impact.
Baha ’U’llah taught that revealed religions—indeed, all religions—can be fulfilled only by being transformed into his own larger revelation. Though he never supplied the practical details of the unity he called for, he was clear about its practical consequences. As all religions were fused into one Mega-Religion—a term he never used—there would be a World Government, complete with a World Executive, a World Parliament, a World Police Force, a Universal House of Justice, a World Language, and a World Currency.
When all that was accomplished, there would reign among men what Baha’is like to call the Most Great Peace. For peace among men, which is to be maintained by the Council of Elders, was and remains the ultimate aim.
Any form of patriotism will disappear—a needless thing in the face of peace as a planetary condition. Similarly, all the particular traits of all the various religions having to do with truth and transcendence and salvation and all the rest of it will sink to a secondary level for a while, and will finally vanish—as needless things in the face of brotherhood and unity as planetary conditions.
Baha ’U’llah died in a Turkish prison in 1892. He left no instructions regarding how to effect his transformation. His son, and then his grandson, continued his work. But they gave no such instructions, either. In that regard, it can be said that Swami Vivekenanda was Baha ’U’llah’s truest heir; for he did supply precisely the required formula.
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Vivekenanda enjoyed some special gift of communication—some charisma, as television stars like to say about one another. The most heady reading of him by his devotees is that he was entrusted with a special mission by the Elders.
For, amazingly, in one summer visit to Chicago in the year following Baha ’U’llah’s death, Vivekenanda, a Hindu by heritage, successfully inaugurated the technique by which Mega-Religion—already defined in its essence by Baha ’U’llah—has made such steady progress in the twentieth century.
Invited by the World Congress of Religions as the star attraction of the Parliaments of Religions held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Vivekenanda “dialogued” with all comers—Christians, Jews and Muslims, Shintoists, Jains and Taoists, Zorastrians, Confucians and Buddhists, atheists and Communists.
In tone and in substance, that was the start of a practice we all take for granted today: the interfaith meeting. Vivekenanda’s example was infectious; his language, inoffensive; his thought, stimulating. And the overarching message of all three—example, language and thought—was the unity of all mankind, and the harmony that lay in store for us all on the day when, by just such a process as he demonstrated, all true religions would be melded into a higher belief.
Though he died young—in 1902 at the age of thirty-nine—Vivekenanda, by his extraordinary personality and example, provided the how-to action model for the achievement of Baha ’U’llah’s vision. That, it was said, had been his mission. And sure enough, within scant years after his life in this “dimension” was over, important organizations began to form, follow his lead and thrive. In region after region of the world, group after star-studded group held congress after international congress, fellowship meeting after interfaith fellowship meeting.
In all of them, the signs and symbols associated with ancient and not so ancient religions were borrowed and displayed in unaccustomed places. Unity was visibly on the march. Yes, it was true that sometimes those symbols were bowdlerized, as was the case with Bertrand Russell’s peace symbol—a broken cross turned upside down. But such violence to individual religions was not inconsistent with the aim of sampling for the sake of unity.
Most often, though, such symbols were borrowed with due respect. It became more and more common to find the Vedanta sign of the Hindus—a serpent coiling among leaves arranged in the shape of a six-pointed star—displayed at Mega-Religionist meetings in Prague, Czechoslovakia, or in Detroit, Michigan. It seems almost natural today to find the Buddhist wheel, with its six spokes representing as many religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism and Christianity—displayed in such places as Mother Teresa’s principal house in Calcutta, and in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Such expressions of universalism were not accepted all at once, of course. Nourishing a vision of world unity and peace takes time. Sinking all religious differences into the unifying ground of material plenty can be hard work. Plenty of humanly guaranteed reason and honesty and liberty doesn’t just happen. Nor does plenty of food and shelter. Nor does plenty of all-seeing, all-wise godliness descend upon man overnight; he must be coaxed and nurtured with plenty of patience toward the Mega-Religionist ideal of a global, borderless and plentiful homeland.
On the other hand, things didn’t go all that badly. To list even a tiny fraction of the many hundreds of Mega-Religionist groups that confront Pope John Paul as active and humanly powerful organizations is to display a clear and worldwide trend with which he must deal.
Within the decade in which Vivekenanda accomplished his mission of example and departed this “dimension,” the rush to follow his lead was on. The now venerable International New Life Fellowship (INLF) made its first mark in the world in 1906. In 1908, the Universal Religious Alliance (URA) established its claim and its acronym, first in New York. The year 1910 saw similar important contributions to the Mega-Religionist advance by the Union of International Associations (UIA) in Belgium and the Union of East and West (UEW) in London. The World Alliance for International Friendship and Religion (
WAIFR—the acronym that might have been designed to have some appeal of its own) and the Church Peace Union (CPU—not much appeal there) each count 1914 as their first hallmark year, in Switzerland and the United States, respectively.
The decade of the twenties saw the entry of more and more Mega-Religionist groups. The League of Neighbors (LN)—1920, United States—had a friendly ring to it. Then there was the International Fellowship (IF—a modest, even tentative ring to that one), 1922, India. International Brotherhood (IB) followed in 1923 in Paris. World Fellowship of Faiths (WFF), 1924, United States again. World Alliance (WA), the same year, Oxford, England. Peace and Brotherhood (PB), 1926, Louvain, Belgium. The Threefold Movement (TTM), also in 1926, New York. World Peace (WP), World Conference for International Peace Through Religion (WOCIPR) and Order of Great Companions (OGC) all count their importance as groups from the year 1928, Geneva and London. Even a small sample of the plethora of groups that emerged from about the mid-thirties to the opening of the seventies forces one to take account of almost ten more major Mega-Religionist entries. World Congress of Faith (WCF), 1936, London. The Self-Realization Fellowship (TSRF), 1937, Indiana. World Spiritual Council (WSC), 1946, United States. International Committee for Unity and Universality of Cultures (ICUUC), 1955, Rome. World Fellowship of Religions (WFR), 1957, New Delhi. The very impressive Temple of Understanding (TU), 1959, United States. Organization of United Religions (OUR), 1967, Paris, and Spiritual Unity of Nations (SUN), 1970, England, picked up again on the idea of acronyms that might have some appeal. One of the best-known in the dizzying welter of names, the World Conference of Religion for Peace (WCRP), scored its earliest contributions in Kyoto, Japan, 1970.
Because the patrons of the Mega-Religionist groups are the establishment figures of the world, and because such luminaries of world society attract one another as surely as they capture the attention of the general public, it is not surprising to Pope John Paul that such individuals turn up regularly at one another’s interfaith celebrations around the globe.
Keys of This Blood Page 38
