I’m astounded by how many people in the present age don’t understand religion, and yet identify as “non-religious”. They think they have somehow overcome religion, and yet they don’t understand the simple precepts of religion. Nature is inherently religious, nature is a hierarchy of law, and all things obey their relevant season. As Ecclesiastes states, “there is a time for everything.” Religion, i.e. TRUE religion, is a mimetic representation of nature, and it also recognizes the great cause of nature. The desire to be “non-religious” is a thinly veiled atheism, as if natural law were ultimately spurious, and that we subsequently exist for no reason.

By that same standard, there are people that HAVEN’T had the psychedelic experience, and yet denominate Terence Mckenna as a “pseudo-scientist”. McKenna is an ACTUAL scientist, and attempted to reduce the psychedelic hierophany; the ufo religion is only the syncretic formula of the combinatory synthesis of both experience and knowledge. Some people have never heard the “alien logos”, and yet they assume an adequate understanding of reality.

But I digress, let’s attempt to investigate the religious impulse with a modicum of clarity:

“And the world is the most artificial and skillfully made of all works, as if it had been put together by someone who was altogether accomplished and most perfect in knowledge. It is in this way that we have received an idea of the existence of God.”

• Philo.

Philo was a neo-platonist, and he believed that the universe, i.e. the world, is a copy of a truer model. I believe the scientific method, which began as a Judeo-Christian impulse, has uncovered the sheer complexity of the world; and that, in connotation, God’s aspect, according to the reflection of the image, resembles a designer, and in denotation he is the creator: he has created a design which includes, and engenders, the inexplicability of being.

Philos quote is interesting, especially in the light of the modern technological age: it implies that nature is a simulacrum of the mind of God, and that the human being, as the Bible states, is an image of Deity. Aristotle stated that the telos of a system is that for the sake of which it exists, and therefore every process acts in accordance with its goal, or finality. According to this logic it is man that exists as the telos of nature, freewill being a type of qualitative priority in nature.

Mankind isn’t the center of the physical universe, but the human being does represent a metaphysical centrality of intent, and this is reflected in the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the apotheotic apocalypse, in which mankind, and nature herself, are glorified according to the creative purpose of God.

Spinoza stated that everything which exists (and by this he means “substances”), must necessarily have a cause for its existence or non-existence, and that it is far from rational to assume that self-referential substances have no logical cause.

In other words, if a thing has no cause which hinders or negates its existence it necessarily exists, and this is why contradictions don’t actually appear through nature; there is an actual cause which ensures the non-existence of contradictions.

This is, according to Spinoza, why God exists: the only cause which can negate the divine cause must necessarily be similar to the cause which is negated; which is to say that only something which is greater than God can therefore negate God, which would validate the negation of the EFFECT of God, which is nature. Therefore, if a cause existed which could necessarily negate God then we wouldn’t actually exist, therefore God exists.

We also exist, thanks be to God, and (according to Philo) this is proof of the divine agency. Whereas, according to Heidegger, the fact that being exists, as opposed to being not existing, is the primary datum of metaphysical doctrine. To paraphrase Heidegger, “why should beings exist instead of nothing?”

Aristotle clarified something for me, which has bothered me since my youth: ontology isn’t dependent on HOW things work, but WHY they work. There is a vital distinction between how nature works, and why it does. This is ultimately contingent on the primary cause of reality, which, according to Philo, is God.

In my own simple words, the ontological essence of reality is directly contingent on the essence of primary causality. The efficient cause is influenced according to the primary cause, and reality is either 1) meaningless, or 2) meaningful, either one depending on the nature of the primary datum of causality.

According to Aquinas, God is that from which nothing greater can be conceived. Aquinas, in order to negate infinite regress, simply elucidates the idea of the static God – in other words, a God didn’t create the God which created the universe, ad infinitum, but THE God, whose nature is unchangeable and static, incited the expulsion of matter and energy through a nexus of singularity. In Judeo-Christian theology this is known as the doctrine of “creatio ex nihilo”, which states that the universe was created from nothing by an act of logos (which is a “Reason-Principle”, according to Plotinus) – only a truly omnipotent God could create everything from nothing.

Its interesting that the universe has NECESSARILY developed laws and habits which thereby judicate the processes of nature. Were these laws present at the moment of creation, or were they somehow implicit, and have therefore unfolded according to the organic demands of the relative system? In other words, things obey a secret order, lest there would exist the supposition of a countervailing force which negates the order of natural law; and perhaps this is evil: “privatio boni”, the absence of the natural being.

Both theism and atheism see the universe as a machine, and it is theism which necessarily adduces God as an individuated identity that is somehow involved with this natural order. The doctrines of both atheism and theism are essentially united in the conceptual possibility of a deus ex machina: that determinism can be disproven with a single act of theologic validation. In other words, the possibility of God always exists within the machinery of the “kosmic circuit”, even if it exists as a potentiality.

I believe the idea of the universe as machine is interesting, but it obfuscates the organic magic of religion, which reconciles the individual and the universe as a unified organism; this is the profundity of the pantheistic doctrine, which is the primeval ontology. I also think it’s interesting that Whitehead, the last great Platonist, essentially conveyed a philosophy of organism, which categorizes the essence of reality as process.

Plotinus also discusses the implications of the realm of process, and that we cannot, as physical organisms, obviate the necessity of process on the physical plane; but it is Whitehead who ultimately justifies process according to the edicts of metaphysics. In this sense organism is a series of interwoven processes which ultimately seek the pantheistic manifesto of God, as the “poet of the world” (to use Whiteheads expression).

To return to Philo: this universe, and being itself, are models of the truer essence, they are ultimately IDEAS, and it behooves the individual aspirant to therefore SEEK a better understanding and appreciation of God.

I think its also interesting that Philo acknowledges that God is the monarch of the universe; but that it is, according to Philo, democracy which embodies the superior form of government. I mention this for no other reason than the fact that history is largely determined by contrary forces, the Greek and Judaic thought, and that a Greco-Judaism, like Philos philosophy, is probably soluble within a greater eschatological context.

This is, after all, the great legacy of the Judeo-Christian religion: its presupposition is the eschatological act. According to Aquinas, the means is justified by the end; an act is an expression of its telos. Aquinas refers to the eschaton as the “cause of causes”, and Mckenna says that “history is the shockwave of eschatology”; they’re saying the same thing. The eschatological modality is retro-causal, and therefore religion IS a psychedelic science, which attempts to clarify the significance of life and death, ethic and wisdom.

I believe, in our non-religious and secular society, that we have essentially lost touch with the deeper implications of religion. Augustine stated that history is divided into two categories, “the lovers of self and the lovers of God”, and this is true: narcissism and sociopathy have risen in precise correlation to the self-centered nature of culture: we have essentially forgotten God, as the rational cause of existence.

The scientific cosmo-vision, though beautiful, isn’t necessarily an ontology, and yet it has presumed the arbitration of essence, and so has become, for all intents and purposes, a paradigm, i.e. a quasi-religion. The fact that the human being exists, in the great cosmological system, isn’t disempowering, but inspiring. We are embodiments of the kosmos, we are the cerebral-hands of Gaia, and this is the magical doctrine of religion: that life is sacred and meaningful; that the great theogony has determined the teleological designation of nature; and that the human being is the central expression of “the world”.

Religion doesn’t discredit the advances of knowledge (or shouldn’t), but rather enshrines the resolution of essence: it means that being human, as an Image of Deity, is somehow important, and that there is a responsibility incumbent upon the human being to therefore apprehend a greater appreciation of nature through religion, and a greater framework of religion through nature.

This is the the transcendental ideal of Emerson, that nature could be seen as the repository of the mind of God. That we shouldn’t worship nature, but perceive the cause of nature through the innumerable vestments of the world. In a sense, we can essentially apperceive the invisible through the embroidery of the visible; we can find the eternal navel of the world through a religious ontos, which seeks the apotheotic reclamation of the perennial God.