by Rabbi Michael Lerner from his website at Tikkun.
http://www.spiritualprogresives.org Bold face is added by me.
http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/magazine/tik0501/050111a.html...There is a real spiritual crisis in America. If you progressives would get over your ferocious anti-spiritual and anti-religious anger, you'd be able to discover what we knew from the moment we started Tikkun more than eighteen years ago: that the spiritual crisis is rooted in the dynamics of capitalism and can only be healed by a fundamental transformation of the economy and political structures that govern our world.
The founders of Tikkun discovered America's spiritual crisis in the course of our research at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health (ILMH). Tikkun magazine, and more recently the Tikkun Community, were founded in order to communicate this central research finding of the ILMH:?? that
Americans have what we call meaning needs that are just as important a determinant to their behavior as their material needs. People hunger for loving connection with others and recognition by the other of our uniqueness. We seek the opportunity to manifest ourselves in creative work and joyous play and a way to connect with a higher meaning for our lives than that which is offered by a society that tries to convince us that he who has the most toys wins. Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that looking out for number one has become the common sense of our society. All day long they work in institutions governed by the competitive ethos of the capitalist market and internalize its instrumentalist and materialist worldview: that progress means accumulating more things and better ways to control the world, that the bottom line is to maximize money and power, that others are likely to take advantage and try to dominate you in their own desire to maximize their own advantage unless you do that first by dominating or effectively manipulating them first. These lessons are brought home into personal life, inevitably corrupting our relations with each other, replacing solidarity with self-interest, and leaving most people feeling deep despair about how much they can really count on other people.
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We are not advocating that people on the Left should all become religious or spiritual.
What we are advocating for is a Left that is friendly not only to secularists and militant atheists, but also to people of faith who share a commitment to peace, social justice, and ecological sanity. We advocate for a Left which believes that the most powerful critique of this society must be rooted in challenging the way this society's capitalist marketplace fosters an ethos of selfishness and materialism.
A progressive politics of meaning does not require that one believe in a Supreme Being, much less the specific God that has been taught in orthodox versions of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. But it does require a recognition that many people want more from their lives than an accumulation of comforts, pleasures, and material goodies. We want more than power, more than fame, more than sexual conquest'we actually want to connect our lives to something of transcendent importance the value of which will continue beyond our own individual life. Counter to the empiricist and scientific reductionism that sometimes gets confused with rational thought, the Politics of Meaning insists that not everything real or important can be quantified or verified through sense-data. The deepest human desires—the desires for loving connection, for transcendent meaning to life, and for justice and peace (not just for ourselves but for others)—are rooted in what we call a spiritual conception of the world.
Much more at the link. The Rabbi invites all to join-check it out.
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