Month: January 2026

Cultish aspects of some religions, philosophies, political and social movements, beguiling and seductive as they are, are betrayals of humanity. They promise release and freedom from the troubles and trials of this world and offer us a golden life in another world, accompanied by lost loved ones, angels, saints, or even divine beings. These elevated beings then become responsible for our being, our love, our life, our joy. Like a fetus returned to the womb, we need do nothing. This is the seductive enchantment. The prophets of such movements tell us that this world is inferior, not to be trusted, evil; that the beauties of the senses are but transient illusions. Even our being here is portrayed as an accident, a mistake of an ancient ancestor or divinity, or a place of punishment, trial, or karmic reward and punishment (a.k.a. “lessons”). It begins to look like this other promised world is little more than an extension of the pleasures and pains of this one.

They promise much but, in my view, they ask even more. These are cults of betrayal, denigration, denial, self-hatred, a blinding to what is before us, and general depravity. We are asked to cut ourselves off from the Natural World that has given us life, to deny the beauty that is rampant around us, to pretend the seasonality of everything reduces its value in calling it “transitory” and worth less with each loss. It is a betrayal of our ancestors who nurtured our seed of life from time beyond memory. Our ancestral lineages are no longer sources of wise counsel, but burdensome old relics of another time. These cults ask us to also betray the children to come, to exploit and extract the life out of this world that they will inherit. And so the harbingers of death spew toxins into land, sea, and sky while they create disease and cures for their profit.

In these ways, we are asked to deny our loving enmeshment with the life that came before us, surrounds us, and comes after us. We are asked to deny and betray our place in the natural order of things, to deny that we bear responsibility for the conditions of this world that we shape with every thought, word, and action. Our ideas and our thinking have been separated from our own vibrant bodies and the experience of our lives that would teach us real and present truths – despite what corrupt regimes would want us to know.

We are asked to betray all that we are through by denying the core values revealed in our deep-heart desires. They would have us believe that we all fit into some category that a predatory society would impose upon us. Delusional destructive dualisms have been imposed on us of right/wrong, material/spiritual, religious/secular, us/them, life/death, left/right, profit/loss, and of gender. All of these boundaries made up and maintained by those wanting to control the multifaceted spectrum of being that every one of us has the potential to manifest.

We are asked to live a half-life, acknowledging only part of who we are, reading only approved writings, teachings, and their authorities. This is a sign they cannot stand on their own because their authority is illusory.

The reality is that we are here, and these cultish movements would have us pretend we can evade responsibility because of an imagined there. If someone else can be blamed, then we are absolved of responsibility for the world we have created.

Let me be clear – not all religions, philosophies, or movements do this. I’m not making some wholesale dismissal of any of these. These are not just the machinations of some established and erudite religions or philosophical movements, but they insidiously show up as in our current political regime that says, “Do not believe what you see. Let us tell you what you see, and what you are allowed to see; and let us make the determination of what it means, what victims intended before we killed them. Let our ideology replace what your eyes see.”

It won’t work. We are the breathing moment of an ancestral line that has given us the raw material for our singular life that asks of us to maintain consciousness and courage. Like it or not, we are the creators of what is to come. Despite our appeals to invisible forces and divine beings, we are responsible for our lives, for this world, and for our destiny. We bequeath the seeds of possibility to those who come after us through our actions, words, and thoughts. Whatever song we sing echoes into the distant future.

Do we live our lives and values in mutual service to one another, in reciprocity with the natural world on which we depend? It takes courage to be present and attentive to the direct experience of who we are, to the nature of the world around us; and it takes even more courage to accept the responsibilities that come with being and with consciousness. But to do so, we are rewarded with the realization that beauty endures, transitory seasons and cycles are sacred, and we have many ways open to embody the life we live, the life for which we are responsible, the life that we are living.

(I had written much of this before realizing it as an elaboration of Chapter 9 of my book The End of Karma: What Causes Our Karma and the One Thing It Asks of Us – hence the title of essay.)

Across my social media feed come ex-evangelicals criticizing various aspects of their former churches, along with ex-Mormons, ex-scientologists, and atheists, all of whom make charges of hypocrisy, and of quoting or misquoting their Bibles. I see ordinary citizens calling out politicians for failing to follow the constitution, and politicians and pastors decrying the rise of Christian nationalism.

Among all the arguments about religion in politics, feigned and genuine victimhood, about which group’s ideology should prevail, do we really not know that love and respect for one another are basic moral principles, or that mercy, forgiveness, generosity, hospitality, and the empathic application of the “golden rule” are the most desirable?

It all puts me in mind of the development of our constitution, for which the signers came together to discuss in a deliberate way how people should treat one another, and they attempted to define the relationships among people, states, and the federal government.

So we don’t get distracted from my point, let’s set aside the ironies and inadequacies that the discussion only included men, that protection of the privilege of white male property owners was a prime consideration, that much of its democratic strength was copied or adapted from native peoples this government sought to destroy, and that many of its promises have yet to be fulfilled or have been subverted by a wealthy elite.

What I’d like to focus on here is the idea that moral principles were developed based on agreement – not on an individual’s authority, some divine right of kings, brute power, or reference to scriptures. The authority was in the agreement of those who would be subject to its provisions (again, tainted by their privilege).

This was a higher level of moral development than submission to authority or avoidance of punishment or promises of later reward.