On the Importance of Understanding Beliefs in Assessing Spiritual Minorities

On the Importance of Understanding Beliefs in the Assessment of Spiritual Minorities

By André Tarassi (December 2009)

The modus operandi of the anti-cult fight rests on a line of conduct that is the pride of its militants but is at the origin of the whole problem of their combat. One can read or hear their representatives proclaim, as if this were a guarantee of anything whatsoever: “We are not interested in beliefs but in acts”. The State not being supposed to distinguish between beliefs, one understands where this pseudo-inspiration was drawn from, which tries to pass their war off as an action stamped with neutrality.

The problem is that beliefs determine acts. The belief of the anti-cult militant, whether of vaguely Catholic, Masonic or purely rationalist inspiration, leads him to think, then to act, in the direction of a “power-hosing” of other beliefs. Such an act is condemnable from the point of view of the members of the spiritual minorities, and if we did not explain it through his “belief”, we would not understand why he acts thus.

But the comparison of beliefs will go no further. Indeed, the atheist belief issues from an intellectual reflection, from a logical deduction on the basis of certain postulates or, more simply still, from certain personal hatreds.

Many religious beliefs in the broad sense rest, for their part, on another form of evidence, more intimate, less intellectual, which is named philosophically “inner experience”, or “revelation”, “awakening” in spiritual language. Inner experience is neither produced nor managed by reason (which files it in the category of psychic disorders for certain rationalists, for example).

Inner experience founded the best-known religions as well as the most recent. The institutions, with their precepts and their codified rituals, come to graft themselves around this founding inner experience, and if one analyses the ritual without knowing the original experience, everything can seem absurd, indeed dangerous. When an individual has the feeling of communicating with God in his inner forum, or when he lives an ecstasy that seems to him to illuminate the nature and finality of the universe, he is living an “inner experience”. When he builds (or lets be built) around his testimony a church or a temple, the link between the experience and the edifice, between substance and form, is present to his mind. But for the one who looks only at the edifice, the knowledge of the foundations is missing. If this partial gaze at the forms of this new or ancient religion provokes a desire for destruction or strict regulation, the conflict is aggravated by the incommunicability of the inner experience, which nevertheless, from a democratic as much as a philosophical point of view, has the same value as the atheist’s reflection.

In other words, if someone who has felt a particular grace, an unsayable joy, which he wishes to share with others by indicating to them the path that led him to that inner experience, proposes an original practice for reaching it, he builds the belief and the practice on an element that absolutely cannot be neglected by those who want to understand it (or to evaluate the possibility of its integration into, or its prohibition from, the social body).

That inner experience makes the anti-cult campaigners quietly laugh or react violently should not enter into the debate on the legitimacy or dangerousness of the spiritual minorities. Inner experience, and the belief and rituals that flow from it, are full components of religious or spiritual reality.

I am not saying that inner experience “excuses” every act, but that acts must not be measured solely by the yardstick of the principles of militant atheism (which is the norm today). To understand the meaning certain believers give to their ritual, it must be illuminated by inner experience - theirs, the founder’s. Yet today, “apparent absurdity” is easily confused with “dangerousness”. In other words, what one does not understand frightens, and provokes that old instinct of war. It is urgent to restore a little intelligence and understanding to the pathetic debate France has initiated on the spiritual minorities. One cannot officially tolerate the weekly consumption of the host on one side, as if that act were “normal” and without “dangerousness” (a kneeling individual receives in the mouth a wafer placed there directly by a standing priest who declares to him that it is the body of Christ), and condemn on the other side (and generally “a priori”) a modern meditation practice, a new therapeutic dialogue, an original prayer, on the pretext that one does not understand its meaning.

This division between belief and act, apparently reasonable, is in reality a trick for isolating an element that thereby becomes more easily criticisable, just as one takes “a sentence out of its context” when one wants to discredit a speech in politics. The springs of defamation and of the attempt to discredit are the same.

We must return to a serious approach (tolerant, neutral and democratic) to this social question, failing which we will witness ever graver abuses.

André Tarassi was born in 1961, he is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has studied the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual path.