For a new world spirit to be conceived, religions must take off their condoms when talking with each other.

Twenty kids were gunned down in Montreal, just blocks from a conference of world religions. I wonder if anyone sees the irony in this.

The world’s religions assembled, peace on everyone’s minds, terrorism and 9/11 on the agenda. How can religion help instead of hinder? Spellbound by the avalanche of brilliant religious thinkers, none of us realizing that here, in peaceful Canada, a local white boy was machine gunning teenagers. I don’t know whom I should mourn for more, the kids or religion.

Everyone knows how massive religion is. It is one thing to know, but it is another thing to encounter it in one place on this scale. The world’s religions all talking at once. I walked away shell-shocked, shaking my head. A routine phone call to my wife, 500 miles away, told me what happened just down the street. No terrorism involved in this violence. No religion either. Just a suburban white boy preying on white kids at a college.

It seems this conference on world religions left out two important components of the global village: indigenous people and a secular Western human being. At the nearby temple of the modern mind, Dawson College, events were telling the religious that they were focused on the wrong thing. It is not the heart that is the problem in the world, it is the dominant mind found in every civilized person whether religious or not.

The media scrambled to figure out how we can control this from ever happening again. How could this occur three times in Quebec schools in only seventeen years? Why does Quebec have the second-highest suicide rate of men, ages 18-35, in the entire world? Why didn’t anyone monitor this gunman, who blew his own head off in the end, before he did this act? The media wasn’t looking for spiritual solutions. Why? Everyone was looking the other way. The conference thought religion was a problem. It appears to be found elsewhere in the civilized psyche.

Not to say religion isn’t a monster. Confronting the barrage of meaning coming from all the great religions of the world in one setting is quite unsettling. The mind reels. And one realizes how screwed-up the world is as all these faiths collide in the shrinking global village.

With all these mountains of wisdom, the endless meaning reaming out of the workshops, everyone was speaking but no one could really listen. It was too much. And there was no time between speakers to actually talk with human beings. Only downloading of all the brilliance of the modern religious mind.

It really points to the growing impotence of the individual. In the few discussions that I did have, religious professionals reacted strongly when I told them of my book on civilization and spirituality. ‘What do you mean by spirituality,’ each and everyone asked, as if I was going to speak some taboo. They were clearly threatened and needed to contain where I was coming from. Religion must stay in control of spiritual meaning. Quite the fortress.

So why was everyone at the conference if they did not want their spiritual meaning challenged? At the Hindu discussion there were only Hindus. At the Catholic nuns’ presentations there were only Caucasians. Tons of ancient wisdom. Lots of PhDs. So what? No one was really listening.

At one point I stood up in the Hindu presentation and asked why the religion had no impact in the West? A professor tried to say that karma and stuff was getting through. But why doesn’t Hinduism really challenge Christianity spiritually? Reincarnation is a fact. It would blow Christian doctrines of Salvation and the Resurrection out of the water. The East still has a grasp of feminine spirituality in ‘reality.’ Why don’t Swamis and gurus have an impact on the hyper-masculine West, which believes reality is inert matter outside of invisible human consciousness? It was like I threw cold water on the Indo-centric navel-gazing of the whole affair. Here were Hindu scholars, living in North America, but totally uninterested in connecting with our culture. Quite bizarre.

At the nuns’ presentation, they showed how God’s love became incarnate in their own work. In Africa, the Order had created an ecologically sustainable farm for the poor. Time ran out before I could observe that it was ironic: Africans lived natural, ecologically sustainable lives before the white man destroyed it. Now they were teaching these newly poor Africans what they always knew. The Grace of God.

Just two examples of how religions wear condoms when they interact with each other. They are not interested in creating a new spirituality in the world with their brother and sister religions. Each threatens the other with their peculiar spiritual truths. And each have their endless reasons for this. Everyone has their own meaning. It’s a cultural thing. Find your truth in one tradition. Why are religions so afraid of one another, masked by their spiritual bravado.

Meanwhile, Western rationalism and capitalism rides roughshod over the planet destroying cultures and human habitat. It seems that religion wears its condoms at all times, unable to pro-create with the real world and other religions. The celibacy of the Catholic priest is the metaphor for all clergy. Convert individuals, but don’t face the generals of the opposing religious armies. Hilarious. Why does the Catholic Church oppose birth control when it practices it spiritually? Hypocrisy.

The absence of the scientist and indigenous at the conference was striking. Religion prides itself on its perception of reality. It will not accept being second-fiddle to any rival. The two groups that are about to join forces in mutual realization couldn’t be bothered with religion. The indigenous never succumbed to the dominant mind of knowledge that the civilized did. They are a wisdom culture, whole in their spirituality, without the limits that religion puts on spiritual experience. Cutting-edge science is now discovering what the indigenous have always known. Religion thinks it has fended off the worst of scientific challenge to its authority. But science is discovering that an object can be in two places at once, because time and space do not really exist. Religion is still stuck in its belief that reality is inert matter. Science has learned that 95% of the universe is ‘black matter.’ They are just beginning to perceive this, and have not developed instruments to measure it. We can only perceive 5% of what is in existence. This flies in the face of the ‘vacuum’ of outer space, the Void that God is supposed to be in relation to. The Big Bang appears to be an isolated event of one spectrum of reality that we are a part of. If there is no Void, then what is the actual nature of God? It throws all definitions across every faith into a tailspin. Science shows how limited spiritual perception is in religion, something indigenous people have been saying since civilization conquered them. Neither needed to show up at the conference. None of the religious would have listened. They have the monopoly on truth, on ultimate meaning.

Every religion is human-centered. We are the most important thing in existence. Religion would protest. God is the most important thing. But God is defined by the services he provides humans. Just as the rest of the inert matter we live in. Only science dares to explore the outer reaches beyond the human self-centeredness. It still has the blinders on, the product of the Christian belief that reality is only (God), humans and inert matter. But it is at least expanding instead of sitting in the puddle of religious tradition. Science has carved up the cultural and political limitations of religion and has moved on. It is the pure mind of knowledge, the endpoint of the long rise of intellect over the wisdom that is the history of civilization. Business may abuse scientific knowledge. But scientists are beginning to understand the nature of reality that Native people have always known. Whole and complete. Religions fit together in a puzzle, with the missing pieces finally put in place.