God and Cultural Evolution

This mini-book is a chapter from my forthcoming book Enlightenment 101: A Guide to God-Realization and Higher Human Culture. The book looks at the experience of enlightenment for the individual and the race. This chapter was begun in dialogue with an online correspondent who argued against what she said is my Eurocentric perspective on culture and in favor of the actions of some environmental extremists seeking to halt Western civilization. It continued with a friend who disputed my claim for the inherent superiority of America in the process of cultural evolution. It begins: Dear C: You disagree with me when I criticize the environmental movement for magical thinking and what Ken Wilber calls retro-romanticism or a yearning for innocence and simplicity through the naive belief that it can be attained via regression to a childish state. Magical thinking, as defined by psychologists, is a stage of the developmental process in children. At an early time in life, before they have attained the capacity for logical, rational thought and formal mental operations, children think in terms characterized by fantasy and by ignorance of various natural laws, such as cause-and-effect in physics. In magical thinking, inanimate objects can become living and personified, the laws of physics suspended, and childish wishing elevated to the status of a cosmic principle...