Daffodil Lane

Stage One (Magic)

1.) Is your world full of spirits and demons?

2.) Are fairy tales your favorite kind of literature?

3.) Do you think God makes everything happen, for good and bad?

Stage Two (Reality):

1.) Do you spend a lot of time trying to determine what’s real and what’s not?

2.) Are scriptures true in a concrete and literal sense, rather than being stories and maxims that may or may not be real?

3.) Do you feel you can influence God’s actions by being good?

Stage Three (Dependence):

1.) Do you have an important peer group or leader who is primarily responsible for shaping your faith?

2.) Is it important to you to understand and follow religious doctrine and moral rules?

3.) Is your main image of God that of a perfect parent?

Stage Four (Independence):

1.) Is your spiritual life unique and personal?

2.) Do you often find yourself wanting to demystify scripture?

3.) Do you think of God or Ultimate Reality primarily as an impersonal force or spirit (or as nonexistent)?

Stage Five (Interdependence):

1.) Do you find a spiritual community important to you at the same time that you maintain your own distinctive faith?

2.) Do you experience spiritual power in religious symbols and myths that you can also analyze objectively?

3.) Do you conceive of God or Ultimate Reality both as a person and as an impersonal force?

Stage Six (Unity):

1.) Do you sense yourself in community with religiously committed people of any and all traditions?

2.) Is your consciousness ego-free and beyond paradox and ambiguity?

3.) Do you often feel that God or divine spirit is in everything and that everything exists in God or divine Spirit?

First things first. For the Atheists out there, I don't know how the author deals with the notion of no faith at all. For the sake of consistency I would guess there is a Stage Zero in which you believe in none of these things. This is not part of my concern, so I leave such issues for you to address in your own free time.

Now in my perfect world everyone at church would be forced to always have clearly displayed a card with the number of their current level of faith on their person. Mostly because I've found people at level 3 to be so backwards mentally that they should be avoided and be segregated off by themselves because they are so moronic that they aren't worth the effort to try and help them make it to the next level. Obviously you can tell I don't have my preacher hat on for this discussion. I'm talking about for me personally right now. If you've read the blog for any length of time you should know that I'm at a comfortable level 4. My faith is my own. I require no nanny God to Shepard me through life with the threats of death and destruction to be a decent person. I have internalized why I follow the rules and I follow them with little or no contemplation of the fact. When faced with a situation that is outside of my previous consideration I default to tolerance and understanding, then look for some religious precedent to fall back on. Which leads me back to the differences between people of varying levels of faith. I know many level 5 people and a few level 6 people, and I have to say it's never crossed my mind to try and drag them down to my level of spirituality. I respect that they are able to achieve something I currently just lack the ability to do. Some day I hope that I will be able to connect to a larger spiritual community and will be able to work toward common goals, but at this point that kind of community doesn't exist for me.

Which finally brings me to my original question. Should I tolerate efforts to bring me down to lower level of faith? Spiritually I can not bring myself to hate people that are different from me for that reason alone. If their actions do me no harm as a person, then their journey is their own. To me doctrine is the crutch of the weak minded fools who can't grasp principals of faith and goodness. So what is to be done to remedy the situation? Those that are permanently stuck at a lower level of spiritual development who lash insanely out at all who dare to travel further up the ladder of faith do themselves and their religions more harm than good. Mostly I pity them for their inability to grasp what kind of fools they really are. Then I try and put back on my preacher hat and ask the question...can they be saved from themselves? I mean if you have people so trapped in their own delusions that they aren't even aware how clueless they really are, how do you reach them? The easiest solution for everyone else is to isolate them and keep them at arms length, but there really isn't much hope for them with that approach. Normally I would expect that their ministers to step in and provide them harsh, but kind guidance away from their chosen path, but they seem to congregate in large masses of those who have no desire to grow spirituality just like themselves. The entire Neo-Christian movement in this country is just a glut of human apathy and ignorance spiritually. The notion of faith itself has been put in danger by those who lack the desire for anyone to gain higher and more mature levels of faithfulness and yet there doesn't seem to be any concern nationally about this.

I had hoped that this exercise would yield some insight into what to do about the problem, yet it has left me exactly where I was originally. I can already hear the radical hate mongering Neo-Christian response about how they aren't delusional, that the stages of faith are nothing more than a "liberal" construct to lead people away from their rigid hate ideology, but I think if they were capable of being honest at any level, they would have to admit the stages are legitimate, the real problem is with their lack of actual faith. Beyond some sort of broad revival of real faith in this country I don't see an easy way to solve this problem. The Neo-Christian hate ideology is just seeded way too deeply in this country. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm looking for a good answer.