Front Cover

Title Page

Contents

Introduction

One: Issues in Secularism and Culture

1.1: Secularism, Atheism and Scientism

1.2: Secularism and Contemporary Culture

1.3: Philosophy and Secularism

1.4: The Role of Language

1.5: Psychology, the Brain and Secularism

1.6: The Shibboleths of Secularism

Two: Articulating Spiritual Difference

2.1: The History of the Spiritual Life

2.2: Four Spiritual Polarities

2.3: The Varieties of Spiritual Impulse

2.4: Pathologies and Correctives in the Spiritual Life

2.5: The Problem of ‘God’

2.6: The Bhakti / Jnani Distinction

Three: Returning to the Roots

3.1: The Twentieth Century

3.1.1: Science and the Century of Alienation

3.1.2: Presecular Religion in the Twentieth Century

3.1.3: Spiritual Teachers in Modernity

3.2: The Enlightenment

3.2.1: The Special Role of the Enlightenment

3.2.2: The Rise of Science

3.2.3: Enlightenment Philosophy

3.2.4: The Death of ‘God’

3.3: The Spiritual Wounds of the West

3.3.1 The Inquisition

3.3.2: Suppression of Thought from the Fift eenth to the Eighteenth Centuries

3.3.3: Early Christianity vs. Early Buddhism

3.3.4: The Intolerant ‘God’

3.3.5: The Unexamined Collective Trauma of Western Religion

3.3.6: Religious Cruelty and the Enlightenment Thinkers

3.3.7: It Doesn’t Add Up

Four: Bhakti and Jnani in Western Development

4.1: Piety and the West

4.1.1: The Language of Devotion

4.1.2: Exemplars of the Devotional

4.1.3: Augustine and Aquinas

4.1.4: Christianity as a Bhakti Religion

4.2 Jnani, the East, and Hellenic Infl uence

4.2.1: The Spiritual Language of the Non-Devotional

4.2.2: The Greek Jnani and Neoplatonism

4.2.3: Dionysius, Erigena and Eckhart

4.2.4: The Renaissance and the Reformation

4.3 A Radical History of Western Development

Five: The Undefended Western ‘God’

5.1: The Enlightenment Reconsidered

5.1.1: The Early Enlightenment

5.1.2: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz

5.1.3: The Heyday of the Enlightenment

5.1.4: Romantics and Idealists

5.1.5: Bentham and Fundamentalist Materialism

5.2: Deism

5.2.1: A Broader Conception of Deism

5.2.2 Deism and Freethought in Thomas Paine

5.3: Failure of the Western Jnani Religion

5.3.1: William Paley and the Argument from Design

5.3.2: Darwinism and the Discrediting of Deism

5.3.3: The Floodgates of Secularism Open

5.3.4: The Hidden Origins of the Secular Mind

Conclusions

References

Bibliography

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