On My Mind
By Joseph Dispenza, Oct 20, 2006

Death in the cradle of civilization

This article is based on an address given Sunday, October 15, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in San Miguel.

Pretend for a moment that you and I are Martian anthropologists observing what is happening on Earth. Our attention is focused on the Middle East, what is called Earth’s Cradle of Civilization—the place where humans learned how to be truly human.

We are looking, particularly, at the country called Iraq. Seven thousand years ago in Iraq, writing, mathematics, urban living, the arts and agriculture all had their origins.

In the place where civilization was born, humans are now bombing, turning what was once a garden—Mesopotamia, the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—into a moonscape.

In April 2003, Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities was virtually destroyed, and 170,000 artifacts—the record of our civilization’s origins—were burned, smashed to pieces or carried off by looters.

As anthropologists, what might we conclude? Human beings are mad, I suppose. Or that they are sane and are going about—literally—the eradication of all evidence of themselves.

Or it could mean that human beings appear to be ready to leave their long period of infancy and are destroying their nest.

I believe we are growing up as a species, leaving our human childhood and moving toward our adulthood. One of the signs that we may be ready to take up the responsibilities of adulthood is that we are dismantling, along with other evidence of our species’ childhood, our religions and their attendant myths.

We seem to be ready to leave religion behind in order to fully create the spiritual bond between ourselves and our spiritual Source. Religion may have been our spiritual school—with rules, regulations, dogmas and doctrines to keep us on the straight and narrow path. Personal spirituality, however, is an adult responsibility—the opportunity to make connection with the divinity on our own.

Among the places we are turning to dust in the same area of the world is the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, in what is now southern Iraq. We are erasing our Creation Myth, the origin story of the three sky-God religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

These three world religions all began with a man named Abraham. Around 4,000 years ago, he made a pact with The One God that he and his descendants would worship The One God alone. In return, The One God would give those descendants a land flowing with milk and honey—what is today more or less the state of Israel.

This dramatic event took place in Ur of the Chaldees, a Sumerian city in what is present-day Iraq, 235 miles southeast of Baghdad. Ur was famous for its huge ziggurat, or stepped tower, which had been completed a century before Abraham was born. The base of the ancient structure is still standing, one of its walls now spray-painted with a big “Semper Fi,” the slogan of the US Marines; a few miles away is the newly constructed Tallil Airbase, where a Burger King and Pizza Hut serve the needs of armed forces personnel.

Over the centuries, Abraham’s descendants grew tremendously and branched out into three parts with three distinct belief systems—and comprising more than half the population of the planet.

Each of these three religious systems has at its heart the notion that it, and only it, is the true religion, worshipping the true One God. The belief that my God is the true God and yours is not has led to enormous problems, not the least of which has been the wholesale torture and slaughter of fellow humans in the name of God.

This has happened all through history, from the dawn of religion. Today this looks like: 



In Bosnia, a fragile peace is holding among warring Serbian Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Muslims 



In East Timor, Christians are slaughtering Muslims



In Indonesia, Muslims and Christians are torturing and putting each other to death



In Iraq, as we know, Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims (each using the same holy book, worshipping the same deity) are beheading and blowing each other up, and both are killing Kurds



In Kashmir, Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering one another



In Kurdistan, Christians and Muslims are murdering one another



In and around Israel, three overlapping apocalyptic stories are playing out within 

Judaism, Christianity and Islam



In Nigeria, Christians are at war with Animists and Muslims



In Pakistan, Sunni and Shiite Muslims are murdering one another in the name of Allah



In the Philippines, Christians are gunning down Muslims



In Sri Lanka, Buddhists are killing Hindus



In Uganda, Animists, Christians and Muslims are at war; Christian rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army are conducting a civil war in the north of Uganda. Their goal is a Christian theocracy whose laws are based on the Ten Commandments. They are 

abducting, enslaving, and/or raping about 2,000 children a year



The challenge for the rest of us is to stay out of harm’s way—not so easy now that country after country is getting the bomb, and with it the wherewithal to destroy all of us.

If we can survive the next few years, we have an opportunity to become truly adult—particularly in our relationship to the spiritual world. Personal spirituality is entirely different from religiosity. Spirituality is the content of religion, or should be under the best of circumstances. Spirituality is the awareness of ourselves as beings living in a multidimensional world, in connection with our creative Source and all other living beings. 

We are growing up. Half a century ago, the mystic Teilhard de Chardin anticipated this new leap in consciousness when he said, “We have been thinking of ourselves as human beings on a spiritual journey—it would be more correct to think of ourselves as spiritual beings on a human journey.”

As that remarkable truth sinks into our collective consciousness, we may see organized religion become increasingly irrelevant. As we take on the responsibility of seeking our own personal spirituality, of finding God on our own, we are doing our part in lessening the human suffering brought about by religious beliefs.



Joseph Dispenza is the award-winning author of a dozen books, most recently, God on Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is a co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and can be reached at Joseph@LifePathRetreats.com