Larry Sanger

So it's the third volume in a three-volume series about the spiritual but not religious movement.

And it really opened my eyes about the history of this sort of spiritualistic thought, the idea of the divine self throughout history.

A lot of this stuff—so, on the one hand, some of it is rooted in what has been called the perennial wisdom, right?

And some of it is just a reaction to the Bible, I think.

Again, as I was saying before, I think it's more—the Bible is used as a—

as a tool, almost, for spiritual enlightenment.

But ultimately, spiritual enlightenment is something which is independent of any particular words of God.

So the mistake, I think, that is being made in this case

is that God is a particular being, right?

And there are good reasons that you can come to independently of believing in the Bible that there is only one God.

Or that there is one supreme God who might have created a number of subordinate spirits, but there has to be one chief, essentially, who is responsible for creation itself.

So, once you've got that on the table, and you think that God would communicate with us, right?

He's not going to communicate in a way that is...

confusing well can be somewhat confusing but it's not going to be fundamentally contradictory in the way that in the way that the body of all purported revelations has been you take all of the different holy scriptures of various religious traditions together and they are very much contradictory right so you can't

And another thing that is very clear if you look at the history of thought, again, this idea of spiritual but not religious, one thing that you realize is that the people who are attracted to these things are...

they seem to be more interested in proving their own wisdom and their own enlightenment than trying to actually discover anything objectively true.

You see what I'm saying?

And

The whole frame of thinking behind the occult, ultimately, esotericism of various kinds, it's continuous with this, again, idea of spiritual but not religious.

And it is basically—the aim is to make ourselves into godlings, essentially.