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Inside The Spiritual Jacuzzi
More people are mixing and matching ideas from various faiths
By Jesse Walker
- Jim Hunt
Page 6 of 6
There is a wide gulf, of course, between someone who merely fine-tunes her Catholicism and someone who replaces the Virgin Mary with the goddess of chaos; between a Jew who mixes milk with meat and a Jew who practices witchcraft. If I'm describing a trend, it's one that covers a wide spectrum of behavior, from the ordinary to the outrageous. But it's the former -- the people who are "adjusting" their traditional beliefs -- who are reshaping society.
The question then becomes how adaptable these revised and reinvented faiths will be in the long haul. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi notes that one function of religious ritual is to bind the generations, and that it's not clear how useful the new combinations are in that regard.
"Most of the people who are inventing these things will not have a second generation," he warns. "They wanted to get the highs out of the individual practice, but they don't do things in the household and families."
That doesn't mean that the spiritual cafeteria itself will inevitably collapse. More likely, the next generation will invent, reinvent, and rediscover its own religious practices, just as its parents are doing now.
A longer version of this article appeared in
the May 2003 issue of Reason magazine.
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