256 religious revolution now
One misstep is to interpret the desire for a greater life as a self-
deifi cation of humanity. Having lost faith in a God who intervenes in
history to rescue us but having kept faith in the view of the self that the
struggle with the world has inspired, we may be tempted to take our-
selves, collectively, as proxies for God. Th ere have been many examples
of this misdirection in the history of philosophy and of politics, none
more straightforward than Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity.”
Our task, however, is not to worship ourselves; it is to change ourselves.
Collective self- worship poses a direct threat to the transformative pro-
gram and conceals the evil within us and the ambivalence to life and to
one another by which we are riven.
Closely connected with the self- deifi cation of mankind is the moral
impulse that I have called Prometheanism. It interprets the desire for a
greater life as a quest for power. It takes its most perverse form when
the power sought is power over others rather than a collective empow-
erment of humanity. Its strongest and most terrible motive, however,
is not power; it is the use of power to deny the truth about our mortal-
ity, our groundlessness, and our insatiability. In denying this truth,
whether directly or indirectly, it is false to who we are. In committing
us, for the sake of this denial, to a contest among ourselves for ad-
vantage, it corrupts both our individual and our collective eff orts at
ascent.
Another false path is the one that lies at the center of both the salva-
tion religions and the secular programs of liberation: the placement of
the supreme good in the future, with the result that we are estranged
from life in the present. Th e essential logic of this deviation is mistak-
enly to treat such estrangement as an inevitable consequence or condi-
tion of our transcendence over context. If the religion of the future
were to give in to this temptation, it would be pointless; it would reen-
act a decisive failing of the religions of the past.
Yet a further mistake is to confi ne the development of the religion of
the future to the model of religious revolution exemplifi ed by the for-
mative periods of the religions representative of the three orientations
to life that have exercised paramount infl uence for the last two and a
half millenniums. Th e indispensable combination of visionary teach-
ing and exemplary action is then falsely associated with a practice of
limited relevance to our present condition: the individual teacher who