Well, To have 'faith' in the Unified Field by virtue of spiritual experience would not necessarily be a 'theism'. Different than 'belief' it could be is just how the watch mechanism works as fluctuating Being in experience.
Transcendental meditationists for instance, transcendentalism, like the American and old European transcendentalists by experience 'sans-diety' and and free from a theism go way back. Not theology or philosophy but experience. Yes, the human nervous system as a reflector of Being goes way back in time. Ideology, separate from spiritual experience, -ism with the zealotry of religious people and their held 'idea' forms of 'belief' about the world goes way back too. ..”If only you would just be with us and believe in Allah, or Jesus..” Spiritual people who really know other wisely by experience tend to separate and just go under ground faced with such stupid inquisition. ..in time and history. Even now this is the very conflict between the religious in TM and practitioners of meditation. “Do you believe like us?” If not, then no badge to get in... regardless. With some vindictiveness, like written within the TM guidelines, for letting/getting in the Domes to meditate with the group the 'religious' destroy the 'spiritual' experience in time, again and again. Likewise, the meditators in TM are mostly gone now. Look at Rick Archer's Buddha-at-the-gas-pump. Batgap.com . The old TM'ers he has interviewed though they meditate are mostly gone and likely not admissible at all as spiritual as they are by what are now the policy guidelines that still effect the access to group meditations in the Domes and Peace Palaces of the movement by what are administrative rigid ideological guideline of some religious of TM . Evidently History repeats itself real fast, -JaiGuruYou ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raph...@yahoo.com> wrote : New Statesman has a review of a new book that argues that atheism has a long history stretching back to the Ancient Greeks so isn't the product of modern science its current advocates maintain. The review was mostly favourable but did point out that atheists of old were far from being the full-on materialists we have today. Anyway this passage amused me : Yet it is possible, even in the light of this book, to interpret ancient atheism in a rather different way. The more we know about those philosophers whom the ancients described asatheoi, the less like contemporary sceptics they seem. Epicurus, for instance, though he featured in Sextus’s list of famous atheists, not only believed in gods but was an initiate of the local mysteries, and went as far as to demand sacrifices from his followers “for the care of my holy body”. His materialist convictions were not, as his 17th-century admirers liked to imagine, bred of a scientific cast of mind, but of the precise opposite: a conviction that they would help him to attain inner peace. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is probably not Richard Dawkins but rather Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
