Toward a truly suprarational and transformational spirituality

I tend to be biased against religion, which usually makes my interaction with religious people difficult, if not impossible. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother also came down hard on religion, with Sri Aurobindo going so far as to say:

There are two for whom there is hope, the man who has felt God’s touch and been drawn to it and the sceptical seeker and self-convinced atheist; but for the formularists of all the religions and the parrots of free thought, they are dead souls who follow a death that they call living.

But of course they also acknowledged the role religion had played in providing humanity with a moral foundation. Their vision encompassed the past, the present and the future, and as a result they were able to maintain a certain detachment that would allow them to criticize religion without anger, ill-will or resentment. The rest of us are nowhere near that level of enlightenment. I generally have a hard time tolerating religious apologetics and the like, which always strike me as shallow and superficial, based on very weak intellectual foundations (and hardly any authentic spiritual ones). I particularly have little or no tolerance for religious justifications or apologetics for sexism.

I guess I am just reminding myself that this is something that I need to work on — my biases against religion and the anger and ill-will they generate within me, which is an obstacle to my own self-giving. May God’s grace help me overcome these weaknesses. My Anti-Religion Biases from The Stumbling Mystic by ned