Analysis and Commentary on the Media's and Religions' Divergent Approaches to Transcendence

The media and religion have diametrically opposed approaches to our need for a transcendent dimension to life.

One task common to virtually all religions is to connect us to some higher or transcendent dimension of being. We humans seem to have a powerful, perhaps even fundamental, craving for something larger and transcendent in our lives. No matter what our circumstances, we demand that life amount to more than just rooting around in the dirt for a potato.

Possibly this urge can be explained on the basis of human biology. Essentially the same brain that enabled Einstein to formulate the general theory of relativity is present in the simplest peasant and the most primitive tribesman. A consciousness this powerful cries out to be utilized—needs to be fed something. And the mundane details of most people's daily existence are not typically in themselves sufficiently nourishing.

Traditionally, our craving for something more satisfying to this dimension of ourselves has propelled us toward religion. But the same urge to find more meaning than what appears in the superficial aspects of our lives has also spurred our discoveries in science and mathematics, as well our endeavors in the arts. In this sense, religion, science, and other forms of knowledge are not nearly as different from one another as some of our late twentieth-century prejudices would make them out to be. And it may thus be only natural that a number of today's astrophysicists are coming to take a religious view of the universe. Knowledge appears to have stopped being the enemy of religion—if it ever truly was.

However, a different kind of challenge to religion, and perhaps a more serious one in the long run, is being posed by today's media.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

More Specifics

The media present a realm beyond most people's experience or contact as the most significant dimension of contemporary life.

Overvaluing the "media world" can profoundly diminish those of us whose frame of reference is the real world.

We've conjured up a set of mythical and iconic proxies to symbolically represent us.

Today's celebrity system represents a potent form of secular mythology.


	The media present a realm beyond most people's experience or contact as the most significant dimension of contemporary life.
	Overvaluing the "media world" can profoundly diminish those of us whose frame of reference is the real world.
	We've conjured up a set of mythical and iconic proxies to symbolically represent us.
	Today's celebrity system represents a potent form of secular mythology.