Incredible

The word 'incredible' means 'unbelievable'; credo means 'I believe' in Latin. I report today that I do not believe in the spiritual realm.

At this point, I suppose some of you will give up on me in horrid (from Latin horribilis, 'bristling with fear') indignation. I can imagine the cries of, "Yes we knew you were a heretic all along!"

But I sincerely do not believe that there is a spiritual realm as distinct from a material, secular, or temporal realm (a caveat follows later). I do not think that any of the world's great religions, let alone mine, have ever made the distinction in the way post-Enlightenment so-called Christians sometimes do.

In the Good Book, which is where many of my readers of all credulities and dispositions orient from, the secular is seen as that which exists in the present age, in a fixed time, in that slice of eternity which is sequential and bound. The temporal is much the same. And the material is just the physical manifestation of the immaterial. To think that you can separate them from the spiritual is like saying that my body does not include my kidneys or my liver. Or like saying that my mind exists outside and apart from my body.

I believe, however, in the material, secular and temporal realms as plausibly and possibly distinct among themselves. One age succeeds another, one nation is not another, one substance is distinct from another. But to me, they are all part of the 'spiritual realm'. And if that realm is everything, then it is not a realm (from Old French reaume, 'kingdom, political unit'), but the cosmos, the university of all.