Preferring the Poor

If we believe that science and religion are incompatible

we will live in one world

and pray and believe in another

the Newtonian view of the world

did not include the human person –

everything was mechanical

and even when the new physics gave us a dynamic cosmos

religious consciousness was stuck in a medieval cosmos:

a perfect/immutable/unchanging/hierarchical/

anthropocentric world

evolution may be a painful movement forward

marked by dramatic suffering and losses

the losses cannot be ignored

but neither can the progress

from hunter-gatherer

to mythic religious empires

to pluralistic informational societies

spiritual regress happened with Nietzsche’s

“will-to-power”

which is not “will” in the psychological sense

nor power in the sociological sense –

for Nietzsche will-to-power

is ontological/basic reality/the way things are

spiritual progress happened after the death

of Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection in 1691

when his Abbott published Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God

and it exploded around the world

spiritual progress also occurred with Gustavo Gutierrez

and his radical theology of the poor –

theology from the perspective of poor people not victors

the polar opposite of Nietzsche’s will-to-power

and mirrored in the Second Vatican Council’s

“preferential option for the poor.”