What is the connection of spirituality to morality? Is there one at all necessarily? They tend to get lumped in as if one entails the other. It doesn't. I think a genuine spirituality doesn’t have to have an attached morality. Although an evolved spirituality would result in moral behaviour it is probably a mark of its maturity and effectiveness that it doesn’t prescribe moral imperatives. If it is worthy of its name then the appropriate morality follows from it without enforcement. There is no need for imposition and the associated do-s and dont-s. It quite simply works in the way anything works: like when music works or relationships work, or an appliance works, or medication; it does its job and no more needs to be said.

If it doesn’t work then the spirituality is flawed. All traditional religions don’t qualify therefore. They seem to cause as many problems as they solve. They are now past their natural usefulness. I suspect in their dying days, years, decades or centuries they will lapse deeper into fundamentalism, trying to hold ever more tightly on to something in its death throes. This is seen already in the world with rising “Islamicism” and the appointing of a new pope committed to old ways (still against safe sex, against homosexuality, against the emancipation of women and so on). It’s as if these great cultures somewhere in their collective soul sense the end and revert more staunchly to the roots of what they know when really they have ceased to do the job they were initially designed to do. How can flying planes into tall buildings or exploding bombs in public places with the intent to kill indiscriminately have anything whatsoever to do with a coherent morality? Once that starts the plot has been lost.

I think enforcement has never been a great way to get people to do what they should do. It is understandable, the need to coerce, certainly. The thinking is that in the absence of the strong arm of enforcement everything would degenerate. But I would say that is as much a view lacking in confidence and true moral certitude. Coercion is failure. We need a world where its people simply do the right thing. They do it because it is innate to them instinctively as well as being intellectually coherent. They know its rightness by its good application. This is the essence of my belief in the connection of the spiritual with the moral.