If secularism banished God from the heavens, spirituality has found God among us. In fact, according to current spiritual thought, He is in everything around us. The Creator is no longer sacred; the creature is. We are told our self is sacred, the earth is sacred, animals are sacred and so on. In his book Your Sacred Self, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer writes that he wants to introduce us to "that glowing celestial light and to let you know the wonder of having your sacred self triumph over the demands of the ego self, which wants more than anything to hold you back."2 Such thinking attributes the glory that should be reserved for God to His creation, just as Paul described: "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles" (Rom. 1:22-23).

Contemporary spirituality defines God as an equal-opportunity employer, the universal source of energy, waiting to be tapped by all of us. What we believe is not important; the challenge is to understand ourselves in light of this higher power that is already within us. If we need forgiveness, we must simply grant it to ourselves; we have broken the commands of no personal God. Since there is no God to offend, there is no God whose forgiveness we must seek. The craze is self-salvation by self-knowledge.

Imagine feeling guilty and yet being committed to a religion that teaches that good and evil do not exist! World War II veteran Glenn Tinder tells how his conscience was deeply troubled when he shot two Japanese soldiers in the war. Though he thought they were armed, he was wrong; the deed haunted him. But he had been brought up in the Christian Science religion, which has many resemblances to New Age thought: evil does not exist, sickness is an illusion and forgiveness from God is unnecessary. Prior to his war experience, Tinder thought of God as "merely the one who had created a good universe and then conveniently disappeared, leaving the human race to 'know' the truth about it and enjoy it." But as he thought about the men he had killed, the word murder entered his mind. He knew he had committed an offense: "Now unexpectedly, an angry God -- or at least a divine and implacable law, menacing and offended -- towered over me. Christian Science gave me no help at all: denying evil, it had nothing to say about forgiveness."3 For decades Tinder sought the truth and eventually embraced Christ who forgave his sin and cleared his conscience.

Counselors confirm that simply telling ourselves we are fine and need no forgiveness from God will not mute the stifling feelings of guilt. Medical researchers have long realized that people use much psychic energy to neutralize the troubled conscience and the distracted mind that come from the nagging suspicion that all is not well with us.

The German philosopher Nietzsche faced the implication of disbelieving in a transcendent God; indeed, he asserted that God was dead, killed at the hands of man. Therefore he asked: "How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was the holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we Ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?"4