Religious value systems around the world help to mediate between the individual and the community. But no such system mediates between conflicting individual and community issues on one side and broader global concerns on the other. In recent years, some spiritual leaders have attempted to transcend religious differences, going beyond their boundaries to unite traditions. However, except for those few, the community at large has no idea about relating with the world outside. For most people, we are ‘us’ and they are ‘them’. We do not have to treat ‘them’ as we treat ‘us’. The world is thus conditioned to live on the basis of this exclusive ‘us’ ‘them’ duality. Now, modern science and technology have reduced the world to a global village. The spread of democracy has also contributed immensely to enlightened ways of governance that promote pluralism and equal rights. The principle of equal rights requires a worldview that recognizes all others as equals, regardless of the other’s religious or moral views. Limited identities based upon religion, culture, nation, gender, ethnicity, or race must be secondary to the over-arching human identity. Failing that, communities exist in distrust of each other in an uneasy peace. Today, limited identities run supreme. Traditional thinking regards spiritual development as synonymous with religious development and defines people and communities accordingly. We are too caught up in the religious paradigm, unable to think deeply enough to break free of its clutches to affect a paradigm shift. Either we teach religion or we exile it completely. We totally fail to notice that between barren secularism and segregated religious ideas, there is the third choice of teaching everyone in one integrated educational system human values based upon core spirituality which has the potential to unify us all in one global family. Spiritual development is of prime importance in today’s dangerous world. This article presents a structural analysis of religion and attempts to show that the traditional approach to practicing and teaching religion is divisive, while spirituality is not. Broadly speaking, what follows is the map to a possible human journey from the supremacy of limited identities to that of the global human identity.
