The BahГЎвЂ™Г principle of the unity of science and religion holds that religious truth, like scientific truth (or truth in general), is relative and progressive. This modern dilemma is addressed by several of the fundamental principles of the historically recent BahГЎвЂ™Г Faith. * On the other hand, most of the traditional religious forms, attitudes and concepts now appear obsolete and irrelevant. On the one hand, the highly efficient science he has so successfully developed serves in part to deepen his moral and spiritual needs-needs that science alone cannot satisfy. Thus, modern man is caught in a serious dilemma with regard to fundamental spiritual questions. But if contemporary man turns to religion for enlightenment, he too often finds dogmatism, which his mind cannot accept, or mindless emotionalism, which is not worthy of acceptance.ДЇrom the modern perspective, each of the great religions appears as a system which was largely successful in satisfying the spiritual and social needs of a certain people or culture during a previous era of history, but which is no longer adequate to meet the needs of humanity in the present critical period of history. Indeed, hardly at any other time of history or in any other culture has the sense of spiritual inadequacy been so acute as is currently the case in industrialized, high-technology, Western culture. The sense of incompleteness and the conscious need for transcendence, for contact with some deep spiritual reality, are widespread in our society. Yet, science and technology have not given man the sense of wholeness he has so long been seeking, even though they have given him a vastly increased power to control and manipulate his physical environment. Thus, traditional religion has come to abhor and fear change while science thrives upon it. Whereas the religions, for the most part, continue to press harder and harder their mutually contradictory claims each to possess an absolute and unchanging truth which admits no compromise, science is based squarely on the idea that truth is relative and progressive, that what is useful and productive in the realm of ideas and techniques today may be obsolete and unproductive tomorrow. The changes in modern-day society are being wrought primarily by a highly efficient, powerful, and established science which owes little or nothing to established religion. Moreover, most of the traditional systems of religious belief appear now to have crystallized into rigid social patterns and dogmatic attitudes of thought and belief with which the modern ethos of rapid social and intellectual change seems incompatible. However, the revealed religions also appear, at least at first glance, to exhibit a disturbing degree of difference in their respective views of the exact nature of this spiritual reality and of how man should relate properly to it. Historically, the revealed religions would seem to be united in affirming, each in its own particular way, that there is an objectively real spiritual dimension to the universe, and that this spiritual dimension of existence is for man the most fundamental and the most important aspect of reality. The revealed religions have been major sources of such salvation concepts, spiritual philosophies, and spiritual disciplines.

The process is often described as one of вЂњsalvationвЂќ, of being lifted above the condition of unregeneration (or spiritual death) to the plane of a superior reality. By this process, he defines what he truly is by becoming what he most truly can be.

Such a process is usually regarded by its exponents as the basic purpose of manвЂ™s existence, for through it man is seen to acquire or develop what is essential and universal, and not merely accidental and local, within the range of human potentiality. The concomitant to this belief is the idea that man must undergo some process of completion, some discipline of self-definition.

Though the generating impulse for each of these systems is undoubtedly related to numerous particular cultural and psychological factors, there runs through virtually all of them the common idea that man is not, in his naturally given human state, whole or complete. Human history has witnessed the birth, proliferation, and death of countless religions, belief systems, and philosophies.

Loop hero orb of unity