Question You speak a lot about man being made in the image of God, and having the divine spark of reason, that sets us apart from the beasts. Do you believe also in the spirituality of man, being another distinct quality of man? Spirituality being our personal ability to communicate with God, through prayer and study, that gives us motivation, and inspiration, in a sense the Holy Spirit?

LaRouche: Well, let me put it this way. You will never see a chimpanzee praying to God. Now, the significance of that is, that you have to be human. And you have to be human in a very distinct way. In the way we've defined creativity.

What is spirituality?

Spirituality is a word which, when properly used, connotes creativity. Connotes man in the image of the Creator. Man acting as in the image of the Creator. Man making discoveries. Changing the universe! Changing the course of history! Changing the conditions of mankind! Acting for God, by discovering universal principles, including Classical artistic principles, which are also universal physical principles. Developing these principles, which puts the power of these principles in the hands of man. And once the will of man, the creative will of man, has engaged and adopted these discovered principles, mankind is able to change the universe.

And that is man's essential worship of God.

The other thing is the reflection upon the nature of universality of the universe, and the nature of God. For Christians, also another thing is involved. The question of the personality of Christ.

European civilization was being destroyed by the Romans. This consolidation of the Roman Empire occurred under Augustus, and Christ was born, under Augustus, who was a real pig. A worse pig was the Emperor Tiberius, on whose order Christ was crucified. Through his son-in-law, or his legal son-in-law under Roman law, Pontius Pilate, who was ordered to execute Christ, at a time that Tiberius was giving the order from Sicily, upon the Isle of Capri, on which he was living.

You say, what is the mission of Christ? The mission of Christ was to save European civilization, and world civilization. As is said. As made clear in the gospel of John, and by the epistles of Paul. It did!

What did Christianity do? It took the Platonic heritage, as made clear by John's gospel, made clear by the epistles of Paul, and, despite the Roman Empire, which is one of the greatest evils, Romanticism, which dominated Europe until the 15th Century, from 200 B.C. to approximately 1400 A.D., dominated European civilization, and beyond. Mankind was saved, from total degradation, by the persisting influence of the Christian mission [...]

And therefore, what we mean by spirituality, from that standpoint, is that the quality which we call cognition, the ability to see beyond the sensual, to discover the universal principles which control the universe, and to utilize these principles to control the universe, is an expression of a principle which is known as spirituality.

For example. The dialogues of Plato, including the supplementary one, the Laws, are called in theology, spiritual exercises. We had a recent friend of ours, who's a Cardinal, who died of cancer recently, a Cardinal from [  ], who wrote a book which was based on a series of presentations he gave at the Vatican on the order of John Paul II. The book is on spiritual exercises. It was on a certain part of his life experience, but it was the method of spiritual exercises. And the book is available, and so forth, but he died, unfortunately. He was the head of Justicia et Pax, and was a Cardinal, who was considered at one point, a potential candidate to succeed John Paul II, as pope. And then he died. A great friend of mine.

And so, the spiritual exercise, which is actually the principle of discovery, is the dialectical principle, the Socratic dialectical principle of Plato. It's the principle of Paul. It's the principle of the Gospel of John. And this principle was saved, for mankind, by Christianity.

It also played a part in Judaism, through the radiation of Philo of Alexandria. It was reflected in the tradition through Spain, of Moses Maimonides. It was reflected explicitly by Moses Mendelssohn, in Germany in the 18th Century. It's also in certain parts of the Abassid dynasty, the Islam of the Abassid dynasty, the same principle.

That is, you have three powers in the universe. The power which we call the abiotic; the power which represents life, as an active principle, or what life represents as an active principle; and the power of cognition, which is called spirituality. So, therefore, how can you pray to God, unless you are in turn with God? How can you speak to somebody, whose language you don't speak? You must speak that language. The language of spirituality, is creativity.

The problem today, is you have cults, which called themselves religions, which have rituals, which have nothing to do with God, but they have to do with a denial of God, by saying, "I've got an in with little guy under the floorboards. And I've got it fixed so that he's going to make me rich, and my enemies poor. And ‘God, please, make my enemies suffer! God, please get those black people wiped out; I can't stand them any more!'"

You know, that kind of prayer. That's what you've got. That is not Christianity. That is something else, and there's too much of it around.

But there is really a quality of spirituality, which is perfectly understandable scientifically. Why not? I mean this is our universe! Why should spirituality be something outside the universe? Why should it be some special deal, with something under the floorboards of the universe? It is not.

The problem here is, with the idea of prayer, is, most people don't know what they're praying to. Or why.

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