riorities--indeed most of the underlying assumptions--of the international
development agenda been determined so far by materialistic world views to
which only small minorities of the earth's population subscribe? How much
weight can be placed on a professed devotion to the principle of universal
participation that denies the validity of the participants' defining
cultural experience?

It may be argued that, since spiritual and moral issues have historically
been bound up with contending theological doctrines which are not
susceptible of objective proof, these issues lie outside the framework of
the international community's development concerns. To accord them any
significant role would be to open the door to precisely those dogmatic
influences that have nurtured social conflict and blocked human progress.
There is doubtless a measure of truth in such an argument. Exponents of
the world's various theological systems bear a heavy responsibility not
only for the disrepute into which faith itself has fallen among many
progressive thinkers, but for the inhibitions and distortions produced in
humanity's continuing discourse on spiritual meaning. To conclude,
however, that the answer lies in discouraging the investigation of
spiritual reality and ignoring the deepest roots of human motivation is a
self-evident delusion. The sole effect, to the degree that such censorship
has been achieved in recent history, has been to deliver the shaping of
humanity's future into the hands of a new orthodoxy, one which argues that
truth is amoral and facts are independent of values.

So far as earthly existence is concerned, many of the greatest
achievements of religion have been moral in character. Through its
teachings and through the examples of human lives illumined by these
teachings, masses of people in all ages and lands have developed the
capacity to love. They have learned to discipline the animal side of their
natures, to make great sacrifices for the common good, to practise
forgiveness, generosity, and trust, to use wealth and other resources in
ways that serve the advancement of civilization. Institutional systems
have been devised to translate these moral advances into the norms of
social life on a vast scale. However obscured by dogmatic accretions and
diverted by sectarian conflict, the spiritual impulses set in motion by
such transcendent figures as Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and
Muhammad have been the chief