Haroon Aziz

The paper identifies the major spiritual problem created by imperialism and the opportunities it has unintentionally created for religious education through its own aerial platform, viz big-data cyberspace. Imperialism in its greed for materialistic power rapidly expanded globalization to the extent that the global migration of skills, expertise, cultures, languages, and religions defy their control by imperialism. In its western centres, imperialism has neglected the mental and spiritual health of its populations and has replaced spirituality with hedonism, egotism, and consumer culture, which it exports even to its periphery as cultural imperialism. In pursuit of rabid capital accumulation it has placed hardware devices in civilian hands to sell software applications as social media, which has become the social power of people, beyond its control. This newfound social power of the people presents opportunities for the promotion of religious education to people who are starving for spiritual fulfilment in the midst of the oversupply of worldly goods. The technological devices, with possibilities of real-time and simultaneous communications across international boundaries, compel the development of new methodologies, new quality assurances, and new contents, which are unique and original. As knowledge is the social property of all of humanity and not the private property of individuals, states and religious organizations have to collaborate in the transfer of beneficial knowledge, skills, expertise, cultures, languages, and religions – with tolerance and understanding. It is a world where the walls of universities are metaphorically falling down and the world has become a global campus. This demands the creation of new adaptive education models in which the distinction between learners and educators is blurred. In spite of the intimidating edifice of globalization, education needs to maintain the basics of cognition, viz., language, learning, memory, intelligence, and thinking as well as the positive emoting abilities of learners/educators. Spirituality needs to be redefined, in modern scientific terms, as the natural realm of ideas, cognition, sensory inputs, emotions, perceptions, and beliefs. It is culture-specific and interpenetrated in the cortico-thalamic processes of the brain.