Philosophical materialism may be contradictory, but it's far more balanced to develop meaning out of personal experience than to chase perennialist metaphysics, wherein all is a vague appeal to religion-in-general -- a relativist position that is dishonest and contradictory.

For years I've been developing a spirituality that is materialist in its fundamental claims about reality. As far as I can see, religions and philosophies that claim Truth rests in the common themes in all religions can't meaningfully explain significant differences between them.

It simply seems dishonest to say that Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc., contain enough in common that we can find some infinitely-reducible Nostrum of Man which leads beyond the Cosmos to "ultimate truth".

These are categories of cranks and people not rooted in life.

To look for a universal singular truth through world religion & philosophy is to unfairly abstract man from the environments & worlds he grows up in. As man, we are not merely Man, but English Man, Hungarian Man, Japanese Man. What matters to man first is Home, which is material.

Man as Man may yearn for beauty, but the English Man alone knows the wonder of the rays of light that penetrate a peaceful wood in the Springtime of his home. No gods needed, no vague cogitations necessary. Immediacy. Freshness. Youth. Vigour. Life. It's all there in this world.

People say "it's not enough to have just this world". We need gods. We need a vague spiritual Something. I don't know. I think this urge comes from a subconscious need to create metaphors that distance ourselves from our direct experience of the world. It's a shame.

I feel a profound "spirituality", even a sort of animism of deep life, when I walk in the woods. I don't believe there is a God, but perhaps a strange breath of life that permeates the universe. To me, this is deeply beautiful. I don't need Theories of Forms and angelic choirs.

You can't say "retvrn to tradition", then deny the return to some specific ideal of the past, and instead offer a misty perennialism and "objective truths" (which nobody can agree on). Tradition as universal does not exist. Marsilio Ficino was wrong. Neoplatonism is wrong.