Exploring Life: Web Clips

Scandinavians are content, caring people who don't worry too much about what happens after they die. And they aren't a tad bit religious (well, maybe a tad, but just barely). Phil Zuckerman, sociologist and author of Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (NYU Press), spent 14 months in Scandinavia and witnessed a compassionate way of life and societal well-being. He contrasts Danes and Swedes with the marginally less-contented and less-charitable folks in the United States, who nevertheless show great religious zeal. He asks, “Is a society to be considered moral if its citizens love the Bible a lot (as in the United States), or rather, if its citizens virtually wipe out poverty from their midst (as in Scandinavia)?”

via Learning from Secular Nations | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

A significant part of spirituality is the development of a particular worldview, and that is what we’ve largely been working on. However, it’s vital to point out that a spiritual life is an active life. Since we do not have any mysterious “essence” that makes us more or less spiritual, being spiritual must include having a spiritual practice.

via SacredRiver.org | Spiritual Practice: An Initial Outline.

For this reason Sacred River delineates seven core areas of living, all of which can be profitably approached with a spiritual perspective:

1. Self—fundamental functions of the self, including the biological, psychological, and characterological.

2. Relational—personal friendships, romantic partners, family, and community (e.g. neighbors, colleagues, classmates, etc.).

3. Work—labor in domestic, occupational, religious, and community settings.

4. Epicurean—creative or enriching experiences, such as art, food, music, travel, sport, dance, theater, and so on.

5. Intellectual—development of critical thinking and reason, education, research and analysis, and pedagogy.

6. Sociocultural—interaction between the self and the larger culture; working to influence social change in some meaningful way.

7. Natural—connection to and experience of the natural world, including and beyond human beings.

In reality, all these Spiritual Streams are interconnected via the body and mind; however, developing a spiritual life is not a metaphysical exercise, but ideally becomes an approach to living. In other words, this list is but a convenient way of focusing attention and implementing pragmatic action. At the same time, I am confident that it does a fairly good job of modeling, if not irreducible then at least well-demarcated domains of human life.

via SacredRiver.org | The Streams of a Spiritual Life.

Integral Life.

Ken Wilber.

The Pantheist Credo

The basic concepts comprise:

* Reverence for Nature and the wider Universe.
* Active respect and care for the rights of all humans and other living beings.
* Celebration or our lives in our bodies on this beautiful earth as a joy and a privilege.
* Realism – acceptance that the external world exists independently of human consciousness or perception.
* Strong naturalism, without belief in supernatural realms, afterlives, beings or forces.
* Respect for reason, evidence and the scientific method as our best ways of understanding nature and the Universe.
* Promotion of religious tolerance, freedom of religion and complete separation of state and religion.

Murry

In his chapter “Anchored in Nature” Murry writes:

Naturalism maintains that human beings are products of nature and natural causes. We are simply one of a prolific nature’s multitudinous creations, each unique and special, and all part of one interdependent web. Naturalism also rejects the idea that a human being consists of a separate entity called mind or soul or spirit temporarily dwelling in a physical body. Instead, naturalists believe in the unity of the mind and body, which means there is no life of the individual after physical death. This acceptance of human mortality and transience leads religious naturalists to feel gratitude for life and a commitment to make the one life have as meaningful and as joyful as possible.
In addition to avoiding anthropocentrism, religious naturalism provides a deeper and richer perspective than classical humanism, and it also affirms a positive relationship with science…. (63)

Religious naturalism provides humanism with both a solid philosophical foundation and an inspiring sacred story. It gives humanism a cosmology, a deeper spiritual dimension, an environmental ethic, and a larger vision. Humanism is deeply enriched by grounding it in religious naturalism. I call this melded theological stance humanistic religious naturalism…(72)

Spirituality without Faith

To what extent can secular humanists be spiritual? Can those of us with a more or less naturalistic view of the world, one that doesn’t involve spirits, gods, or ghosts, legitimately seek spiritual experience? There seems a prima facie difficulty here since traditional notions of spirituality often posit a non-physical realm categorically separate from the world described by science. Such dualism is of course the antithesis of naturalism, which understands existence to be of a piece, not split into the natural and supernatural. If for humanists the ultimate constituents of the world don’t include immaterial essences, souls, or spirits, then it might seem that spirituality is off limits.

If you look up the etymology of the word “spiritual,” you’ll find that it derives from the Latin “spiritus,” meaning “wind” or “breath.” Standard dictionary definitions of spiritual contrast it with physical or material, so dualism is more or less built into the ordinary conception of spirituality. But I will argue that just as we can be good without God, we can have spirituality without spirits. Even within the monistic view of the cosmos entailed by a commitment to scientific empiricism, we can avail ourselves of spiritual experience and take an authentically spiritual stance when appreciating our situation as fully physical creatures embedded in a material universe. I hope to show that in its dualism, the traditional notion of spirituality in effect sets up problems of existential alienation and cognitive dissonance that religions have wrestled with, more or less unsuccessfully, for millennia. At a stroke, naturalism cuts these problems off at the root, providing an emotionally satisfying and cognitively unified basis for feeling completely at home in the world.

Many humanists, of course, will not necessarily want to access what I will call the “spiritual response.” Even if I persuade them that there’s nothing conceptually incoherent about a naturalistic spirituality, they might be constitutionally disinclined to indulge in emotions or practices that even temporarily disengage the rational mind set. I won’t argue against such reluctance, since each of us has his or her own tastes in aesthetic experience, and varying “comfort levels” in letting go. But the spiritual response is there for those who wish to experience it. It’s intrinsically rewarding in its own right, and a valuable resource in getting us through tough times.

What would it mean to naturalize spirituality? What precisely would a naturalistic spirituality look like? Before turning to these questions, I want to briefly touch on some basic aspects and functions of spirituality, whatever its type, and then see how traditional spirituality fulfills (or tries to fulfill) these functions. This will set the stage for exploring how naturalism might work as well or better in grounding spiritual experience and in addressing our ultimate concerns.

Introduction/Overview

As you will find, there is a lot of diversity among Religious Naturalists. It is probably fair to say that virtually all of us find meaning, joy, and value in the natural world. We trust our own experience at interpreting that world but realize that our experience can also lead us astray. We therefore look especially to science to resolve differences of opinion in understanding and interpreting the natural world. A consilient understanding of our place within the natural world is pursued as we strive to protect and enrich our home on earth.

The spirituality of Religious Naturalism (spiritual naturalism) includes the idea of a sound emotional life. It also includes the well-winnowed wisdom and morality that have emerged within human cultures over the ages. We don’t take traditional wisdom at face value, however, but explore it in the context of social processes, reason, and the aesthetic insights supplied by art, music and literature.

We sense and appreciate an essence, a grandeur and a magnificence in Nature, in which we take great joy. We are awed by its vastness and complexity. We revere these qualities but do not worship them. Nature is the interrelated conditions and processes for our emergence as living and thinking beings. We respect this context and are committed to an environmental ethic that honors it.

Religious Naturalism hopes to help create a consilience of viewpoints along the lines above, that are accessible to anyone in the world from any culture. As a group of diverse individuals, we may differ on how this is best accomplished, but we are committed to reaching that destination.

• Preface
• I. The Attractive Power of God| John 6:44-No one can come unto Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him
• II. The Nearness of the Kingdom Luke 21:31.—Know that the Kingdom of God is near.
• III. The Angel’s Greeting Luke 1:28—Hail, thou that art highly favoured among women, the Lord is with thee.
• IV. True Hearing Ecclesiasticus 24:30^[1]—Whoso heareth Me shall not be confounded.
• V. The Self-Communication of God John 14:23—If a man love me, he will keep my words: and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.
• VI. Sanctification Luke 10:42—One thing is needful.
• VII. Outward and Inward Morality 1 Corinthians 15:10—The grace of God.

BuddhaNet – Worldwide Buddhist Information and Education Network

BuddhaNet.Net – Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc.

Ranchor Prime – About me

I write about spirituality and work as a freelance illustrator and designer. My first book, Hinduism and Ecology, written in 1990, arose from my work in Britain and India as an adviser to WWF on religion and conservation. This led to the founding of Friends of Vrindavan, an environmental charity dedicated to conserving the sacred forests of Krishna in India, and to helping to establish ARC, the Alliance of Religions and Conservation.