Exploring Life: Web Clips

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.

Religion may have evolved because of its ability to help people exercise self-control (12/31/2008)

Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.