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A Spirituality for Non Believers: Pointers on the Way

A Spirituality for Non Believers: Pointers on the Way

Last updated on: September 2, 2015 at 11:05 am by James Ford

A Spirituality for Non Believers: Pointers on the Way 2015-09-02T11:05:03-07:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

I know a number of people who say the problem is God. Or, rather, the problem is belief in God. The great cascade of human ill follows people following people who say they speak for the divine. I actually don’t see it that way. I find the great problem in religion is belief in some eternal soul and the ills that follow trying to defend what sure looks to me to be an indefensible position.

But, with that I diverge from many atheists and agnostics, I also believe religion is important.

And so as a practical matter I think about Christians who believe in neither heaven nor hell. And closely related, and rather more important to me, I find my thoughts going to Buddhists who do not believe in rebirth. But, really, there is a class of people within the various religions who I find important. I believe they, and others who have grown up with or find themselves profoundly influenced by various religions but cannot accept the usually central tenant that the human personality survives death, reflect a small but important subset of the religious landscape.

I am one among them. We’re a small crowd, but I believe we are walking a path that might prove useful for our sisters and brothers as a larger part of the world ceases to find value in traditional religions.

We are often dismissed as materialists or “man-centered.” Neither is actually true, at least as I see it. First, the dichotomy between material and spiritual is a fiction. Both words have value, particularly if one sees reality can be perceived through either lens. But, also, the world presents in patterns. And those patterns can be figured out, or, so far, they have shown they can be. And so claims, material or spiritual that cannot stand up to close examination should be suspect, and probably should be dropped. Man-centered is just a canard for people who don’t see divine agency, some eruption from elsewhere into our corner of time and space anywhere in one’s actual experience, and therefore have pulled up their socks and gotten on with life.

The technical term for this approach to religion in the West has been liberal religion, or somewhat more rarely but perhaps more accurately, rational religion.

This spirituality is found within an empirical stance in life, a trusting of one’s ability to see what is going on through our human senses and analyzed with our human brains with sufficient accuracy to mean something. Probably the most important distinction for those who take this perspective is seeing how everything alive dies. As one ancient observed “everything made of parts will in time come apart.” It is very hard to argue this isn’t so. And, most tellingly for this group of people, seeing how things that die do not come back to life. Once that egg is broken, as the old children’s rhyme goes, “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

At the same time people throughout history and no doubt well before the dawn of history have recoiled at this bald statement about a reality where we human beings are a very small part of something very big.

Instead they told stories of how it doesn’t actually happen that way. The cosmic stories are all about us. One story is that humans are being tested, and after they die, based upon wildly differing criteria in the different tellings they go to a reward or a punishment that lies outside of time. Another popular story is that ego, that personality, goes through eons of preparation before returning to some mystery beyond time. A major variation on that theme is that the eons of time with the personality occupying different bodies is ultimately a chain of sorrow, and the only hope is to break the chain.

There is, however, little observable evidence in support of these stories. Of course there are many tales of people who have died and come back to tell what happened. But with the advent of modern medical science no one whose brain stem has ceased functioning for a minute or two, that is no one who has truly died, has ever been resuscitated to tell a tale of actually being dead. Leaving it hard to honestly say that any accounts reported from states less than that truly dead are anything but subjective experiences most likely associated with one’s body functions shutting down. Similarly there are accounts of people who claim to remember previous lives. It seems that serious investigation of specific cases always leads to the possibility of simpler explanations ranging from constructed memories based upon encounters with people associated with that “prior” life to outright fraud.

My point here isn’t an attempt at a point-by-point refutation of these various claims to an ego or personality separated from the body. Rather I’m making an assertion that a reasonable person witnessing the course of life and death of all biological creatures, say who has seen someone die, and who has looked up into the night sky with any rudimentary knowledge of the size and complexity of the universe, and has experienced our particularly insignificant part in that universe, is not compelled by any degree of intellectual honesty to believe there is any continuity of the human personality beyond the breaking down of that individual’s bodily functions.

I am speaking of those who get the reality that the human mind is inextricable from the functions of our bodies. When we let go of the idea, hopeful, or fearful of some part of us that is not of this world, then we are confronted with the miracle of our existence as it presents. We are invited into the reality of our ability to see and to hear and to taste and to touch and to smell, and most amazingly, wonderfully, magically, for us to order those experiences in ways that not only make sense to us, but are sufficiently congruent with reality to allow us to navigate our lives and to survive for a period of time. In short, as the Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian Forrest Church once observed, we know we are alive and we know we will die. And we have some hint this is something past wonderful. So, what next?

We now live in a time and place, at least many of us do, where we will not be punished for not believing the human personality survives death. Or, rather we won’t be punished for saying so aloud. Some insults on occasion. A hint we shouldn’t really be allowed to sit on juries here or there. A small wish we, and our close cousins who spend a fair amount of time rubbing noses in the conflicts with reality of the majority’s statements about reality, would just go away. But, people aren’t lining up to kill us. At least not in many places.

So, what now? I suspect if Europe is any example we are on a trajectory that will see a dying off of much of organized religion. People will simply get on with their lives, without giving it all much thought. Although I fear many may simply slip into those lives of quiet desperation Henry Thoreau once wrote about.

At the same time we human beings live by metaphor. That is it looks to be one of the primary ways people find a sense of place, that we experience our human need for “meaning,” is through stories. The great religions have always had many tasks. Among them is to create order, to establish who is in and who is out. This is not always the most attractive part of religion. And if that were gone, no great loss as best I can tell. But, there is more to religion, always has been. It’s what many people are trying to point to when they say they’re spiritual if not religious.

And here I find those Christians who do not believe in heaven or hell and Buddhists who do not believe in the classical definitions of karma and rebirth.

And I recall Mary Oliver’s words.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And perhaps I have an answer. One, at least.

Here we find an invitation into the reformulation of ancient stories, dropping the bits that are not really useful, but looking for those parts that have in fact helped people to focus in and to see what it means to live in a world where we will all die.

Here we’re invited to find our one wild and precious life within a Christianity where hell and heaven are the things we create in our own lives. Here, a Buddhism where each intention and action taken this moment creates a new life in the next. These are religions worth exploring, unpacking, taken as maps into the depths of our hearts, and compasses to guide us out into the world.

And everything challenges.

And everything, passing, sad, terrible, beautiful, wild, is home.

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