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Spiritual Humanism

  Spiritual Humanism can be thought of as an extension of Religious Humanism. The Spiritual Humanist Manifesto is simular to the Humanist Manifesto I , but has no real connection to the more recent Humanist Manifestos.  Spiritual Humanism does not call itself an atheist philosophy and prefers not to be called that, but it can be thought of as a agnostic philosophy.  Spiritual humanist believe in the spirituality of love and we have faith in humanity.  We take our ethical morality from humanism but we expand on it by seeing the spirituality that is within everyone. We see God or the Goddess as being wthin all of us. We see all life as being equal, with a basic equal right to be on this earth. We will never waste our time finding reasons or explaining reasons why another person's beliefs are wrong, everybody has a right to their own beliefs and philosophies.  We believe that love is the greatest spirituality and that love can heal all things.  We find great pleasure in studying other philosophies and religions, not to find what is wrong with them, but to learn from them, for we believe we can learn from every other person or any other life form in the universe.

To learn a little more about Spiritual Humanism please read
the Spiritual Humanist Manifesto

To learn a little more about Humanism please read
HUMANISM Why, What and What For

  The following is taken from writings of the American Humanist Society:

A Humanist Perspective on Spirituality

Humanist spirituality! To some people, this must sound like an oxymoron. Isn't spirituality the very essence of everything that humanism denies? they might ask. The answer is, of course, that it all depends. It depends on what we mean by it.

It's true that what most people appear to mean when they use the word 'spirituality' is quite foreign to the philosophy of humanism. For example, if they're talking about some sort of spiritual realm existing parallel to nature they'll have to count us out. We likewise find quite unacceptable, in this age of scientific enlightenment, the persistence of a belief in a master spirit or some sort of spiritual force outside of nature capable of interfering in the course of history. Or some spiritual source of absolute truth and mora-lity that can be tapped into directly by human intuition, as the Transcendentalists believe. (Would that it were that easy!)

Nor can we accept the belief in spirits such as souls that enter and depart the human body at birth and death. Equally incredible to us is the notion of a mysterious injection of something called spirit into the evolutionary process at the point of humankind's emergence. Or the notion that the Bible or any other holy book is the cre-ation of some mysterious spiritual world or entity. So if any of those things is believed to be the source or content of spirituality, then clearly, hu-manists have nothing to say about the subject.

We are not the first to question such things. The Roman poet Lucretius, in the First Century BCE, derided these ideas. He wrote:

For surely it is utter madness to combine

A mortal thing with an eternal, and opine
That both can feel and act as one, what more detached
Can we imagine, more repugnant, more ill-matched,
Than an immortal and a mortal thing together
Trying to stay united through the fiercest weather?

Like many of the great thinkers of Classical times, modem humanists reject all such dualisms. For us, it is not God, but the imagination that created the concept of God that is spiritual. It is not the Bible as a source of truth that is spiritual for us. It is the beauty and clarity of the poetry within it, and the oral tradition that preserved it throughout pre-history.

This brings me to what the concept of spiritual-ity means to humanists. It is what Lucretius was talking about when he said, in yet another poem, four lives we borrow from each other, And we, like runners, pass along the torch of life.  Spiritual-ity represents the potential of those evolved capacities that mark us off from other animals: all the humanly-created aspects of life that we pass along to the next generation.  Like our genes, it is a natural product of evolution and it is what defines our species as human.

We see spirituality as a capacity that has evolved within human beings as a direct result of the evolution of language. No outside force or entity placed it there. That simply is not the way that evolution works.  When we speak of spiritual-ity we are referring to all the wonders that followed from the emergence of a uniquely human consciousness: a consciousness gradually brought into being by one particular species of upright primates, as they reamed to manipulate symbols. Symbolic language made possible, for the first time in evolution, the sharing experience: experience removed in space and time from the current mo-ment. Only by developing language out of primi-tive animal communication could our apelike an-cestors begin to build mental categories such as "self/other", "near/far", "friend/foe", "prey/predator", and "then/now". Thus it was only through the invention and continuous refinement of language that there came to be a human consciousness as distinct from mere animal awareness of outside stimuli.

To explain this great achievement of self-con-sciousness there is no longer any need to imagine it as a mysterious gift from some all-knowing and unknowable force beyond nature. Science now enables us to understand it as simply the natural evolutionary result of the development of memory and imagination within our species and within each individual human; a memory and imagination initiated and then greatly expanded by language. Nothing more but nothing less than that!

With the onset of self-consciousness came an emerging sense of the past and future. It is not only that we, alone among animals, became recorders and transmitters of the past. We, alone among animals, became anticipators and visionaries of the future. In other words, we, alone among animals, developed the potential for spirituality.

Humankind is unique in all of evolution for one reason only. It is because, so far, we are the only species capable of manipulating ideas. This is because ideas are impossible without symbolic language.  Feelings we share with all sentient life, but not abstract thinking.  It is not our emotions that make us spiritual beings, nor is it wiping our minds clear of thoughts. It is, instead, those very thoughts that define us as spiritual animals.  It is the world of ideas and ideals and artifacts, that imagination and memory and reason have enabled us to create and pass on from generation to gene-ration, that represents spirituality for humanists.

By ideals I mean the values underlying our institutions. They are the principles and goals guiding our organized ways of governing, of producing and sharing resources, of demonstrating reverence, of protecting and socializing our children, of caring for our sick and old, and of administering our laws and remembering where we came from. By artifacts I mean our objects of art such as our paintings, our recorded music, our books, our buildings, and the products of our science and our technology. Altogether this amounts to a second level of environment a humanly created one. We call it culture. Culture is our spiritual world, and it is a distinctively human creation.

No other animals create and transmit culture. This is not because animals like chimpanzees and dolphins lack family feeling or communicative sound systems or even intuition or crude concepts. What they do lack is the symbolic language in which to encase all this.

What does it mean to be, as far as we know, the only spiritual animals in the universe? First of all, it means that we are capable of imagining, and bringing into being, realities not currently given in the physical surroundings. An example is the arts which likely emerged very early in what we call cultural evolution. Drawings, stories, poems and music, all have contributed to an expanded spiritual world for human beings: a world of vicarious experience. These spiritual products free us from the narrow limits of animal subjectivity. They allow us to feel and see and hear what others, in far-off times and places, have felt and seen and heard.

The experience of the listener, reader or viewer may take the form of feelings of self-fulfillment, or a sense of deja vu, or heightened appreciation of the human condition, or possibly an empathy so intense that the artist's representation of experience is virtually being relived. To the degree that the creative agent has succeeded in accomplishing this end, for people of varying times and cultures, the work can be said to possess spiritual quality.

Secondly, being spiritual means that humans tend to look for some sort of reassurance of being part of something beyond the mere individual life span. Even an unsought awareness of this can produce a spiritual "high", as when in the midst of an expanse of mountains or ocean, an understanding of the essential connectedness and relative insignificance of one's own self in nature's scheme can strike like a sledgehammer.

    We are engaged in a spiritual undertaking whenever we yearn for an integrated view of self and of human destiny within some larger picture, a picture that orders and makes sense out of our daily experience. That picture has been represented by many different world views throughout history. In earlier times, in the absence of reliable universal knowledge of the nature of things, a variety of traditional myths were the source of the world views of human groups. We now know these views to have been sadly limited and often mistaken, but they served a purpose in their time. And, in our time, they provide a record of where the human race has been. Today we rely on science for our picture of the way reality operates, and as scientific knowledge evolves, we adjust our world views accordingly.

Certainly, the philosophy of humanism follows this course. We humanists believe that there is nothing so spiritual as a scientific insight, especially one that forces a creative readjustment of our world view. And we believe that there is nothing so remarkable and awe-inspiring as the understanding of the origin and role of humanity in the scheme of things which is now provided by modern evolutionary science. For humanists, there is nothing more wondrous and worthy of appreciation than the life process which shaped humanity into what we are. For us it is not the gods, created throughout pre-history by the evolving imagination of our primitive forebears, that warrant worship. It is, instead, the remarkable aeons-long process of cumulative accidental changes and adaptive modifications called evolution that is the ultimate object of reverence.

So far, I have identified two distinctively spiritual pursuits: artistic creativity and the re-verential search for understanding of the origin and role of humanity in the scheme of things. A third important spiritual undertaking is the moral one.

Ethical ideals and principles, and rules for living a good life, have been the worthy goals of much spiritual endeavour throughout human history. Humanists recognize the entire range of human experience, past and present, as the source of these ethical guidelines. As with knowledge, we accept that the responsibility for morality is ours alone. Ours in the sense of all humanity, that is. And, as with knowledge, we accept the hard fact that there is no mystical shortcut, as much as we might wish that there were! Neither is there any source of morality in non-human nature. We agree with Schweitzer that the refusal of most religions to accept the exclusively human source and responsibility for morality has been an obstacle to spiritual progress all through history and is now a threat to the very survival of life on this planet.

We look for what the modem humanist philosopher, Paul Kurtz calls the common moral decencies." These are ways of relating to others and to other forms of life that make continued survival possible and enjoyable. We think that morality consists of simple human attributes like honesty, kindness, responsibility and fairness. But they are abundantly spiritual precisely because they are human and ordinary. We consider that the test of principles and rules and moral decencies is the consequence of living in terms of them. Do they work to ensure the survival of the group involved and the earthly home of all life? Do they work to provide fulfillment for the individual? The job of clarifying and testing and altering these moral attributes and guideposts, in the light of experience, is a continuous spiritual task.

A fourth aspect of the spiritual quest is the search for truth. It has become fashionable to assert that there is no such thing as truth that "We each create our own reality!" And that, as no one can be perfectly objective, there is no point in even trying The humanist answer to all this is that mere common sense should tell us that truth is important. As Santayana pointed out, "Truth is simply what happened." Of course it is never easy to ascertain what actually happened in any specific instance, either in a court of law or in a historian's analysis or a journalist's report. Ideological prejudices and emotions, and the self-serving desires and delusions they promote in us, are too often in the driver's seat. But respect for the truth and for objectivity in the search for it are superbly spiritual commitments to the humanist.

     Related to the search for truth is the building of scientific knowledge. Scientific propositions are a particular form of knowledge that make "if-then" kinds of claims. If we act in this particular way, then a certain effect is likely to follow. To the degree that a scientific proposition has survived a rigorous public testing procedure, we consider it to be a dependable guide to action. We value objec-tive history and journalism because they are our only available means of reaming reliable lessons from the past and present. But we revere science for yet an additional reason: it allows us to control our future, rather than being merely helpless victims of social and technological change.

Of history we ask, "Is it true?" and the concern is a spiritual one. Of the findings of science we ask, "Are they reliable?" and that is also a spiritual concern. The truth is what happened and humans ignore it at their peril. Reliability, however, is what will work to make something happen. Of all the animals, only humans can build objective knowledge of both these things. What could possibly be more wondrous and more spiritual than such a remarkable undertaking?

This brings me to the fifth and perhaps most important aspect of spirituality for the humanist. It involves the fact that humans are capable of making choices. We call this valuing or judging or making value judgements. It has its roots in the feelings that we share with all animals. However, when we include the notion of values as idealized objects of reverence that determine direction for the future, we have something distinctively human and spiritual. For example, when we say that cave people valued their totems and rituals and myths we mean not only that they sensed and enjoyed these things momentarily. We mean that these things symbolized desired experiences, and the very act of remembering and visualizing and seeking them aroused emotions of warmth and safety and joy. These are intensely human activities, and in no way supernatural!

    But the evolution of the human valuing process did not end there. Ultimately it came to involve judging the best means of prolonging or repeating enjoyable experiences, and of expanding them and perpetuating them over the long term. And not just for the self but for the family and community and ultimately for humanity as a whole. This level of valuing is not possible without advanced reasoning and knowing. The wise valuer is one who is informed about the current situation and the choices available, and has the reasoning ability and knowledge required for predicting the probable consequences of these choices. Also required is a sense of the degree to which each string of consequences is likely to aid or prevent achievement of the goals desired.

Because not everyone is prepared for the critical thinking required, not everyone is capable of judging wisely. And not everyone is willing to accept the responsibility involved. Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of the causes of the holocaust concluded that the worst offenders in Nazi Germany were not essentially evil. They were merely ordinary God-fearing people who simply refused to make any moral judgement at all about events and their own role in them. "Who are we to judge?", they said.

She also noted that among her academic colleagues and friends, those who depended upon an external moral authority were the ones who tended to accept most readily the dictums of Hitler. For people accustomed to leaning on a banister, she said, it is the mere presence of a banister that matters, not its nature. Exchanging one banister for another is the easiest thing in the world! Arendt concluded that, in such times, it is not the true believers who are to be trusted. She said that, in her circle of acquaintance it was the doubters and sceptics who proved reliable, because they were used to examining things and making up their own minds.

We call such people humanists. For humanists, the making of wise value judgements is the most magnificent and the most spiritual of all the achievements of human beings. It brings together in one glorious culminating activity, all four of the spiritual capacities mentioned earlier. It requires a creative imagination; a sound world view that recognizes the significance of the human role in evolution; a morality that values equity and peace and order in human relationships as well as the long-term welfare of life on this planet; and a respect for truth and the scientific outlook.

With the potential for wise judgement, we be-lieve that humans have become unique in a truly significant sense. As Asimov has pointed out, it is probable that our scientific achievements have allowed us to become the only creatures in the Universe capable of tracing the very origin of life and of looking back to the very beginning of time itself. And our valuing capacity has given us the power to shape the future course of cultural evolution rather than leaving it to the blind chance and technological drift that may well destroy us all.

What could be more worthy than the optimism and activism and the courage and disciplined scientific attitude required for this task? What could be more wondrous than these magnificent and uniquely human capacities? And what could be more spiritual than a willingness in the face of humankind's necessary responsibility for the future to take up the torch of life and climb, without a banister, the stairs that the human group itself must build as we go?