Secular and Religious Humanism Noel Cheer spoke about the possibilities for dialogue between secular and religious humanists.
Humanism, as it has been classically understood, can best be seen as putting into practice humanitas, or human virtue, as seen in the practices of understanding, benevolence, compassion, mercy, fortitude, judgment, prudence, eloquence, and love of honour. For practical and rhetorical purposes we can allow that there are basically two kinds of humanism: secular and religious.
Humanism is so often said to be the opposite of religion that it is difficult for most people to see the term religious humanism as anything other than a contradiction. Yet this has not always been so, and it is not so now for most subscribers to the Sea of Faith who use the term humanism to name human-centredness.
There is much in common between secular and religious humanism. Members of both groups agree that all human activity and institutions are made only by humans there being no other creative agency.
Because this life is all that we will ever have, the secular is immensely important and the human is where we locate our priorities and our values. Those of us who retain some affection for a Christian upbringing but who can no longer assent to what we take to be its defining affirmations call ourselves post-Christian . We take the view that, while institutional forms of Christian expression have more-or-less lost the plot, the plot remains important.
All humanists have in common a moral earnestness.
We yearn for a better world, and the more active among us try to bring it about. Yet we differ, deeply. Religious humanists make the claim that the religious dimension of a human being is our best part, even while conceding that some forms of religious expression have done much harm. On the other hand, secular humanists show, in speech and in writing, what can justifiably be called a deep loathing of religion. While secular humanists call for no religion, religious humanists call for better religion Much of what separates secular and religious humanists can be seen in the way they each use certain key words. First, the term spirituality needs to be delivered from both its medieval concern with metaphysical dualism and also from its late 20th century New Age uses. Then we will be free to promote it to name that capability which steers us towards religion in the first place. Secondly, we need to show that religion, while often expressed in supernatural terms, does not depend on them. Supernaturalism is an option, not an essence. The potential benefits of gaining some clarity in these matters are enormous. Not only will we find a forum in which to meet and greet our secularist friends, we might rescue faith from its fundamentalist prison and put it back, to use a quasi-biblical phrase, on the throne of our hearts.
In seeking to describe a relationship between spirituality and religion which will work in today’s world, we must note the three-stage historical progression in the use of the word spirituality. The early and traditional use of the term can be found in most dictionaries. It speaks of two kinds of reality, with the spiritual above and the material below. It depends upon acceptance of an unseen world more real than this one, which reveals itself in visions, dreams, and physical manifestations. We scurry around like ants down here below while the perfect realm broods over us. This dualism, which owes a lot to Plato, is still embedded in mainstream Christianity.
During the last halfcentury a new formulation of spirituality arose as a sort of personal substitute for stuffy, old-fashioned religion. It had become romanticised and democratised and was aided by the Orphic and Gnostic idea of interior journey, which has dogged Christianity from the start. It became a scheme for opposing both secularist rationality and the dogmatism of the formal church. This development transferred the authoritative source of spirituality from the custodial care of ecclesiastical institutions to the commercial concerns of book publishers. It re-potted the roots of spirituality in the ephemera of currently fashionable warm fuzzies and the dynamics of the publication of self-help books. So saccharine are some manifestations that they have attracted the Australian epithet, ‘New Age wank’.
Spirituality is best seen, not as a free-thinker’s alternative to religion, but as its very source.
Michelangelo:The Risen Christ Athird, and to me the most satisfactory, definition of spirituality commends itself because it talks of what is lodged in our very humanness. The American theologian Owen Thomas defines spirituality as: the sum of all the uniquely human capacities and functions: self-awareness, self-transcendence, memory, anticipation, rationality (in the broadest sense), creativity, plus the moral, intellectual, social, political, aesthetic, and religious capacities, all understood as embodied.
Under this definition spirituality is a natural phenomenon, unlike the medieval dualist supernaturalism; and an enduring phenomenon, unlike Oprah’s Book of the Month approach. Such spirituality is oriented to this life and to this world and to this time. It is part of the human condition; it lurks in the pockets of our genes. Spirituality is best seen, not as a free-thinker’s alternative to religion, but as its very source.
Some secular humanists loathe the word religion. Their publications do not define religion as much as characterise it and then proceed to denounce it from an assumption that religion is inescapably supernaturalist, corrupt and daft.As Rob Wheeler wrote in a review in Sof (68):
The trouble with most books arguing for [secular] humanism is that they start with a crude critique of religion, focusing in an entirely unbalanced way on the horrors committed by Roman Catholicism in the past and the idiocies of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists in the present. Having shown that religion is mad, bad, dangerous and false, they tend to assume that there is nothing else they have to do.
Secular humanism naturally follows by default, QED.
However, the passionate anti-religious humanist, too, knows the feeling of deep commitment. The following passage by Richard Dawkins, that voluble scourge of all things religious, refers to Ursula Goodenough s book, The Sacred Depths of Nature:
Yet, by the book’s own account, Goodenough does not believe in any sort of supreme being, does not believe in any sort of life after death. By any normal understanding of the English language, she is no more religious than I am. She shares with other atheistic scientists a feeling of awe at the majesty of the universe and the intricate complexity of life... If that is religion, then I am a deeply religious man. But it isn’t. And I’m not.
To insist that religious thought and expression are obliged to offer supernatural explanations is similar to asking physicists still to speak of phlogiston as the active agent of fire, for astronomers to defer to Ptolemy, doctors to prescribe according to Galen, and for biologists to declare that crocodiles emerge spontaneously from mud on the banks of the Nile. To imprison religious expression in preEnlightenment thought-forms, as many conservative Christians still lovingly do, and as Dawkins does for ease of ridicule, is outdated, dishonest or both.
Following Owen Thomas, we might use Tillich’s words to define spirituality, when manifest as religion, as ‘the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary.’ Note the absence of any reference to the supernatural, or prescription as to the form of its expression. Our itch, our yearning, is for the realisation of our humanness, our hardwired spiritual potential pushes us to aspire to transcendence. The pursuit of transcendence is a religious pursuit.
Classical Christianity has made life difficult for itself by preserving pre-scientific knowledge in dogma, like spiders in amber, long after it has been superseded.
Lloyd Geering speaks as strongly as any humanist, even atheist, against theism and he argues passionately for a Christianity Without Theism. Theism, he says: added to purely human words a dimension of absolute authority which they did not deserve ... For centuries the Western world has encouraged us to believe that our future is in the hands of a benevolent and allpowerful God and that we have been placed here on earth to prepare for an eternal destiny elsewhere.
This paper takes the view that the itch, which takes on many names: spirituality, religion, faith, belief, integrity is that which seeks to promote the human condition. It is as ubiquitous as language and as problematic as sexuality. And, like sexuality, the uses to which the religious disposition may be put are widespread. We deplore some of those uses without demanding an end to the underlying spirituality.
As Feuerbach said in a lecture in 1848, we are all born as animals and, if the circumstances are right, we develop both the aspiration and the competence to transcend our animal substrate to become spiritual beings. And we can do it with out leaving home, let alone the planet.
What has The Sea of Faith Network got to offer a secular humanist?At least we are neither a church, nor a church substitute. You might call it a talk-shop, wherein any and all ideas about the expression of faith are heard sympathetically. One of our members described it as a safe place in which to talk about unsafe things. I get rueful nods of acknowledgement whenever I refer to it as a detox centre . There are even some capital-H Humanists among the membership of Sea of Faith who are made more comfortable by there being no assertions of dogmatic certainty nor definitions of orthodoxy. Sea of Faith does not suit everybody and nor does it try to. It treads that uneasy line between a rejection of a supernatural order of things and the feeling conviction that all that is profound and ennobling about being To insist that religious thought and expression are obliged to offer supernatural explanations is similar to asking physicists still to speak of phlogiston. human, needs forms of expression that sound supernaturalist, when what is really happening is that we are talking in the language of transcendence. It’s the age-old problem of metaphors being taken literally. We are not being supernaturalist when we affirm that God or the gods are figures of speech which we deny at our peril.
So is it time to look to a convergence between Sea of Faith and such Humanist groups who preach that religion is irredeemably supernaturalist? My own view is that that will eventually be possible, but it will take some time. Just as there are devout religious hardliners who promote religion over against a devalued world, there remain, if the published Humanist journals are any guide, a dyed-in-the-wooliness unreflecting hostility even to the word religion or any of its synonyms.
Humanists need to be aware that voices, like Don Cupitt’s, are saying that the dualism of Classical Christianity is no longer sustainable in the face of postEnlightenment science.
The expression of religious faith does not, of necessity, require an acceptance of supernatural agencies or realms, even though many take that option.
Scientific discoveries require us to look for improved metaphors by which to express the sheer wonder of life on earth. If scientific paradigms may be modernised, why not religious also? New expressions of religious faith are constantly emerging. In recent decades there has been a re-emphasis on earth-centred values and rituals. Many radically religious people – post-theistic, post-Christian, religious humanist and many others – take the view that the earth is our only home. Ever. It is not merely a transit lounge in which we piously wait for death to waft us away to another world above the bright blue sky.
Our deepest values, including the right to chose or reject expressions of faith, are best protected by secular government. While humans exist, religion will persist in one form or another because to ascribe value and to commit utterly to it is an essential part of being human.
The search for better ways will go on as long as humans exist because, at rock bottom, that is what religion is.
The ambition to be radically, totally human is about as sacred as it gets. 1 Owen C Thomas ‘Political Spirituality, Oxymoron or Redundancy?’ Journal of Religion & Society Volume 3. 2 Richard Dawkins, ‘Snake Oil and Holy Water’ in Forbes.com April 10, 1999. 3 Lloyd Geering, Christianity Without God (Bridget Williams Books (NZ) and Polebridge Press Santa Rosa (USA), especially pp. 137-144 but elsewhere passim.
Noel Cheer is the Chair of the Sea of Faith Network in New Zealand.This is an abbreviated version of the talk he gave to the England SoF Conference in July 2006.The unabridged text with full bibliography and references is available from the editor or from the SoF (UK) website at www.sofn.org.uk Ludwig Feuerbach Fourth Station Cricklewood Station, Cricklewood Station, I wait for the five o’clock with resignation.