Benedict, Albert and Carl

Good Company Indeed

The concept of spirituality embraced by such luminaries as Benedict Spinoza, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan is well worth considering. All three believed that the discoveries of natural philosophy and science could be sources of deep spiritual nourishment. In addition to the fields of expertise for which they are respectively well known, each of these men was a poetic dreamer and a philosopher. Philosophy was actually Spinoza’s field; Einstein was of course the 20^th century’s greatest physicist, while Sagan was best known for his work in cosmology.

These pioneers of human endeavor (and others like them) recommended awe in the face of the Universe as revealed by empirical inquiry. The sense of the numinous we get from reading great poetry. Transcendence experienced through the voice of a symphony or the view of a landscape. These are some of the treasures of true humanism.

It is certainly awe-inspiring to look into the night sky and realize that we are the result of exploded stars. (As Sagan was fond of saying, “We’re star stuff.”) Considering the staggering scope of evolution on this planet, our kinship with other species can give us a sense of belonging more profound than any supernatural doctrine. This is what Carl Sagan had to say about this dichotomy:

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe barely tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.”

When Einstein was asked about his religious beliefs, he replied that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.” Highly simplified, he was talking about nature deified or divinity naturalized. This is what he had to say in his essay, The World as I See It:           

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It is the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only in this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

Indeed, it is precisely when we are caught up in the truly numinous and transcendent that the relative poverty of supernatural religion (and other forms of certitude) is most clearly revealed. Having thrilled to the insights of Spinoza, Einstein and Sagan, we are instructed to return to primitive tribal myths and told that these are the “word of God.” After vicariously wrestling with real moral dilemmas through the characters of great fiction, we are presented with crude atonement doctrines masquerading as absolute truth. This is the point (for some of us, at least) at which all sense of the sacred temporarily dissolves. Confronted with stultifying certainty, we sense a moral imperative to defend doubt, both for the discoveries in provides and for its own sake.

True philosophy begins where traditional religion ends, as we know from reading Spinoza. How impoverished humanity would be if he had remained Baruch Spinoza, merely parroting the Torah in the safety of the synagogue. The fact that he had the moral courage to become Benedict Spinoza (facing excommunication for his heretical beliefs) is the reason we have treasures like The Ethics and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.

Taking our cue from giants like Spinoza, Einstein and Sagan, we should be open to taking our chances with free inquiry and thought. The fruits of both are much sweeter than anything absolute certainty has to offer.

Copyright © 2012 by William K. Ferro

All rights reserved

Stolen Lives

Part of the pathology that nearly all the "shooters" of our increasingly regular school massacres seem to share is the desire to transform themselves from insignificant nobodies into postmortem media stars. Their feelings of powerlessness cause them to imbibe deeply of our culture's gunslinger mythology and to embrace the romanticized view of "going out in a blaze of glory." 

Ideally, more accessible and proactive mental health services could help convince these individuals not to kill themselves at all. Failing that, one does wish we could convince them to make their suicides solo acts. The fact that the innocents pictured here (and others) died violently at the hands of a sick young man with a gun nut mother is an atrocity that makes me physically ill.

Thoroughly Enjoying...

We humanists and other secularists believe that being an imperfectly evolved primate is not a capital crime. Our imperfections are not worthy of death, eternal torture, or the torture of someone else in our stead. There is nothing for us to be "saved" from (in the sense that word is usually employed).

All that being said, many of us thoroughly enjoy every aspect of the Christmas story as mythology. We love the music, the devotional poetry, the art, everything. The idea of the birth of a child on the darkest night of the year as the light of the world is a wonderful idea. It builds on the myths of all the other gods (and sons of gods) who were believed to have been born on or near the winter solstice in pagan times. It only breaks down and becomes meaningless when we are told we must interpret the story literally and read it as history-- something the gospels were never intended to be.

The Darkest Night of the Year

Some Thoughts on the Winter Solstice

The darkest night of the year is coming right up.

At the Winter Solstice (December 21 this year), we have the shortest period of daylight of the entire year, and hence the longest, darkest night. In Neolithic times, the Winter Solstice was marked by midwinter celebrations that were highly significant culturally. These early agricultural communities depended on the previous nine months of the year to survive deep winter; starvation between January and March (often called “the famine months” by those communities) was not uncommon.

To avoid having to feed domestic animals such as cows, goats and sheep, most of these were slaughtered just before the Winter Solstice. This was also the time when most of the fermented beverages were ready for consumption. As a result of this sudden availability of fresh meat, beer, and wine, there would be large feasts on or around the year’s darkest night.

Pagan societies saw this as evidence of the sun’s vanishing presence, and the view of the birth (and rebirth) of various sun gods became associated with these feasts. The people had a sense of the world itself dying, to be reborn in the spring. After Roman conquest of the majority of Europe, these concepts were subsumed into the Saturnalia celebration.

After the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, Winter Solstice celebrations underwent yet another cultural and religious shift. Now the emphasis was on the birth of Christ; the idea of Jesus as the light of the world entering the world on the darkest night of the year (to die and be reborn in the spring) dovetailed easily with existing traditions. Thus Saturnalia and other midwinter pagan celebrations were gradually edged out by Christmas in the new, Christianized Europe. Nonetheless, many of the aspects of the Christmas celebration carried over from pagan times: the Yule log, the decorated tree, mistletoe, caroling, and so on. The caroling tradition can be traced back to the pagan practice of a community’s poorest children going from dwelling to dwelling, singing for cakes and other treats. (In Christian times, the children would beg for “soul cakes,” promising to help release people’s recently dead relatives from purgatory with their singing.)

Interestingly, the idea of a god being born of a virgin, dying, and being reborn, was quite common in the ancient world. It was applied in the case of Jesus, having already been believed to have been the case with the Roman god Dionysus. 

The Ultimate Emancipation

Image from deviantart.com

More than at any other time in human history, superstition has given way to rationality as the primary means of understanding our lives and explaining the world in which we live. Before our species understood the germ theory of disease, illnesses and plagues were typically perceived as punishments from the gods. Similarly, before we understood meteorology and seismology, we interpreted events such as storms, floods, volcanoes and earthquakes as signs of divine disfavor. Our ancestors felt an ongoing imperative to make propitiation to spirits, saints, and gods to avoid incurring their wrath.

Thanks to scientific inquiry and the philosophical Enlightenment, humans have learned to think empirically; to study cause and effect, to test hypotheses and find scientific explanations for natural phenomena that filled our ancestors with dread. This has led to rapid advances in medicine, science and technology, ethical inquiry, and other breakthroughs that have steadily improved our lives. As rationality and empirical inquiry have spread worldwide, religious traditions have been reinterpreted, abandoned, or replaced with wholly natural forms of spirituality.

Our sense of the numinous outlasts our belief in the supernatural; by no means do those of us who are increasingly secular compelled to live dry, dispirited lives. The joy of an excellent yoga routine, the deep connectedness to all sentient beings (and self-transcendence) we experience in meditation, a sense of kinship with our fellow human beings—all these can be deeply spiritual experiences. Thus, the loss of traditional religion need not be perceived as a loss at all, but rather a great liberation—perhaps the ultimate emancipation of the human mind.

The trend toward secularism can be seen in the rise of the “Nones” (people who claim no religious affiliation) in North America. It is evident in the religions that are practiced (by some) more as ways of preserving community and passing on cultural norms than as supernatural faiths. It can be seen in the steady emptying of the churches of Europe that has been a steady trend since the early 20^th century. Churches that once ruled by inculcating a dread of hell (along with the promise that they alone possessed the keys to heaven) have lost their hold on a great many people. Theocratic monarchies—long the norm in Europe—have given way to liberal democracies; huge life-affirming results have flowed from the personal autonomy that democracy enables. Even in the United States, easily the most religious country in the West, a fundamentally nontheistic worldview has lost much of the opprobrium it once incurred. Humanists and other secularists are becoming politically active and must now be taken into account as a voting bloc. They, together with the above-mentioned “Nones,” now make up 20% of the U.S. electorate; politicians can no longer afford to ignore or alienate them.

We by no means seek to convert the religious to humanism. Instead, we seek interfaith/secular dialogue and church/state separation, so that no one’s freedom of conscience is threatened. We realize that what we experience as an emancipation may present to others as a devastating loss. With that in mind, the secularization of others is not our goal. It is to enable the religious and secular alike to pursue transcendence and fulfillment in the manner that works best for them, free of persecution or coercion.

Copyright © 2012 by William K. Ferro

All rights reserved

Civility Rules

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Enjoying Holiday Dinners without Friction

A humanist and a priest sit down for a holiday meal. No, this is not the setup for a joke, as much as it may sound like one! It actually describes what happened at our recent Thanksgiving celebration. These ceremonial feasts can be tricky; sometimes they’re the only time certain family members and friends of widely differing stripes sit down to share a meal together.  There are bound to be a variety of political, religious, and ideological views represented.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, I saw an amusing Facebook post that read, “’Tis the season to have your life choices questioned at the dinner table.” I hope it’s not as bad as that for you! (it sure isn’t for me). In fact I consider myself incredibly fortunate in this regard. My mother and sister are still at least nominally Catholic; I’m the only member of the family who officially left the church. At the Thanksgiving family meal that just past, my wife and I had the wonderful opportunity to drive the priest who married us to my sister’s house to celebrate. Even at the time of our engagement, I had ceased being a practicing Catholic, and this wonderfully witty and friendly man had no problem with that. He was our family priest when my sister and I were growing up, and he’s the real deal. (I think it says a lot about the tolerance of this time in our culture that a priest can remain a lifelong friend of someone who in times past might have been shunned as an “apostate.”)

When we get together, we don’t discuss theology or the Vatican (the latter in particular would be a non-starter); we talk about life. My critiques of the Catholic Church are voluble and deeply felt, but I don’t get into these with him. He’s such a thoroughly decent person that I can’t help believing he would agree with my judgments of the moral failings of the institution to which he is tethered by a lifetime commitment. He’s a deeply humane individual who has never uttered a misogynist word in his life and who would no sooner molest a child than I would fly an aircraft into a building.

Is my family priest, thoroughly decent individual that he is, responsible to answer for the Vatican’s culpability in things like the subjugation of women, child abuse, and denial of birth control to the developing world? Of course not! No more than I, as an American citizen, can be held personally responsible for wars of opportunity my country prosecutes in defiance of international law. I would be quite surprised if I were to learn if this gentleman hasn’t registered his personal protest of the way the Vatican covered up its rampant child abuse scandal, for instance, just as I resisted (as best I could) my country’s devastation of Iraq. We’re all limited in our influence over world events.

Anyway, he said the grace at the meal, and it was as genial and inclusive a prayer as one is likely to hear. There is great wisdom in the age-old prescription for avoiding politics and religion at mixed-company gatherings. These topics cause people to ‘think with the blood” as no others do; avoiding them and simply enjoying each others’ company is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, I would be ashamed of myself if I were to start a war by lobbing a politics-or-religion grenade into a family gathering. If someone asks my philosophical position, I put it in thoroughly positive terms: “I’m a humanist; I believe in the Enlightenment values of democracy, personal autonomy, human rights and the separation of church and state.” It would be puerile and downright rude to wade in with something like “I believe organized religion is largely responsible for the subjugation of women, the abuse of children, and panoramic needless human suffering.” These are sentiments suited to a rigorous one-on-one debate, not a holiday gathering. Civility rules!

Copyright © 2012 by William K. Ferro

All rights reserved

Prizing the Life of the Mind

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Any time a civic, religious, or spiritual leader asks you to surrender your intellect or check your mind at the door, it is wise to question his motives. Giving up one’s critical faculties is a kind of suicide; the self-abnegation it represents is not virtuous, but inexcusably lazy.

Extinction, apocalypse, the end of days. There’s something both seductive and sinister about these concepts. From the suicide bomber to the messianic crusader to the apocalyptic evangelical, there seems to be a nearly-universal desire to bring the whole human project to a close. If only the end of the world could somehow be brought about, we could be done with the whole difficult, thorny problem of being human. In my view, even the “nirvana” concept—the extinction of self—is (or can be) a strain of this kind of thinking. Life for us humans--as far as we know, the only animals aware of our own imminent demise and forced to consider ethical and philosophical problems--is indeed difficult. There seems to be an innate part of us that longs for it all to be brought to an end. I think this is among the more contemptible parts of our makeup, one that demands continual resistance.

What is evolution’s unique gift to us if not our highly-developed cerebral cortex? The ability to think, to weigh and consider arguments, to retain the good and discard the rest? Any religion, philosophy, or party line that demands that you surrender your critical thinking capacity is more than suspect; those who make such requirements are usually up to something. They may have a genuinely sinister agenda, such as those who propagandize young people into throwing away their lives as suicide murderers. Or their motives may be plainly larcenous, like the televangelist who uses a false prospectus to separate credulous retirees from their meager savings. In any case, these and others like them are to be resisted by all those who prize the life of the mind.

An appreciation of art, literature, music, and irony is a superior means of developing an ethical and moral compass; it brings one face-to-face with moral and ethical dilemmas and offers no easy out. Fiction and mythology tells us truths that are otherwise inaccessible, and music expresses human feelings for which no words exist. Philosophy invites us to think deeply about the beautiful, the true, and the transcendent. Humanists are no strangers to the numinous; in fact, we relish it. The stunning beauty of a painting, the transcendent voice of a symphony, and the treasures of literature and poetry-- these are all of inexpressible value to us. It is precisely because we do not entertain fantasies of living forever that we find the consolations of philosophy (and the other humanities) so precious.

Goya famously declared that “the sleep of reason breeds monsters.” We have certainly seen that maxim borne out throughout human history. It is our reason, our capacity for free inquiry and thought, that makes us distinctly human. It is too precious a commodity to be surrendered, no matter how seductively the offer is made.

Copyright © 2012 by William K. Ferro

All rights reserved