Belief arises from the conclusions one can draw from whatever knowledge and experience he or she possesses. We act on such conclusions only because we believe we can rely on them to be correct, or to be the best of all options open to us. The difference between religious and secular varieties of belief is that secular beliefs are open to refinement and correction. Secular people make mistakes and, if we are wise, we learn from them. We are oriented toward the future more than the past, and do not want to make a religion from our mistakes.

Religion, we all know, is what we shun. We look at grandiose but grotesque buildings in our neighborhoods, hear the bells and wailing, see the grim faces in the herds answering to their various calls, think of the control and manipulation they have allowed to dominate their lives, and think of that when we think of religion. What is religion, really?

We call the standards by which we live 'philosophical' and our way of adopting them as 'reasoning'. We don't have 'morality', we have 'right' and 'wrong', 'good' and 'bad', and claim them to be determined by 'cause' and 'effect' even when we cannot identify the origins for our standards. Is it possible we tell lies to ourselves when we say we're irreligious?— and so, when it comes down to factual truth, we are not different from those whose regimented lives we so denounce?

Religion is a result of ignorance. None of us are omniscient. All of us are religious. There, I said it, and I feel proud. Go, fly around the room, bang your head against a few walls, get some hot soup to settle your stomach down, and then come back to finish reading this. It, like the soup, is good medicine for you.

Religion is our very human way of living amidst struggles against life's obstacles and dealing with problems that assail us but won't wait for us to learn how to deal with them, and that seem to overwhelm us with their demands for action when we'd rather they'd just go away. We all have opinions regarding right and wrong, good and bad. We take our best guesses and hope for the best, and then we have to live with the results. Those results become vested interests we must defend, and so develop into religions.

So, in spite of regrets about the taunting religionists who dance in joy at declaiming our atheism is nothing more than a religion; in spite of all the horrors we suffer that makes the notion that it might be true too much for us to consider; in spite of all the hours of justification we have spent in our efforts to prove, with the finality of a judgmental pronouncement that it cannot be true, we are religious. Accept that. Live with it. Acknowledge it and be a better person for it.

And, relax. Atheism is not a religion; it is (once more) ignorance that fosters religion, that either results from the intellectual laziness that makes people prefer to allow others to decide for them how to live their lives, or from the facing of unexpected events without proper preparation, often in unfamiliar circumstances. You can remain a secular person, and do so after understanding what makes the nature of your religion different from, and better than, those derived theosophically.

If atheism is not a religion, what is it? It is not a philosophy nor a theosophy; it is a religious condition describing only the absence of belief in 'supernatural' realms, and all that precipitates from that, from your system of beliefs. As a secular person, you subscribe to Nature and your best knowledge of the laws inherent to natural consequences as the source of your doctrines and philosophies, and rely upon your own abilities, and upon the documented abilities of others that you can verify, to interpret your own ideals and your own understanding of morality, knowing that responsibility, blame and credit are fully your own for your errors and successes. That is your secular religion, unique in itself, capable of growth and self-correction. Revel in acceptance of that. Feel the joy. Let your spirits soar.

Secular people all uphold similar basic concepts regarding right and wrong, over which gets layered concepts inherited from our cultures, many of which seem inexplicable. In spite of Xian angst over your right to decide what moral rules apply to your own existence, your bedrock source of information is the exact same source used by all other secular people as influenced by the cultures around you. The nature and certainty of your awareness of functional truths depends only on your willingness and dedication to gain such knowledge, to mine the data provided from others, and to verify as much of it as possible so you can trust it. It is the verifiability of it that ascertains what is true, and the worth of that very principle is demonstrated daily in the realm of practice and thought inhabited by natural scientists.

I am sure that an honest study of sources for the technical differences in thought that secular people argue over would show those to derive from areas of knowledge where data derived from nature is most sparse, and that our differences then come from attempting to formulate opinions with a lack of sufficient information. We can defend such opinions as hotly and heavily as any theocratic religionist, and why not: they have built their own entire belief systems from only that kind of information, and secondhand at that, without allowing any room for corrections. What we share with them only induces us to be like them, after all. Our willingness to polish, refine and update our beliefs is all that differentiates between the two systems. Where we feel unwilling to do that makes us all the more like them.

Prayer (meditation out loud). Prayer is talking to yourself as though you are somebody else. Meditation, mainly a silent form of the same process, varies (like gods) according to the methods one has learned, each claiming to be the one and only working version. Claims are that people who pray live longer, happier lives that are generally healthier. Meditation shows up in studies of brainwaves to be having some kind of relaxing effect. People who regularly meditate are also claimed to live longer, healthier lives. All of that remains to be verified.

That people who talk to themselves are generally considered somewhat insane may have a lot to do with pretending to be talking to somebody invisible else. The idea is that if no one can prove nobody is there, you can get away with it. Would it not be more honest to acknowledge the current emotional event we are suffering (or enjoying) that makes us feel as though we have to talk to somebody about it?—and that we are just laying our thoughts and feelings and wants out on the table by expressing them, and so sorting out our minds to iron our problems out or to assess how we deserve to feel so much joy?—or maybe figure out how we can get less of the first and more of the second?

Why not?—if it works, and there's only one way to find out.

Spirituality is a concept that seems not to jibe with a secular view of the world. Don't let yourself get fooled over that. This is a word we direly need to take back from the teleological cults and set its correct version back into place as our own.

Secular spirituality, as stated in my Glossary, results from joyous awareness of one's own place in the world. Secular interpretation of spirit is limited to "The vital principle or animating force within living beings." It is the breath of our bodies, our own sense of possessing life, and our zeal for demonstrating that to others and that results in our own good health. From that, our spirituality denotes the very acts of living; a spiritual secular person would be one living life to the fullest of his or her capabilities. Who, being honest, would want to deny from us that? Who needs for it to be purposefully misrepresented into a form that requires invisible presences, and that thus avoids the true issues that separate us from the theists?

To gain a correct secular understanding of spirituality may be one of the most important advances you can make to your system of thought. It has absolutely nothing to do with hokey superstitious delusions involving spirits, ghosts, gremlins or cackling demons taking over our souls. It has nothing to do with religious doctrines about the "afterlife", nor about knuckling down to the phantasmagoria of superstitious religion in the beaten fashion of the prayerful.

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.