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People who comment about my apparently religious nature
become dismayed when I respond to tell them they're mistaken, and that my
view of existence is totally atheistic. "You don't seem like the kind of
atheist we know about," they inform me, and make their disbelief about it
plain.
Atheists are individualists with their own
personal
philosophies built upon the experiences and facts our minds absorbed
during our lifetimes. Some of us are more studious than others, as normal
for all people and, as life and circumstances prevail, none of us will
duplicate the others. Most of us will deny a role for the spiritual and
define the word itself as only religious, something with no merit, not
worthy of belief or inclusion into our vocabularies. A few of us will
learn to understand that is not true. Here is my attempt to explain that,
in an entirely natural way.
From my GLOSSARY:
SPIRITUALITY:
joyous awareness of
self and the place of
one's self in this natural world, as derived from one’s genetic set of
predispositions in any of a variety of environmental circumstances that
determine pretty much how we should go about attaining that heightened
awareness and gain access to the resultant sensations of joyousness. The
practices resultant from that, as evidenced by lifeforms throughout the
natural realm we occupy. spiritedness
The religious interpretation (from American Heritage):
spir·i·tu·al·i·ty
(sp¹r"¹-ch›-²l"¹-t¶)
n., pl. spir·i·tu·al·i·ties.
1. The state, quality, manner, or
fact of being spiritual. 2.
The clergy. 3.
Often spiritualities.
Something, such as property or revenue, that belongs to the church or to a
cleric.
Most atheists adhere to the religious definition, and
refuse to recognize any other. It is, after all, "official". Although
people such as myself refuse to impose such limitations upon our one and
only experience at living, especially when no external authority requires
it of us, I must acknowledge my suspicions get aroused by others' bandying
of spirituality. I listen to determine what they mean by their words,
rather than reject their message simply because of their choices of words.
I am in this world to learn what I can, not to impose rigid separatism
simply to emphasize how different I am from everybody else.
We could possibly do better for our understanding by
learning about the root word, spirit. A definition of that from the
same source, with the religious definitions dropped, is:
6.a. The part of a human being associated with the mind, will, and
feelings: Though unable to join us today, they are with us in spirit.
b. The essential nature of a person or group. 7. A person as
characterized by a stated quality: He is a proud spirit. 8.a. An
inclination or a tendency of a specified kind: Her actions show a
generous spirit. b. A causative, activating, or essential principle:
The couple's engagement was announced in a joyous spirit. 9.
spirits. A mood or an emotional state: The guests were in high
spirits. His sour spirits put a damper on the gathering. 10. A
particular mood or an emotional state characterized by vigor and
animation: sang with spirit. 11. Strong loyalty or dedication:
team spirit. 12. The predominant mood of an occasion or a period:
"The spirit of 1776 is not dead" (Thomas Jefferson). 13. The actual
though unstated sense or significance of something: the spirit of the
law. 14. Often spirits. (used with a sing. verb). An alcohol
solution of an essential or volatile substance. 15. spirits. An
alcoholic beverage, especially distilled liquor. --spir·it tr.v.
spir·it·ed, spir·it·ing, spir·its. 1. To carry off mysteriously or
secretly: The documents had been spirited away. 2. To impart
courage, animation, or determination to….
Secular definitions outnumber the religious, even without
the inclusion of alcoholic beverages, and point toward the definition I
referred to from my
Glossary. The
word spiritedness arises from the secular definitions, as a
possibly more accurate expression of the secular meaning. In my mind,
spirituality and spiritedness shall remain synonyms. If I see
someone who has been described as 'spiritual' and (s)he seems dull and
listless, I will simply believe I have been lied to, as she displays too
little spiritedness.
If something is so wonderful it takes our breath away, we
want a word so we can talk about that. If you have never crafted any kind
of ecstatic joy and exhilaration, then it is about time to start learning
how to think and act for yourself in some drug-free manner that matches
your natural inclinations. That is what
secular morality is all about.
Why should we limit our freedom to act and think, and so
diminish our own existences? We do not belong to an atheist church, as
atheism is not a religion, and so we refuse to act like it, but do we
overreact in doing so? Whom would we worship? Are we afraid someone will
accuse us of that? Why should we be, if we have made certain we are as
knowledgeable about our own
principles as the religious claim to be about theirs?
As must be obvious to anyone who has spent much time
browsing these pages, this website is about individual liberties, rights
and all of that which, combined, goes to describe something called
Personal Freedom.
I have, for years (decades, even) investigated this with an
interest toward deciding upon those I would (if I could) own and those
which maybe I don't care so much about, but others do. Many of them are to
be had by the taking, or by acting in accordance. Many of them are
abandoned to religious proclamations which have nothing to do with me or
anyone else who would put them to practice. Quite a few are choices anyone
has to make between either/or: to do the one denies the other, whichever
one might choose. Numerous of them are inhumane and in other ways immoral
under nurturant practice, as they would introduce harm by such pursuits,
either to oneself, or to someone else. Some seem innocuous, but may
infringe on rights or properties claimed by other people, and so must be
abandoned, or some kind of agreement reached about them. But, the
elimination of any of them serves to delimit, not enhance, one's
spiritedness. Religious interference, by working to impose a creed's moral
edicts by legislation, works counter to their claims of returning a nation
to a status of high spirituality.
What is there of natural law that could decide immorality,
or right and wrong in any way? What is there in Nature that denies us the
right to harm others, and under what circumstances, for what reasons? How,
in Nature, does one determine what constitutes a satisfactory form of
spiritedness? Is there something new we can learn about life, about being
human, about the nature of true spirituality without seeking to reify
imaginary monsters living within our bodies?
Do our emotions serve an animal purpose that no longer
applies to modern humans?
We are emotional beings, and we should realize emotions
must serve some evolutionary benefit, or they would have been sloughed
away like any other feature unnecessary for survival. Our diminished
second stomach that now serves as an appendix, for example. We might grow
it back again if we keep on wolfing down convenience foods, but it looks
doubtful. It may eventually disappear entirely. It may hang around in case
conditions change, if we have a future for them to change during.
Radical rightwing religious Republicans (the so-called
Dominionists and Reconstructionists), and their equivalents in the Asian
world, may intervene in that. Emotion-originated philosophical dictums
inspire actions that emotions serve to perpetuate. Emotions are powerful
as inciters of action, but philosophies emotionally derived and adhered to
are dangerous forces that we somehow esteem when we ought best not to.
Derived as they are from 'inspiration' or 'revelation', they incite action
with no assessment of the consequences, and no sense of real-world
rectitude. "I have this idea, I believe in it, if you don't like it you
can go to hell, and I'm willing to give you a head start" is the award
winning slogan such a process promotes.
As secular people, we ought to be willing to learn what we
can about all aspects of what is natural, if we do not wish to ordain our
secularity with religious consequences, such as the hardening of our minds
to simple verifiable facts.
Emotions can inspire interest in advanced learning:
In a social setting claimed to be based on concepts related
to civility, such an attitude ought to be deemed completely out of place,
but it's not. It has gained a place of increasing honor in recent decades.
It's as if we have gotten tired of civility, and have decided to hate
intellectual pursuits and, while we are at it, the people who enjoy them.
"They bore us," we say. "What they write bores us. What they write about
bores us. They have no emotions, and so they say things using numbers and
formulas about things nobody we know ever bothers to think about. They
have gone off to someplace that has nothing to do with reality and the
stuff that means something to everybody we know. They want to tell us
about reality. Who in the hell do they think they're kidding?
Goodgodamitey, who in the hell do they think they are kidding?!!"
Themselves, mainly. In a civilized setting, emotions still
have a place and an important function, and it gets overlooked. It gets
avoided. In fact, if anyone of us writes about an intellectual subject in
a way that offers emotional appeal, we get quickly condemned by those
whose ideals such an asset would serve to support and advance. To write
something in a picturesque manner takes it away from its scientific
foundations and places it in a presentation that gets condemned as
inappropriate because of its apparent diminished accuracy. As a result,
people who might get steered toward a more accurate view of existence than
they now have are left with only the 'revealed' version of the topic, and
what looks like proof that the scientific community does not know what
it's doing but, whatever it is, it must be evil. That has to be deemed an
immoral result. It is wrong to condemn what we could build on to advance
the common pool of knowledge.
Emotions are proper tools for reward and punishment:
Most of us know how to torment others by picking on them.
People in governmental agencies of various flavors know how to torment
information out of supposed criminals they have captured for
interrogation, a result of which has been to discover most such people
will eventually answer in a way most likely to end the torment. Most such
people will then go on to defend their answers even after the threat has
been removed, until it has been made clear the need no longer persists and
their reasons are well understood and accepted, and they are not regarded
as liars or traitors. People in leadership roles are trained in how to
torment more production out of their employees so they will exceed even
the demands of the toughest incentive plans. In most places I have worked,
employees get no reward beyond arrogant pride for such performance.
Inducing such torment is very profitable for some employers.
In this free and sophisticated country we puff up and
proudly call our home, only a very few of us know the positive side of
emotions; that is, emotions used as rewards. Emotions of that sort are
sought after mainly in religious settings, and scoffed at otherwise, and
poorly understood, and not understood at all by most secularists, who
study such things as outsiders rather than as participants, to use as
reference material rather than for practical application.
There is one breed of practicing secularists who teach as
from an insider's point of view. We can learn from these people, who teach
the rudiments upon which some people gain lifetime success, while the rest
of us falter and fall by the wayside. They will teach us that, while the
religious variation of spirituality requires suspension of disbelief and
visualization of heavenly images painted with magical words from their
clerics, secular spiritedness derives from an inner awareness of inherent
natural drives prompting us toward a built-in aspiration, the nature of
which we must determine for ourselves. Secularity is an internal process
derived from our awareness of Nature; religiosity emanates from an outside
authority for outward display, mainly of submission and self-abnegation.
Most of us get our natural self-awareness wiped out during
the earliest years of our lives, and never feel its call. We may sense a
kind of tugging at the core of our being, which we get taught to interpret
as a religious yearning and which oblivious secularists quickly tell us
has no real meaning. ("You're just bored. Find something to do. Get a
hobby! It's party time…" Yeah, right.)
A few of us have been lucky. We knew something had to be
wrong with the religious idea, or we could make it work. Maybe it did stop
because we had begun to lose our faith, but it had never started while our
faith had been strong. With no faith at all, the results of our religious
aspirations remained the same: counter productive. Exposure to authors and
speakers like Napoleon Hill, Steven Covey, Robert Heinlein, Carl Sagan,
George Vetter, Robert Rimmer, Abraham Maslow, Isaac Asimov
 and
a hundred more whose names and titles have slipped away from me, during
the period of doubt, and the music of the time, worked to steer many of us
on a path toward rectitude.
Most of us got stuck at one of the path's many branches. A
few of us will follow it 'til the end, the words and sensations of our
youth still chiming and proclaiming freedom. Their messages hit home
because they could be tested. Their messages hit home with an alternative
spiritual path and an understanding to accompany it. Their messages
prevented the complete erasure of our inherent, genetically-inspired
initiative. Such people do not feel an inclination to ponder the subtle
meaning or importance of words like 'spirituality' or 'morality', they are
too busy putting their discoveries into practice and chasing the dreams
that well up from inside the natural beings that they have remained. They
have found their own initiative resource, and they are putting it to work.
It is from following that initiative that we gain emotional
rewards. From achievements big and small arrive the recognition of the
so-called 'religious experience', and we learn to find it in other places,
with those we love, from a successful experience at helping another in
desperate need, from letting someone else win at something, from inspiring
another to action in his or her own behalf, from finally daring to do
something and finding out it felt great even though we failed at it, from
telling someone you dislike that they did good, and any kind of good deed
or small and great accomplishment that comes to mind.
It's not all about achievement, though: Diving naked into a
warm pool of water after a long hike through the woods. Making long and
careful love with someone about whom you care deeply. That certain smell
of carefully finished and polished upholstery and furniture, whether in a
car or in a room. An exquisitely performed piece of music that appeals to
your taste. Some of that comes out from other people's achievements,
especially when you have enough awareness of their efforts to heighten
your own appreciation. Whether through art, business, or just the sheer
pleasure of having fun, emotional rewards are yours just for the
discovery.
The emotional rewards I refer to as secular spirituality
are real, and not just make believe that requires suspension of disbelief.
There is no trap here, waiting to pull you down into a life of submission
to a contrived cause. It is, rather, an avoidance of such traps and a
reward for doing so, and they are tremendous in their influence and their
power to elevate you in any role you deign to play; whereas the religious
variation depends on hokiness to build you up and leave you hanging in
wonder about where it all went, suffering guilt about not being good
enough for your "god" to pay attention to or care about.
Secular spirituality requires work, and part of that is to
gain an understanding not only of the nature that surrounds you, but the
nature inherent to you. Secular knowledge is derived from testing, and
secular spirituality is not exempted from that. Most of us are lazy, and
too easily influenced to take the easier path toward an artificial style
of existence. Too much of life works to pull us in that direction; the
natural tendency we feel inclined to answer to is to rebel against it and
anything that looks like part of it, and so we lose sight of the better
parts of secularity when we refuse to acknowledge them, even to test them
for ourselves.
That needs to change, but it will not for so long as the
attitudes of secular leadership continues to condemn that natural element
of ourselves that makes us unique as well as human, not the rationality
that constitutes only a minor aspect of our individualities, but the
joie de vivre that lets ourselves and others sense the life within us
that swells and bubbles with mirth and aspirations and dreams. Why banish
religion from our lives and convince ourselves there's nothing to take its
place. That is as big an error as adhering to the discontent induced by
religion in the first place. We all need to find our "selves" and restore
them. |
