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Post by Tamrin on Mar 16, 2013 7:00:10 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Mar 16, 2013 7:02:02 GMT 10
1 of 3:I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation
The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmo- logical narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix
Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview — a culture-dependent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are
The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures — this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true
We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone
The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death
Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that loveUrsula GoodenoughAmerican evolutionary biologist ( Sacred Depths of Nature) (Born this day 1943) Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago
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Post by Tamrin on Mar 16, 2013 7:03:55 GMT 10
2 of 3:Naturalism has been defined by many people. It's just a world view that does not include the supernatural, so it's everything else
The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us
The concept of an independent "spiritual realm" does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human
Deism spoils my covenant with Mystery. To assign attributes to Mystery is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance
We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Where did the laws of physics come from? Why does the universe seem so strange? My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted
Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what's good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find this planet and its history and its story to be sacred, let's preserve and nourish it, and then we can go home at night and say whatever prayers we choose
I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence … And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tender- ness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own graceUrsula Goodenough(Born this day 1943) I don't have any problem accessing experiences of unity. I feel completely part of the universe and all that's going on. When I try to describe it, people say I'm obviously a mystic. It doesn't seem mystical to me in a theistic sense. It's not a state that engenders in me any sense that God is watching over me and paying attention to what I'm doing. It's much more what I understand the Eastern traditions to be talking about — a belong- ing to the universe, an overflow of astonishment and wonder and peace and tranquility
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Post by Tamrin on Mar 16, 2013 7:05:34 GMT 10
3 of 3:We all eat or are eaten. That's the way life works, it's a greater rhythm. And that's why science and the understandings it has uncovered can be a source of joy. This all relates to assent, a very important Judeo-Christian concept. "Thy will be done" is a God-kind of assent. "God works in mysterious ways," and you're supposed to give assent even if you don't like it. As a religious naturalist, I think of assent differently. Assent is saying, "Okay, for whatever reason, this is the way life works. It's an acceptance of what is. After that fundamental acceptance, I can live my life to minimize suffering and promote as much as good as I can, and try through whatever work I do to help others." We can't get around death, but we can get around poverty. We can try to avoid women being brutalized. We can curb environmental degradation. One can start from the per- spective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished
Emergence. Something more from nothing but. Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances
All life has a kind of seamlessness. All creatures have to be aware of their environment, and there has been an evolution of the capacities needed for detecting increasingly complex stimuli. I have no problem calling this "meaning," since all creatures pick out meaningful facets of their environment. For the first creatures, these facets were physical and mediated by receptor proteins. Sperm and eggs find each other by protein shapes; photosynthetic bacteria find light by protein shapes. The impetus to figure out what's going on is still very much programmed into our highly complex brains
We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal — for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages … All of us see in children — our own and all children — the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forbears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future — meaning that we are each called to develop such a vision
Once there is empathy, then there can be the feeling we call compassion. A version of the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is found in most religious traditions. … and emergent from our sense of compassion, in mortal conflict with our insistent sense that we should win, is our haunting sense that things should be fair
Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent
Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds, and remembering how to do itUrsula Goodenough(Born this day 1943) What scares me? The way the world is going. People seem to think that development is more important than sustainability. That fundamentalism is more important than openness. That racial differences should dictate political decisions. That a person's sexuality is somebody else's business
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Post by Tamrin on Mar 16, 2013 8:28:27 GMT 10
Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview — a culture-dependent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are [/size][/quote] ( emphasis added)
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