Spiritual Humanism

Know Your Onions…

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“Know your onions” is what they say
how can you know something with so many layers.

Pauper’s Hotpot layers sliced onions, potatoes and bits of bacon
My parents gave me The Pauper’s Cookbook when I went to University

University does not teach you to cook onions but you may learn whilst there
recipes always say sweat onions until translucent but not the long care that takes.

Sweating it is the secret to life and the search for transparency
it takes what it takes to get there – a lifetime even…

Many unexpected things come to you in a lifetime
I found an album of Booker T including Green Onions in the middle of Brixton at 3a.m. and loved it ever since

Spring Onions are green and tender – it’s like eating onion babies
other colours are available – purple, white, brown – on the outside.

We grow new outside layers with each new age we reach
To “Know your onions” peel a person to the heart, layer by layer…

This poem was written in response to Melissa LeMay as guest over at the dVerse Poets Pub last night. I was very taken with the previous Poets Pub Challenge to write a Duplex poem – seven couplets where the baton of an idea, a sudden twist in each second line, is passed to the first line of the next couplet and although I have written in similar form here, I have relaxed the strictures of line length and I still can’t shape the form as being bluesy as it’s inventor talks about…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023

The Rational and the Belief of a Spiritual Humanist…

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Terms

Humanist

Despite the fact that the word Humanism is applied to many different movements such as Christian Humanism, Atheist Humanism, and Ethical Humanism – I still chose to describe myself as a Humanist because I can find no better word to express what I am. 

I am not merely an Atheist because although I don’t believe in God or gods because that would be to define myself by what I don’t believe in instead of those positive things which I do believe in.

I am a rationalist, I believe that the scientific method is the only way of approaching the world in order to understand it. Science cannot know everything about the universe and what it knows now may be subject to change later, but whilst you cannot prove anything to be absolutely true, you can more easily prove what is not true by conducting experiments and each time you disprove something, you move, by elimination, nearer to the truth. Whatever status quo science has brought us to is acceptable until there are discovered to be too many flaws in it and someone new can suggest a new view that, for the time being, cannot be disproved.

I am a materialist in the sense that I believe there is only a material world, not a dualistic world in which there are spirits waiting to pop into newborn babies and return to the other realm at the death of a human being, no heaven or hell, no reincarnation. Whenever I use the word “believe”, that means I can’t prove it to be the case, but like the scientific status quo, I find it acceptable for now – so I am atheist (don’t believe in gods) rather than agnostic (don’t know the answer about gods) but I accept that this is a matter of choice as to what I believe.

In the 19th century, many humanist groups were set up as an alternative to the religious. They might have been called Atheist, Humane or Ethical Societies and often they were as dedicated to “doing good work in the world” as any religious group. In humanism, what you do and how you live mater in exactly the same way as they do to people of religion, you have just arrived at motive differently, not because God told you to live in a particular way, but because it is obviously right to do so for and by, the good of humanity.

I believe (choose to believe) that human beings can be better rather than worse in the long run. I most certainly can’t prove or disprove this assertion and the Covid 19 crisis is a very good example of why not. On the one hand, there are right-wing politicians who are seeking to increase their power and its longevity under cover of the response to the crisis and on the other, millions of people have donated in excess of 30 million pounds to Captain Tom Moore’s charity fundraising event to support the National Health Service workers during the crisis. The former RAF pilot who served in WW2 and who turned 100 last week, crystallized the generosity of people who were already grateful to the NHS workers for their heroism and altruism in the face of personal danger from the virus. How could you possibly devise a way of weighing up the efforts of right-wing dictators against the efforts of Captain Tom and the NHS workers and those who have donated to them – you can’t and so my belief that people can be better rather worse, must remain an untestable belief – so once again, that is what I choose to believe.

Because the values of humanism are so great, so obviously right, that is why the term can be appropriated even by Christianity in it’s depiction of the values of Jesus as sent into the world by God, the son of God made human to bring God’s love to humanity – this does make the term humanism confusing given all the things I have already said about it…

If I don’t believe in a dualism of material and spiritual realms, then why Spiritual Humanist?

Spiritual

The word spirit is often conflated with the word soul and although they both come from an ancient word for breath, they are quite different. The soul is a word for the dualistic idea of an immutable essence that passes into the body at birth and returns to some spiritual realm at death. Breath is most certainly the first thing that enters the body at birth and the last thing to leave it at death bur the what are we to call the memories and personality of a person, which as a humanist, I believe must cease with death – what are we to call all that?
We often refer to a person’s spirit without meaning their soul in the religious sense as in “they have a kindly spirit” or we stay someone is “very spirited” – so I refer to that bundle of memories and personality, contained in the mind of a person, perhaps reflected in the appearance of their body as they develop, so easily damaged or destroyed by a blow to the head, and which makes the difference between a living person and a corpse, as their spirit. Just as the term humanism carries baggage and ambiguity, so too does the word spirit, but once again, I can’t find a better word – so here I am – choosing to call myself a Spiritual Humanist…

Spiritual Humanism – the Ripple effect

At this time of existential crisis, brought on by the Covid 19 pandemic, many people who have not previously thought about their own mortality, are doing so, in lockdown, without their normal support networks or the distractions of normal life. Very often, when say, a parent dies, the next generation find themselves contemplating their own mortality, and if their parents were in any way religious, they may find themselves in a church service for the burial or remembrance of their parent. Very often, I believe, this may strengthen either their own religious roots, however dormant they might have been, or else prompt a search for some other meaning, beyond the daily grind. my version of Spiritual Humanism is a way of seeing meaning in life and beyond the death of the individual which does not depend on a dualistic belief, and as such, this might be a good time to give it another push out into the world.

When a person dies, it is not as if they had never lived, not ever!

I remember there was a tramp, a homeless person who spent their life walking between my town and the next village – you would often pass him if you were going that way. Every time I saw him, he made me thankful for the home and the life I had, and I would wonder how he came to his point in life and what would become of him. If one day, as would inevitably happen, one way or another, he were not to  be seen again by people driving that road, I suggest that the memory of him would linger on, they would wonder if he had died or been taken into some sort of care –  either way, the memory of him would probably continue to make people glad for what they had in their own lives.

A child is stillborn and though they had no life beyond the womb, they have already filled their parent’s life with anticipation – good or even fearful – it is not as if they had never existed, their life, such as it was, has changed the world.

Everybody changes the world to a greater or lesser degree. Think of Florence Nightingale whose story got another boost by the temporary hospitals created in Britain to help fight the pandemic, they were called Nightingale Hospitals. Florence was white, Victorian and a woman. You might be black, born in Africa in the 21st century, and a male, but the first thing you will learn about if you choose to go into nursing might be the history of Florence Nightingale. So the work of Florence Nightingale, the energy, insight and impact of her spirit, not only affected her Victorian world, it continues to resonate to this day – like a ripple through the minds and institutions of humanity.

Not everybody is as famous as Florence Nightingale, but they can have as great an effect even without anybody being fully aware of it. Imagine village baker – he is a good kind man – everybody recognizes that but nobody knows the full extent of it. He gives a job to a man who has been in prison and helps him to turn his life around. He lends some money to a person when they have nowhere else to turn. He always slips, wordlessly, an extra bun into the single mother’s bag. He is very modest and none of these people ever share the story of how they were helped by the baker, not even after he dies, not because they are not grateful, but because they know he would have wanted it that way. Yet that baker changed the course of the whole village, the ex-con became a fine member of the community, the lender developed a business that employed many villagers and the children of the single mum grew up healthy and strong and one of them found a cure for one type of cancer.
The Ripple effect from that baker was strong!

If you believe in God or gods, then I will never try to dissuade you of your beliefs, but if in this time of crisis, you are seeking a way to reconcile yourself with your mortality and you can’t believe in a supernatural being, then think of your life in terms of the Ripple effect. How have you changed the world, have you left it a better place and who will remember you? Maybe you feel you have not contributed much, or even been a negative presence in the world. It is not too late, the story of the baker shows that you cannot tell which of your actions will have the greatest effect. Maybe you are mourning someone who has died, if so then you are demonstrating the Ripple effect, for you are carrying the memory and the particular energy of that person’s spirit with you already, now and for as long as you live. If you build whatever memorial is appropriate to that person’s life, you will pass their story on to others…

If contemplating life in the world as illuminated by these strange times leads to re-assessment and change for individuals or institutions, if it brings changes to their spirit, then that can only be for the good…

Please leave a comment so that I know you have been here, and stay safe…

Bread and Circuses – Metonymic, Akashic Records and Materialism

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A morning adventure…

Lying in bed this Saturday morning, I started checking my emails on the phone. There was an alert to a post by Deborah Weber over at Garden of Delights for the letter Y (part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge) – Yeppsen – the amount that can be held in two hands – an obsolete word as many of Deborah’s words have been, unusual, interesting words.

Then it was over to an email chain from my school friends of 47 years ago and one of them mentioned panem et circenses (yes we were posh enough to study Latin) or in English – bread and circuses. Just to check I had translated it right and to see what it originally meant, I checked it out on Wikipedia which as well as attributing it to Juvenal’s “Satire X”, told me that the phrase is an example of a metonym. Well despite the posh-ish education, I had never heard of this so it was another link on Wikipedia to find out what that means! To explain, Wikipedia (last updated on 30th April 2020 so hot stuff!) had to examine and contrast Metonyms and Metaphors as well as touching on Synecdoches and Toponyms and even Metalepsis. You see how this internet surfing goes…
Back to the meaning of Bread and Circuses – Juvenal was expressing disappointment that the mass of Roman citizens had ditched their republican ideals of taking their politics seriously and electing their, politicians, generals and officials – instead they fell for cheap bribes of grain (for bread) and circuses (entertainment). How little things have changed, we in the UK have a Prime Minister who made up the story about the European Union bureaucrats requiring straight bananas in future. He was working as journalist in Brussels and was too lazy to research real stories about the EU and later took us out of the EU – whilst in the US – well let me go no further down the critique of the political technique of distraction – you all know who I am talking about…

A depiction of Juvenal in the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 1400s. Wiki Commons


So what is a Metonym? Well, an example would be talking about The White House meaning, not the building itself, but the President and all his men and women in the West Wing who constitute that part of the US government. Now that is only part of this in-depth article in Wikipedia and if you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, then head over there pronto! I did read it all, and it was interesting to me even though I realized that I use metonymic phrases all the time without realizing it, but what I thought about it was a) you can use things without needing to understand the deep philosophical/linguistic issues and b) that this is the sort of stuff I bet Deborah Weber would love!

So I decided to go and read Deborah’s About page where I learned that Deborah is a Spiritual Guide and Alternative Health practitioner. I find myself very torn by this because – as my stepdaughter has told me – I am a materialist. I prefer rationalist, but that does not mean I do not have a spiritual view of life either. My first blog, Ripple, from which I quoted on bread, yesterday, was named for my belief that we all emanate energy and effect into the world, and even after we die, that energy and effect carries on spreading out into the world. What you do in life, for better or worse, goes on and on so that even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do think that how you live your life is very important not just in a karmic sense within your lifetime, but in terms of what you leave behind, how you change the world. So I really like to describe myself as a Spiritual Humanist. I think I will do a whole post on this but for now I just want to say that there is much about Deborah as a blogger and health practitioner that I love and much that I find difficult such as Akashic Records. But hey! That’s okay, things don’t have to be binary, we can handle grey areas rather than mere black and white…

So all this happened before I even got out of bed…

K is for Karma…

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Karma – (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

There are many people who think, and many more who are wondering, whether the Covid 19 crisis is Karma for the human race, whether the fate of our present state and future existence has been determined by our heretofore actions in regard to the way we live in and treat this world. The definition at the top of the page (courtesy of Wikipedia), uses the word deciding in relation to future existences, and it is, of course, referring to the lives, deaths and reincarnations of individuals. You may have noticed that in connection with the collective fate of the human race, I have used the words “determined by”. The religious use of Karma implies that some divinity weighs the action ( for which karma is the Sanskrit word) of a person’s life and as we say in the west – “As you sow, so shall you reap!”

Does Karma always work?

It is clear in life, that neither the good nor the bad always get their just desserts, and whether anyone becomes demoted to a lower animal in the next life, or the opposite, nobody in this life can actually say. Most religions use the threat of some kind, karmic judgment or heaven v. hell, to try to cajole their congregations into behaving better and without intending to be too cynical, the odd natural disaster, especially ones that have a leveling effect on society, does not go amiss in helping religion in its quest. Ironic then that in this present crisis, those western religions at least – I can’t speak for others – who have been languishing with ever diminishing congregations, have had to lock their doors due to social isolating and are unable to offer comfort in the hour of need – at least not in person. They are asking themselves whether their role is going to be even more diminished once this crisis is over, and with many of the elderly members who have remained staunch attendees having “gone to meet their maker” according to their beliefs, churches are asking themselves how they can reinvent themselves now, in new and perhaps digital ways.

Mind you, there have been some religious people who have brandished their belief in God/Yahweh/Allah as a shield which they are sure will protect them – bible belt evangelists going about their business and their worship as usual, Moslems queuing up to lick shrines and as to Yaakov Litzman, Health Minister for Israel, well he said “all LGBT+ people are sinners” (in other words, the virus is a judgment on them) but has since tested positive for Covid-19, his wife has also tested positive for the disease and, being a cabinet minister, he has caused Benjamin Netenyahu and several top government officials to go into quarantine. All those other virus defying groups will probably also learn the error in their thinking.

Free Will and Karma

Lest you think I am wantonly attacking religion, let me tell you an old joke. A flood was building and as the waters rose around the church, a parishioner ran in to the priest and begged him to come away to higher ground. “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” The waters surrounded the church and a boat was sent to collect the priest but he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” As the waters rose the priest climbed up to the roof and a helicopter came to rescue the priest but still he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!”. During the night, the waters washed the priest off the roof and he drowned. Standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven, the priest asked: “Why did God not save me?” At which, God, who hears everything, rushed up fuming. “What do you mean not save you, you idiot?” God shouted, “I sent a man, a boat and a helicopter to save you!”

The moral of this story is that even for those who believe in God, he has given free will so that you may act well or badly (otherwise there would be no point in judgment) and that means you have to act well and wisely and not expect God to save you from folly of your own making.


The Rationalist’s position…

I don’t believe in God, but I very much believe in free will and folly of our own making, in people who act well and those who act badly and I believe (see C is for Covid 19) that microscopic viruses which are arguably not even alive, have no intelligence and certainly no moral judgment against any of their victims. The very fact and mystery of their pointless existence could be enough to cause a man of faith to question his beliefs…

So can Rationalists, Materialists, Atheists, can they have any truck with the concept of Karma? Very much so – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” is simply cause and effect you can’t get much more “scientific” than that! If you mess up your planet by unrestrained growth, wanton use and waste of resources, unrestrained pollution, you will find yourself in the shit. If you sell live, wild animals that have been infected by disease-carrying bats in a world that is crisscrossed with the airways of the global village, you will get crossover virus events that sooner or later will become pandemics. No moral judgment involved, no Gaia is punishing us with a restorative crisis – just scientifically explainable inevitability!

That is, however, Karma, the consequences of actions chosen – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” So as I have said before in these pages, as we grope towards exit strategies form this crisis – there are past actions to be reassessed, choices to be made,, new ways to be formulated…