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Secular Spirituality and Secularising the Religious

Let's turn our attention now to something a bit different, and that is the other major term of the course: spirituality. In removing any form of god and religion from the human dimension, it might be argued that the spirituality that many people claim to experience, which indicates to some the presence of the divine in the world, is either ignored or denied by the humanist. This is not strictly true, for while some humanists might claim that spirituality does not exist, others are more inclined to interpret it in a more secular sense.

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The Ontological Argument

The ontological argument is the most philosophical of the arguments for the existence of God. It was formulated by the Christian Anselm (1033-1109) and taken up by the French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650). Its basic assertion is that God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived; a perfect, complete being that lacks no attributes. This is a being that exists in the mind.

But a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists in the mind, and since God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived, he must exist in reality, therefore he exists. Further, since we are able to conceive of such a being, and cannot have a conception of a non-existent being, then this, too, proves he must exist: lacking no attributes, he is bound to have the attribute of existence.

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The Arguments to Design

Arguments for or to design are based on the belief that a supernatural, conscious and intelligent "Designer" must exist because the universe exhibits such careful planning, its whole design being beyond the possibilities of chance. It is thus an argument that posits design as that which underpins the universe.

The idea stems from ancient Greek philosophical thought, from an Aristotelian belief in an abstract, intelligent force or principle that informed all things but which did not affect them. The thought was taken up by Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Roman Catholic Dominican monk and theologian, whose theological ideas and proofs for the existence of God were to become the foundation of Roman Catholic theology in the late nineteenth century.

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Cosmological arguments for the existence of God

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God are based on the premise that every effect must have a cause, but to avoid infinite regress there must be a first cause: something that started it all. Put in another and more sophisticated way, often called the Contingency Argument: everything in existence depends on something else for its existence, but nothing has a reason for its existence contained within it. So the world itself must depend on something else for its existence, a "something else" that must have existence in itself, otherwise that would also have to be caused by something else, ad infinitum.

Got this from an e-mail list of an atheist group that meets up in Virginia:

"Speaking of comming out. I tried it Saturday. I was at the Pottery Shop in Williamsburg. Just before I reached the entrance a man approached me with a small book in his hand.
He walked up to me and showed me the book. It was the New Testiment. With a warm smile on my face I took his hand, that had the book in it, with both of my hands and looked looked directly at him saying "Thank you very much but I'm an athiest and I am sure that their are others that would like the book.
His expression froze, he said nothing, and just looked at me. I nodded, gave him another plesant smile, turned and walked away. He was not there when I left the Pottery Factory.

There is a pathological reason, a mistake in the mind's machinery that results in the belief in God. God is ultimately compassion towards onesself in the eyes of a theist. There exists a falacy, though, because there is nothing that you need forgiveness or compassion for from God.

Psychologically, what happens to the theist (and many people throughout all of human existance) is that they develop a complex of subservience that is a result of the evolutionarily advantageous maleability with which each of us has as a child. The human child is designed to listen and submit to it's parents out of necessity to survive. It does what mommy says because mommy cares about her child and gets very angry and emotional if her child is in danger. The child gets scared and does what mommy wants. But mommy doesn't always know best, and the child may develop a belief that, in fact, many of it's actions will result in mommy being angry, and thus many of it's actions are "wrong." The child begins to understand what is right and wrong from mommy's reactions.

I'll be making a special segment of my blog into "The Mysteries of the Unconscious Mind." Enjoy!

In common parlance the terms unconscious and subconscious are used as if they expressed some kind of scientific or even religious certainty. This may be convenient. We wouldn't get too far if we were forever stopping to analyze every word we use. Tacit conceptual agreements make conversations smooth and newspaper articles easier to read. Obviously there's some benefit to this kind of collective unthinking.

But there's a shortcoming too. All too often our socially accepted terms become more than mere tropes and catch phrases. The repeated use of a concept in everyday life can lead to reification. Reification occurs when ideas are assumed to represent some real entity or thing—for instance, the sociological idea of the state. Reified concepts may even point to detailed legal entities. But the question remains: Does the thing written and talked about exist as described?

I faked being sick from work today because I didn't feel like going, so I decided to learn some philosophy!! Yay! And I finally figured out what this "ontological argument" was, and boy, is it ridiculous! Mind games, delusional mind games. It's sad to know that people were so delusional as to come up with an idea like that. You could create any number of imagined things! Even Thomas Aquinas knew this argument was bunk! An ontological argument seems to be the loophole of all loopholes. Kinda like saying that "since in the Bible it says God is real, and the Bible is never wrong, then God is real! ZOMG so easy."

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.