June 27, 2002
An article in the current Free Inquiry magazine to which I subscribe has some very good articles on what they call "secular" vs "religious" humanism. I bill myself as a "spiritual seeker" and I have called myself an "irreverent non-believer." While that sounds contradictory, it really isn't because I do have a sense of the spiritual in humanity. This article articulated what is pretty much my strange magical non-belief -- as follows:
Some among the ancient Gnostics, those great spinners of mystical, allegorical mythologies, had a name for the Ultimate Godhead. They called it "Man" (Anthropos, human being). This is a very old idea, rooted in the Upanishads where the world springs into being from the self-sacrifice of the Primal Man, Purusha, whose name is also one of the words for "soul." What a breathtaking myth! What a powerful image! Let me suggest that the Gnostic myth implies something about what distinguishes religious from secular humanism, namely, a belief in the divinity of human nature. Such belief may not be a necessary condition for religious humanism, but it seems to me a sufficient one. That is, if you believe human nature deserves the epithet "divine," you qualify as other (or, if you prefer, more) than a secular humanist.
I think of Ludwig Feuerbach and his relentless hermeneutic of suspicion. Feuerbach held that theologians are correct when they say we can discern the divine attributes. They are right to believe in such things as divine love, justice, mercy, sagacity—even in eternal life and omniscience. Theologians are merely wrong in ascribing these to some divine person beyond humanity. On this argument the grandeur of human nature, of the human race collectively, truly is divine. It is also a terrific burden to bear. Our problem is that we shirk the burden of our own divine greatness. We create the devil as the scapegoat for the evil that we do, both trivial and titanic; and we create God as a paradoxical scapegoat to take the burden of our righteousness—we don't want responsibility for either! Feuerbach said he knew his readers would consider him an atheist for denying the existence of God, but he riposted that he was the genuine believer, because he revered true divinity where it was really to be found—in the human breast, or in humanity as a whole. Feuerbach thought that conventional theists, by contrast, were unbelievers or idolaters, erecting for themselves a false God instead of the real divinity within them.
So, pardon me while I blame religious patriarchies for erecting these false gods. (Heh. I blame patriarchal structures for just about all the ills of humankind. Not men as individuals, but rather the constructs that some men have devised to keep other men and women "in their place." I know that I'm pushing buttons here. I mean to. And I don't mean to imply that matriarchy is the answer either.)
And so I don't really want to be called a "religious humanist." But I think that I strive to be a "spiritual humanist." A spiritual humanist who's really pissed off at patriarchy in all of its forms. So, there you have it.
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Old Comments (3)
Tom Bolton on 03 Jul 2002
Well, now this is interesting. Worthy of comment. As the psychotic hyperintelligent neutron bomb of Dark Star said:
I must think on this...
polifoniczne dzwonki on 13 Jun 2004
Hmmmmm interesting !!!
pop up killer on 16 Jul 2004
I'm new to this site, just browsing around