Proverbs 7

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Often times when I’m listening to Christian teachings, I wonder whether atheists would accept it readily as I do. I wonder how someone with a completely different world view would see it.

Solomon is considered to be the wisest man who ever lived. I’ve always accepted the book of Proverbs as sound, common sense advice - obvious, even. I still do. But would irreligious people agree?

What follows is a story Solomon tells about the dangers of promiscuity. When you read this, instead of seeing Solomon looking out the window at some unknown youth, see yourself looking out at your own son or daughter. Would your counsel differ from Solomon’s?
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Connections

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I want to try an experiment.  Mike spoke about spirituality last week and about how it is difficult to explain and understand.  I see spirituality as a connection to something greater that yourself, a way of being more that just the one human mind in your head.  This experiment requires a little creativity on my part and some expenditure of effort on the part of the reader.  Please bear with me.

Imagine that you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.

It’s summer, early in the morning.  The sun is barely breaking through the landscape and long, tiger stripes of shadow punctuate the light.  The rays warm your skin as you drift serenely through them.  The shadows are cool but not chilly as you pass through the slices of day and night in the early dawn.  You can hear the clear, sharp, clean sound of birds singing.  There’s no background susurrus of daytime sounds yet, just the birds and the soft slosh of mini waves as they push against the sides of the boat.

You reach over the side and the shock of cold water kisses your skin.  The bob of the lake rolling beneath the boat plays across your knuckles.  A chilly rhythm of water.  Languidly you pull your arm back enjoying the hint of an ache in your fingers.  Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the cling of water resist the gentle pull of gravity as the liquid finds pathways across your skin.  They fluidly build themselves into droplets and, when heavy enough, they fall.  Each drop taps. Tap.  A new sound in the arena.

Now, right on that tap - stop.  Stop imagining.  Here is the real game.  This is the thing that is overlooked while being obvious and frightening at the same time:  the lake in my head, the same lake I was imagining.  That lake has become the lake in your head.  It doesn’t matter that you never know me, or never know anything about me.  In a thousand years after I’m dead, if language can carry this message forward it won’t matter.  Think carefully on this, beyond the obvious sense to the huge and amazing miracle hidden inside.  The lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

Behind the one hundred and ninety words that make up my description there is some kind of flow.  A stream of pure conception.  Something with no mass, no matter, no gravity and beyond time itself.  A stream of consciousness that can only be seen if we choose to look beyond the words, beyond the meaning and into the process itself.  Look at it at just the right angle and you’ll see my imaginary lake becoming yours.  We have made a connection that might be described as spiritual.  Maybe but not yet.  For that we need to go a little further.

Next try to visualise all those streams of human interaction.  All those communication links where imagination is passed from one mind to another.  Linking in and out and between people.  Not just the lake in the description but every concept, every idea that is shared and transformed and shared again.  Every text, every picture, each bar of music, every spoken word, knowing look, smile or tear.  Streams through casual contact, shared memories, witnessed events, past and future touching, cause meeting effect in billions of different ways.  Try to imagine this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, grasp a sense of it’s vastness and awesome complexity. The reach of this is nearly infinite and yet it remains rich with every experience that humanity has chosen to share.  This waterway of conceptual paradise mixing all information, all identities, all societies and selves forever and beyond time and space.  More than any single mind can hope to grasp.

Spirituality for me is when I catch a glimpse of that vast connectivity.  Some might call it God but for me it just doesn’t have words that are adequate.  It is my hope that this experiment has let you share it with me, even if just for a moment.  Let me know what you think.

Back to Secular humanism next week.

It’s Like Wiggling Your Ears

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The question of how to describe “the spiritual” purely in physical terms is one that has been rumbling around in my head for several weeks now. In My Deconversion Story, Karen made the comment

Yet I clung to the memory of several spiritual experiences I’d had in my life that seemed very real to me. But as I examined each of them (maybe half a dozen) in my memory, I also examined possible alternate explanations. Had god really been talking to me during prayer, or was it my own subconscious chiming in? Was the sense of transcendence I felt during certain worship services really supernatural, or was it an emotional reaction - one that I also felt at great concerts and touching poetry readings?

In other unrelated posts Jason has said that spiritual, to him, means a general sense of awe or wonder that we can experience in nature, for example.

And to me, a Christian, the spiritual obviously means so much more than that.

So I keep coming back to the question, “Is it possible to describe the spiritual in physical terms?” My initial reaction to that statement was that it was not possible - the spiritual and the physical are completely different - “like TV and radio” is how I put it at one point. I didn’t think it could be explained, but the more I think about it, the more I think I can!
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Secular Humanist Tenets Part 4 - Search for Truth

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Four weeks ago I wrote about false assumptions and how Christians suffered in the past because of them just as atheists suffer today.  Atheism doesn’t have a philosophy or principles to counter these false assumptions any more than it has a philosophy or principles to deserve them.  Secular humanism does put forward a set of positive traits and promotes a world view.  These are:

1. Need to test beliefs
2. Reason, evidence, scientific method
3. Fulfillment, growth, creativity
4. Search for truth
5. This life
6. Ethics
7. Building a better world

The search for truth is something that both secular humanists and those who belong to one theistic group or another can appreciate.  Secular humanists, I think, take a slightly different stance to it though. (more…)