Naturalistic Paganism
Musings of a Pagan Mythicist, by Maggie Jay Lee: “Michael Dowd and Religion 3.0”
I would like to share with you a video by Michael Dowd titled “Religion 3.0: Inspiring Science, Realistic Hope”. Michael Dowd is a naturalistic Christian and the author of Thank God for Evolution. He and his wife and collaborator Connie Barlow have been traveling around North America spreading the good news of evolution since 2002. This video is a guest sermon he gave at Granite Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Prescott, Arizona on April 13, 2014. It really sums up some of my own core beliefs and values.
Dowd’s religion 3.0 is not a new religion, but a new way of understanding, validating and drawing forth new meaning from religious traditions. It is a religious orientation, grounded not in the authority of elders or written scriptures, but in our best evidentiary understanding of reality as collectively interpreted. It is a religious orientation, deeply engaged with the revelations of science, with what it means to be part of an evolving 13.8 billion year Universe.
Dowd lists six things that make up his personal religious credo, his what, why and where of religion, which I think will resonate with most naturalistic pagans.
Michael Dowd’s religious credo:
(1) Reality is my God;
(2) Evidence is my scripture;
(3) Big History is my creation story;
(4) Ecology is my theology;
(5) Integrity is my salvation;
(6) Ensuring a just and healthy future is my mission.
Doing Religion 3.0 requires that we seek to understand and strive to be in right relationship with Reality, with the World as it really is. Dowd list three important aspects of Reality: Nature, Time and Mystery. I really like that he includes Mystery. Mystery is that part of reality that we are unaware of, that we may never be aware of, or as Dowd says “all that we don’t even know that we don’t know”. Without an acknowledgement of Mystery, there can be no reverence, and without reverence, religion is hollow.
Although science does offer us our best understanding of Reality, getting in right relationship with Reality requires more than the acquisition of knowledge. I believe it is rather something that grows out of cultivating the right attitude, the right way of being in the World. According to Dowd, to be in right relationship we must cultivate what Martin Buber called an I‐Thou, rather than an I‐It, relationship with Reality.
“Humanity has been out of right relationship with Reality because we have related to Nature, Time and Mystery not as Divine; so we have been treating Nature as an It to be exploited and used by us, rather than a Thou to be related to in an honorable, respectful way. Martin Buber, the famous Jewish theologian, wrote a book called I and Thou, and what he said was that, if you treat any person or aspect of Nature as an It to be exploited and used by you, rather than a Thou to be related to in an honorable, respectful way, then the Divine is not present, God is not present.” ‐ Michael Dowd, “Religion 3.0: Inspiring Science, Realistic Hope” video, at 7:05
Relating to Nature, Time and Mystery as a Thou requires extending the sense that we feel in our selves, that sense of being fully alive, to the world around us, so that the World is not a dead thing, but a living presence. To do this is to personify the World, even if only subtly. Sacred personification is not a false romantic pretense put on Nature, but is rather a metaphor which points to that which cannot be stated explicitly without a loss of meaning. Sacred personification is the heart of all religions, including version 3.0.
Thomas Berry said that: “We will never enter a just, healthy, and life sustaining future on the resources of the existing religious traditions, and we cannot get there without them.” (as quoted by Dowd, at 14:04). I believe we humans still need religion, maybe more than ever, but we need a different sort of religion from what has come before. We need religion 3.0 and Naturalistic Paganism is a part of this religious revolution.
The Author
In addition to writing the Musings of a Pagan Mythicist column here at HumanisticPaganism, Maggie Jay Lee is interested in growing a new religious culture grounded in the everyday shared world and the public revelations of science, that celebrates our relationship with Cosmos, Earth and each other, and strives to bring us into right relationship with the Nature inside and outside of us. She draws inspiration from modern cosmology, evolutionary psychology, and the myths and wisdom traditions of ancient Hellas. M. Jay is a member of the Universal Pantheists Society and the Spiritual Naturalist Society, and she has studied with Glenys Livingston author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion. She celebrates the creative unfolding of Gaia in west Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, two dogs and cat.
Mid-Month Meditation for June
We bring our late spring theme, “Practice”, to a close with this thought by Mary Jo Weaver:
“First the appearance, then the dance, then the story.”
Pagans often claim that they have no orthodoxy (right belief), only orthopraxy (right practice), by which they mean they privilege action over belief. Mary Jo Weaver writes in her essay, “Who is the Goddess and Where Does She Get Us?” (published in the spring 1989 volume of the Journal of Feminist Studies), that the formula, “first the appearance, then the dance, then the story”, specifies the proper relationship among theophany, ritual, and theology. If we were to rephrase that statement in naturalistic terms, then we might say: “Experience precedes practice and practice precedes reasoning.” But is this ordering true for Humanistic and Naturalistic Pagans?
Give this issue some thought then share how you order these three elements of spirituality: experience, practice, and reasoning. Explain why in the comments below.
Starstuff, Contemplating by Jon Cleland Host: “The Wonder Amplifier”
We are assemblages of ancient atoms forged in stars – atoms organized by history to the point of consciousness, now able to contemplate this sacred Universe of which we are a tiny, but wondrous, part.
While intellectual ponderings were important in my path to Naturalistic Paganism, and these still play a major role, another part of the current topic simply crowds them out in my mind now. You see, the topic also asked about intellect’s interaction with wonder, and that’s a very, very big and compelling topic.
Years ago, Dr. Richard Feynman was told he couldn’t see beauty. As he explains:
“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree, I think. And he says, ‘You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”
Dr. Feynman goes on to explain how he sees all the beauty in the flower that anyone else does, and that on top of that, he sees inside, imagining the networks in the petal, then down to the cells themselves, and the complex dance of the many intricate molecules working together, and then, even more! Behind all of that is the deep time history, the long process of evolution which – more than 100 million years ago, drew together insects and plants in mutually beneficially teamwork. He describes how he sees all of this, each level adding to the excitement, mystery, and awe of a simple flower! He concludes:
“It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts”
I know that rush. It’s incredible. I see it unfold, level upon level, in the blink of an eye, time and again in my life, all around me. That tree, this rock, that cloud, a blue jay, this computer, and on and on! And that’s not even getting into seeing other people. I can’t imagine living without it, and for anyone who hasn’t experienced it, it’s indescribable. For someone to suggest to Dr. Feynman, that he sees less beauty in a flower, when he sees so much more, just shows that this friend doesn’t understand what knowledge can do. When I first read Feynman’s flower story, it hit me – Here was someone who sees the world as I do, and experiences that beauty of so many things as I do! Wow, it works with other people too!
I caught glimpses of it in others too. Carl Sagan comes to mind. As does this quote from Charles Sherrington, 1942:
“The brain is a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. It is as if the Milky Way is engaging in a cosmic dance. The cortex is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never a lasting one; with a shifting harmony of entrancing subpatterns.”
That’s why I just simply don’t get how anyone could suggest that a Naturalistic worldview somehow decreases awe and wonder, when the opposite has been so true for me. Have they never learned anything about things they see? For me, a Naturalistic worldview, coupled with some knowledge, has taken my awe and wonder to undreamt-of levels, drawing from deep wells of spirituality that I hadn’t known existed.
Any attempt at examples will fall far short of reality, but a few come to mind.
We just saw how someone could describe our brain as an “Enchanted Loom”. How our brains work, on a basic level, isn’t that hard to understand. We can start with our senses that feed into the brain. For instance, well understood cells in our eyes convert light into electrical pulses, sent along nerve cells to the brain. Nerve cells are also called neurons, and each has many long, thin branches connected to other neurons. It takes many electrical pulses from many neurons to cause another neuron to send its electrical pulse, which may then reach many other different neurons. A number of connected neurons make simple “logic gates”, similar to those in computers. Many logic gates linked together can process information like a computer does. But how do they get connected the right way? Our genes, built by trillions of our Ancestors over millions of years of evolution, give us the starting structure, and our history builds the rest, ending up with trillions of neurons, and a hundred trillion connections between them!
The incredible realization here is that this shows how the mind works. These basic chemical reactions and electrical pulses, all working in milliseconds, make up your every thought from “where did I leave my keys?”, to “Yes! I’ll marry him!”. I don’t know about you, but I find that realization to be mind blowing. We are our brains, without a need for the idea visiting ghosts from some imagined supernatural realm. There are no disembodied “minds”, and so any damage or chemical change to our brains affects (or even eliminates) our thoughts. My thoughts seem to me to be the essence of who I am, yet, at the simplest level, they are undeniably made up of basic chemical reactions! And it’s not just my brain that is this amazing, but your brain, or his brain, or her brain, too! We are surrounded by so many of these incredible thinking chemical, biological machines!
And what if we turn our gaze skyward?
As a ball of plasma a million times bigger than the entire Earth, the sun is not a ball of fire – it’s much too hot for even fire to exist! A few numbers can show us nature more clearly, and for a Naturalistic Pagan like me, practically everything about nature is spiritual.
So how can we conceive of the sheer awesomeness of our Sun? Size? Oh yeah, we already did that. Ok, how about power? The energy output of the Sun produces over 18 million times more energy in one second what the entire worldwide nuclear arsenal! Our local star produces that flood of energy by nuclear fusion, turning 370,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 3.7 X 1038) hydrogen atoms into helium, which by Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, directly converts 4 million metric tons of matter into energy each second. If every grain of sand on Earth were instead several whole planet Earths, then the total number of grains of sand on all those millions of quadrillions of Earths would still be less than the number of hydrogen atoms fused every second by the Sun! And all that energy is only just barely enough to keep gravity at bay.
We could go on all day. It’s truly mindbending. I find it even more mindbending to realize that all this energy has caused simple molecules on Earth to organize over millions of years to be able to build cities, sing whalesongs, understand DNA, and even to love a new baby.
OK, that’s it for now. I can’t write anymore….. I see my fingers moving as I type…. Nerve cells firing….. the actin and myosin molecules converting ATP into motion….. motion causing the electron fields of the keyboard to repel……………. the electrical… ………………………………
The Author
In addition to writing the Starstuff, Contemplating column here at HumanisticPaganism, Dr. Jon Cleland Host is a scientist who earned his PhD in materials science at Northwestern University & has conducted research at Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning since 1997. He holds eight patents and has authored over three dozen internal scientific papers and eleven papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the journal Nature. He has taught classes on biology, math, chemistry, physics and general science at Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University. Jon grew up near Pontiac, and has been building a reality-based spirituality for over 30 years, first as a Catholic and now as a Unitarian Universalist, including collaborating with Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow to spread the awe and wonder of the Great Story of our Universe (see www.thegreatstory.org, and the blog atevolutionarytimes.org). Jon and his wife have four sons, whom they embrace within a Universe-centered, Pagan, family spirituality. He currently moderates the yahoo group Naturalistic Paganism.
See other Starstuff, Contemplating posts.
See Dr. Jon Cleland Host’s other posts.
Postpagan Ceremony & Ecology, by Glen Gordon: “Walking with Whitman”
The following is a small sermon given as part of a larger worship service with three others at the Unitarian Universalist Church of The Palouse in Moscow, Idaho on Sunday, January 27th, 2013.
One of the first poets I fell in love with was Walt Whitman. At 17, I remember wandering the bookstore in search of a literary craving I could not name. I passed the discounted classics, and a leatherbound copy of Leaves of Grass caught my attention. I thumbed through its gold leafed pages, mesmerized with the words flowing on the page. The first pages of “Song of Myself” captivated me as I mouthed the words to myself, flipping from page to page. To this day, the poem continues to have that effect on me. Whitman could articulate the submersion in the natural world as clearly as he experienced it.
In his day, Whitman’s poetry was considered scandalous for its sensual qualities. Yet, often ignored by scholars today is the religious message behind his poetry. Whitman’s intention was within the spirit of his times, when new religions where sprouting all around him. Leaves of Grass was deliberately written as an inspirational spiritual text, in as far as he mimics the poetic cadence of the Bible. He laid a poetic foundation for religion and spirituality that is grounded in the sacred of the everyday and merges the mystical with the scientific, without friction or contradiction, leaving both himself and his words as controversial today as when they where freshly written.
In my personal spiritual affirmations, I have a phrase, “One breath, one flesh, one soul.” In several key passages Whitman’s words reflect the meaning I attach to this affirmation. When he writes, “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”, I think about all matter being the collective physical manifestation of all creation as one flesh. Putting aside human perception, I question whether there is a distinct line where I begin and end or where the physical world around me begins and ends. I have often stopped while on a brisk walk to allow my senses to fully engage with the environment and feel lost in the landscape, feeling as though there are no barriers between me and the extended world.
Whitman continues, “My respiration and inspiration … the beating of my heart … the passing of blood and air through my lungs”. These words are filled with complete adoration for the act of breathing. From these words comes a sense of what I call “the one breath”, which is the atmosphere itself. With each breath of humans and animals and plants, the atmosphere is created and changed, being inhaled and exhaled, so that it becomes unclear where my breath ends and other’s begins. What I take inside me with each gasp of air belonged to and was inside something else. The unseen particles that float about me could have been anywhere and everywhere, and I take them in myself as a necessity of life.
When Whitman writes about God, it is not the anthropomorphic god of the Bible:
“I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty four, and each moment then,
In the face of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.”
This passage reveals a God that is all pervasive within the very fabric of creation and reality, and dwells within the narrator, the faces of those he meets, and in every aspect of the world around him. This is not much different than my own beliefs about the soul. I do not believe in individual souls or spirits that reside within people, unique to them and carrying the attributes of their personality into an afterlife. Instead, I perceive one soul that is at the core of all physical manifestations.
Whitman might relate my vision of the one soul to God. I tend to view it as life itself, an evolutionary impulse of creativity. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman mentions love as the unifying peace of creation, likening it to the support beam used to unite the keel and floorboards. He declares his love for many things and the whole of creation as a declaration of his own self love. This gives me a sense of love for self that is the one soul. The soul that is not myself is the soul that is is everything and everyone else but is still me.
Whitman’s elegant use of language describes what psychology calls a trans-personal experience, where distinction and identity of the self extend beyond the usual filters of our human perception — in layman terms, a mystical experience. As I continue reading the poem in its entirety, I get a sense for the same awe and wonderment I feel on the occasions where I allow myself to let go of preconceived perceptions and meld into the experience itself. From Whitman’s experience arises a poetry of complex theological thought that parallels my own beliefs in “one flesh, one breath, and one soul”. I could spend a lifetime exploring the nuances and subtleties in Walt Whitman’s poetry.
The Author
Glen Gordon was introduced to Paganism by friends while living overseas in Europe during the late 90′s. He underwent both Wiccan and Neodruidic training during his formative years, but had not self-identified as a Pagan when his path diverged into land-centered spiritual naturalism ten years ago. His focus has been on cultivating beneficial relationships with the natural living world surrounding him wherever he lives. During this time, he discovered Unitarian Universalism and has been active in his local congregations for many years. Since 2007, he has worked on varied projects regarding BioRegional Animism, including this 5 minute video, the words of which came from a short UU sermon he gave. He has spoken on the topic of ecology and the land on a few occasions for his local congregation and facilitated a now-disbanded group of UU Pagans and spiritual naturalists. In the past, he maintained the blog, Postpagan, and is excited to share some of that material at HumanisticPaganism. Currently, you can find Glen writing occasionally for No Unsacred Places and helping achieve Green sanctuary status for his beloved UU community, where he helps create and lead ecological aware earth- and land- focused ceremonies for the solstices and equinoxes.
“Charity: A naturalistic practice of offering” by B. T. Newberg
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As in the story of Philemon and Baucis, who hosted Zeus and Hermes in their home, giving to the figures of myth can enhance your life.
In the ancient world, gods and goddesses were honored with gifts. How can a naturalist carry on this tradition today?
One way it can be done is through giving to charities. For example, if you want to honor Demeter, goddess of grain, why not donate to your local food shelf? If Dionysus, god of wine, is your guest of honor, why not toast to him with a donation to Students Against Destructive Decisions? In this way, you can both honor the deity and make an immediate, concrete difference in the world.
Why mythologize charity?
Some may ask why myth and charity need to be paired. The short answer is they don’t, but doing so can have many benefits.
First, gifting is a natural way to develop relationships, well-documented in the animal world as well as across human cultures. So, if you are seeking to develop a relationship with a figure of myth, a natural way to further the bonding process is with a gift. Whether you relate to deities as symbols, archetypes, or some other naturalistic form, gifting can help develop relationships by recruiting our natural social bonding instincts. An offering in the form of a charitable donation appropriate to the deity is an excellent way to cultivate a relationship.
Second, we may intend to give to charities, but how often do we actually carry through? As Alain de Botton points out, we simply tend to forget. One way to remind yourself to do good is with a regular calendar of rituals. If each of your Wheel of the Year rituals involves some gift to charity, you will be reminded to spread the wealth at least eight times a year.
Third, charitable giving is a historically attested ancient Pagan practice. For an account of the ancient tradition of the euergetes, or benefactor, see Peter Brown’s Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire.
Finally, helping others has been scientifically shown to enhance happiness. So, if you are doing ritual anyway, why not add that extra bit of help to others? It makes ritual all the more meaningful.
How do I choose an appropriate charity?
You can start by asking: What does the deity in question care about? For further inspiration, HP has compiled extensive lists of charities organized by deity.
So far, we have five pantheons:
Don’t see your favorite pantheon? Then create it, and share it with the rest of us!
Check out all the Charities by Deity pages, and leave comments with your ideas of new charities. Thanks for your help!
About B. T. Newberg
B. T. Newberg
B. T. founded HumanisticPaganism.com in 2011, and served as managing editor till 2013. His writings on naturalistic spirituality can be found at Patheos, Pagan Square, the Spiritual Naturalist Society, as well as right here on HP. Since the year 2000, he has been practicing meditation and ritual from a naturalistic perspective. After leaving the Lutheranism of his raising, he experimented with Agnosticism, Buddhism, Contemporary Paganism, and Spiritual Humanism. Currently he combines the latter two into a dynamic path embracing both science and myth. He headed the Google Group Polytheist Charity, and organized the international interfaith event The Genocide Prevention Ritual.
In 2009, he completed a 365-day challenge recorded at One Good Deed Per Day. As a Pagan, he has published frequently at The Witch’s Voice as well as Oak Leaves and the podcast Tribeways, and has written a book on the ritual order of Druid organization Ar nDriocht Fein called Ancient Symbols, Modern Rites. Several of his ebooks sell at GoodReads.com, including a volume of creative nonfiction set in Malaysia called Love and the Ghosts of Mount Kinabalu.
Professionally, he teaches English as a Second Language. He also researches the relation between religion, psychology, and evolution at www.BTNewberg.com. After living in Minnesota, England, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea, B. T. Newberg currently resides in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife and cat.
B. T. currently serves as the treasurer and advising editor for HP.
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