Swimming the Sacred River

Needless to say, I am thrilled that Obama was sworn in yesterday as our 44th president. Although I expect to be frustrated and even disappointed by him from time to time, I am ultimately hopeful and enthusiastic about our future. In his speech, he said a couple of things that I really appreciated.

The first was his mention of “non-believers”. Considering that about 13% of Americans are non-theists, it is about time that we were acknowledged. It will be a long time before being non-theistic will no longer be a political liability. But that journey starts with the understanding that we exist and that, unlike popular misconception, we are not minions of Satan, we are not morally rudderless, we are not withering in existential misery (at least not more than anyone else), and we vote.

The second was his statement that science will be restored to its proper place. It has been painful to watch the last administration treat science as an inconvenience at best, tossed aside whenever it conflicted with conservative ideology. But as many are now finally realizing, ignoring scientific data doesn’t make reality go away. Having a president who actually respects science is a huge breath of fresh air, indicated by Obama’s excellent appointment of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. Let’s hope that this is but the start of a grand revival of science in America.

Ever since FDR first introduced prayer at the inaugural ceremonies in 1933, they have each and every one invoked a monotheistic god. A strong case can be made to say that including such prayers is inappropriate at one of our chief secular rituals. Nevertheless, they are here to stay for the foreseeable future. This year, with Rick Warren, the anti-gay pastor of the Saddleback mega-church, set to give the opening prayer at Obama’s inauguration, the issue has grown in significance. His support of California’s Prop 8, which strips the right of marriage from gays and lesbians, makes his participation especially abhorrent.

Since it is safe to assume that his prayer (and those of the other religious speakers) will again call on a personal Father-God, I wanted to write my own benediction from a naturalistic orientation. The following is hardly poetic or memory-worthy, but I will be reading it during Warren’s invocation, dreaming of a time when supernatural beliefs no longer have a place in our secular life.

On this historic day we inaugurate our new President and Vice-President, that solemn ceremony epitomizing the secular process of our enduring democracy. We offer our gratitude to those great minds that courageously embarked upon the American experiment, who had faith in the essential goodness of humanity and envisioned a country whose every citizen might equally enjoy the freedom, security, and opportunity that the rule of law might provide. We further give thanks to all those individuals, both civic and military, who have sacrificed all they have to forward the fortunes of our nation.

On this day, we grant unto President-elect Obama, Vice-President-elect Biden, as well as their families and members of their administration our support and our hope that they will find the strength and wisdom they will need in the coming years. In light of the challenges we as a nation face, may they never fall short of the fierce courage, unwavering integrity, compassionate beneficence, and broad open-mindedness they must have to fulfill the potential of their profound duties.

Despite the darkness of these days, we recognize that this can also be a wondrous time, a time of great renewal and revitalization. We must now reaffirm our dedication to a culture of social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Once again we must look to our own resources to refill the national vault, not only with economic prosperity, but just as importantly with our wealth of humanity—education, the arts, science and green technology, health care, and a new age of justice, liberty, and progress. The world is ready to look to us once again, not only as moral leaders, but as a partner in the struggle for a healthy planet and a lasting peace, and we must not, we shall not fall short of these sacred obligations.

Let us mark this day as a turning point in the journey towards the splendor that is our potential, a potential measured by our dedication to a world without poverty, injustice, or fear. A world where all humankind can embrace each other as the Great Family we truly are, and live as one on this divine earth as virtuous and responsible citizens.

One of the central tenets of Sacred River states that intentional change is a moral imperative. This is grounded in the idea that the one thing that makes us most human is intentionality, the ability to plan, reflect, imagine, and act with forethought. We can choose to think and behave in ways that our primordial disposition might otherwise prefer. Further, we have the power to learn; one’s store of knowledge and skills is never fixed, even if age makes the process more challenging over time. And because our choices have consequences not only for one’s personal well-being, but also in regards to our social and ecological impact, we have an obligation to “educate the will” as Emerson put it.

The Second Virtue within Sacred River is Integrity. One aspect of integrity is genuineness, which can be interpreted as embodying one’s most authentic self. Of course, this “self” is not an unchanging relic, but an emergent process of being. There are many keys to achieving this flow of genuineness, but perhaps the most salient is self-knowledge or self-awareness. It is no small thing to be able to pay attention to the self, to one’s quiet motivations, expectations, beliefs, assumptions, fears, values, and all the obscured habits of the mind, to follow the tangled thread in the cognitive labyrinth that leads to our manifested actions and feelings. Any increase in such awareness can be considered another step in the journey of personal growth.

2009 promises to be a year of momentous change. The rise of progressivism is long overdue, although too many Democrats are still under the sway of Reaganomics and general conservative thinking. The country, however, is ready for something new and if enough pressure from progressive groups is kept up, the incoming Obama administration might break the conservative chains that have shackled America for the last three decades. Although we can gripe about specific policies (and we will), overall we can look forward to a renewed respect for knowledge, science, education, health, and sustainability, all of which were largely abandoned in 1980. If we are lucky, we will also see major reform in corporate culture and government corruption through a resurgence of an ethic of responsibility.

No doubt about it, we have a mountain of problems to fix—two wars, an economic meltdown, a broken healthcare system, a melting planet, decaying infrastructure, and civil rights under siege. Although so many complex problems cannot be blamed on any one cause, I believe that a major component has been the abandonment of the idea of the common good, replaced by the promotion of selfishness, greed, and radical individualism. In fact, the notion of civic cooperation for secular purposes (religious efforts have been excepted) has been long attacked as communistic and fascist. One must admire the propaganda efforts put forth to convince so many Americans that when a tiny group of wealthy elites do well we all do well, and when they hurt we all hurt. Large cracks have finally appeared in this fantasy, but it will take many hammers from progressive groups and thinkers to shatter the illusion. This must happen, because our problems are so many and so large that only cooperative efforts will effectively address them.

The state of our country was not inevitable; we have the resources and knowledge to address what ails us, but they have been suppressed under the yoke of conservatism. My own greatest hope is that the new administration will make the necessary investments to turn our assets into pragmatic solutions that will benefit one and all. We also have a chance to begin educating people on both the realities that face us and the ways we can better our situation, all without the filter of evangelical and conservative ideologies. Further, we can, if we are lucky and industrious, put forward a new public ethic grounded in empathy and integrity. In some cases this will need to be accomplished legislatively, especially in regards to corporate behavior, but ideally it will happen through example.

Many Americans are waking up from the dream woven by corporations, evangelicals, and conservatives; they are becoming savvy to the lies, fairy tales, and twisted logic. This is an opportunity for Naturalists to offer an alternative, one based in reason, empiricism, and pragmatism that is also guided by compassion, imagination, and wonder. It is an opportunity to remind people of the virtues of cooperation and shared sacrifice in service to the greater good. It is an opportunity to make the switch from throwaway consumerism to sustainability. The pabulum Americans have been given has been attractive and sweet but ultimately without nourishment—it is time for people to find true sustenance, a richer fare that feeds lives of meaning, fulfillment, and joy. That is my wish for this New Year.

What is divine? What things are sacred and what makes them so has been debated since the notion was invented. For many religions, even up to this day, sacredness has been seen as a kind of extension of a transcendent personality. In this general perspective, God, say, is inherently sacred (being God and all) and anything that God does, creates, or influences becomes itself holy. Of course, this orientation requires a dualism, where some things are sacred and some things are not. The not-sacred things/events/actions can range, depending on who you ask, from the blandly mundane to the wickedly profane, depending on those things’ relation with the source of sacredness.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

Religious beliefs are a strange thing and cause people to act in strange ways. Otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people can have their minds turned inside out when their faith is questioned, either by a skeptic or by a scientist. A key problem with non-allegorical (i.e fundamentalist or supernatural) religious beliefs is that they generally have a static view of the world. Because the world can be seen in only one way, when seen through the religious lens, such beliefs revert the mind to an immature state where things are black and white and fixed. When the world provides evidence that goes counter to those beliefs (as it always will), instead of incorporating those new understandings, adherents instead will either twist reality to conform with their bias or they will ignore it altogether. It is, in short, a kind of insanity.

So far, we have briefly examined two of three pillars of a developing spiritual orientation—Religious Naturalism and Allegoricalism. The final pillar is Progressivism.

In a very general sense, progressivism is a worldview that recognizes the worth of human life and seeks to maximize freedom, opportunity, and fairness in society. Further, it aspires towards improving the well-being of all—via education, the arts, technology, social justice, health care, economic opportunity, et cetera—while also balancing human interests with those of the natural world. A progressive vision, therefore, seeks to enhance the liberty and fulfillment of both individuals and groups while simultaneously cultivating social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Progressives seek to manifest this vision through the promotion of diversity, empathy, pragmatism, critical thinking and debate, innovation, and cultural participation.