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Amazon.co.ukI’d rather be human than spiritual
A recent debate, hosted by the South West London Humanists, tackled what I believe to be a very loaded question: can humanists be spiritual?
Jeremy Rodell and Marilyn Mason led the arguments from the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps respectively (click on their names to see summaries of their points on the HumanistLife blog).
Why is this question so loaded? Because, I think, answering ‘no’ makes you vulnerable to judgment – usually silent, always unjust.
Spirituality is on the rise as organised religion declines. Many people reject the pomp, prejudice, prescriptions, proscriptions and silly stories that are the basis of most of the market-leading faiths. Yet they yearn for the fantastic in their lives, they want to touch the numinous and have some degree of mystery and wonder in their lives. And there’s no end of alternative wackiness they can be sold, from feng shui to crystal swinging.
But being ’spiritual’ doesn’t just mean being credulous. For some reason, the term has managed to attach to itself some measure of moral righteousness. To many – too many – being spiritual automatically earns approbation.
Marilyn Mason (with whose ‘no’ verdict I entirely agree) points out that spirituality, of course, implies spirit, and thus takes us into the realm of the supernatural. So what does being spiritual actually mean? As far as I can see, it means believing in things you can’t see, can’t prove, can’t predict, can’t use in any meaningful way and can’t possibly explain.
Yet, when I say to people that I am not spiritual, they regard me with either pity or suspicion. Not having a spiritual side is like not being able to see or hear. It’s almost impossible to explain to people who consider themselves spiritual that not sharing that characteristic is not a disability. In fact, I regard it as a form of freedom.
Not being spiritual is not the same as not being capable of emotion. There is much that moves me profoundly. The sight of the Earth seen from a distance – Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The marvel of replication by DNA and the staggering profusion of life it has produced via natural selection. In fact, science provides an endless seam of treasures capable of evoking deep contemplation and great emotion. You don’t need the fantasies of the supernatural realm to encounter the marvellous – it’s right there in front of you in the natural world.
While New Age spirituality may lie beyond the pale of organised religion, I think the term has carried over some of the prejudice it acquired within those faiths, especially Christianity.
There are some people for whom saying ‘I am not a Christian’ is synonymous with saying ‘I am immoral’. It is a form of arrogance, of course, but to them the only source of morality is faith. It is generally a fruitless exercise to point out to them the millions of good, moral people who must have existed on this planet before their particular brand of mythology came into being. Faith is about prejudice: the two words are themselves virtually synonymous.
So it is with ’spiritual’ people. To say that I am not spiritual is, to them, to say that I am unable to marvel or to empathise. They believe that I am missing something – perhaps even my humanity.
And they couldn’t be more wrong. By rejecting the supernatural, by insisting on remaining in this corporeal, temporal world, I am not putting my hopes in the unreal, I do not shift the responsibility for my actions to some ethereal force, I do not attribute the authority for my beliefs to some unimpeachable, unreachable entity. Instead, I find everything I want and need within humanity itself. Knowledge, wisdom, beauty and empathy are human attributes we should value and celebrate. Why look anywhere else?
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