Society without God

What if God was N-one of us? What if God was NONE of This? :)

With 12% of the world being 'non-religious' + 2.35% atheists, it is unimaginable not to imagine society and world without God. Even 'Religulous' shows us why & how with some hearty laughs. The possibilities are endless & some of them even hilarious… http://salmanthemighty.freeservers.com/images/god.jpg


Thanks for sharing & provoking us to think/feel/imagine &/or act/laugh. Off to the God/ess/less paradise on Earth… D :)

I agree that Bill Maher in his new movie “Religulous” explored atheism quite thoroughly.  I saw it and was amazed at how simple life could be.

Would this simple life have meaning?  Or would we just seek a more banal divinity in, let's imagine, a grapefruit?  LOL

Yes Albert when all this 'for, against and without' are taken together what emerges is a picture of a potential too potent to be ignored even by the best of secularists.
 And it is so encouraging to witness the 'leading edge' in so many areas in the European Nordic regions where ethics, integrity, transparency & dynamic action are the walk…

I also wanted to share 2 quotes  about God, humans & imagination from Henry Miller that showed up synchronistically:

“When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.”


“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.”

Albert,
Are you referring to “Pornography and Obscenity: Handbook for Censors.” - Two Essays by D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller?
It is interesting that you are mentioning that for I just saw Philip Kaufman's movie “Henry & June” where at the very start it is Anais Nin's essay about D. H. Lawrence that triggers the passionate & erotic relationship b/n her & Henry Miller…What a sequence of synchronicities & spiral of names, people & events around.

Albert,

I am glad I asked as well. Your comments always add up new angles, views and dimensions that stimulate new discussions, findings and insights. I am yet to read that ‘powerful , energetic and imaginative “duell” with D. H. Lawrence, and I do appreciate their works and lives ever more now.

Some contemporary voices & authors that attempt to delve into the realms of eroticism and sexuality in an open, honest and inner-taining way are Margot Anand, David Deida and even Marianne Williamson in a different way. More are coming I think/feel.

And the ‘cultural creatives’s actions are changing as their views are becoming more mainstream in the USA and globally. That ‘spiritual, but not religious’ label is becoming the norm when trying to sum up one’s evolving mixture of modern spirituality that is disappointed with all the ‘religulous’ schemes and still searching to integrate all the levels and quadrants in a new dynamic spiral that embraces the inner and outer, the individual and collective and allows for co-creativity with God/dess in a world that has never been more messy and marvelous at the same time…

I am happy to know that Europe is still leading the way in advancing all those changes and that there are luminaries that are bold and daring enough not only to envision and write about those shifts, but to actually walk the talk, cause and live them. You being one such bright example is smth really encouraging & inspiring.

Hello!
Without God - yes, but without Spirituality? - What do you think, Albert, about David Hawkins approach in which he states: “Thus, without divine Grace, life would come to a total standstill (calibrates as true at cal. 1,000).” (in “Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man”, David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., p. 69).

By the way, I have been enjoying very much your “insightful comments” (good for us..) about Spiral Dynamics Integral and I am looking forward to learn more about Integral theories, following your contribuitions here.

Tschuesschen,
Silke (aus Hamburg)

I could not resist adding a comment here before I get to the rest of the entries :) 

From living in different regions of my country, I have observed a wide variety of intense religious beliefs, affecting not only personal but professional lives.  I find it very interesting that still secularists are considered amoral and often treated accordingly, negatively affecting their personal and professional relationships.

Dennett makes a great point here, especially starting at 15:00…

And of course, I love Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow…

:) E.

Albert, I always feel energized reading over here.

That was a great article and well worth the read.  I can see directly how these factors affect belief systems here…   From environmental and geographical influences having evolved into socio-economic factors…  Something I loved about travel was feeling more at home outside my own country religion-,  spirituality- and lifestyle-wise.

Finally, by travelling, I found fellowship with those interested in simpler lifestyles, with sharing good conversations and food with friends far higher priorties in life.  Long, leisurely dinners and after dinner walks were the norm, where here, hardly anyone makes the time for those things, chasing after wealth and busy-ness.

Back to the point, with the direct affects of the economic crisis in my local area, I see people turn more and more to magical thinking.  Reading the article helped me further understand this kind of (il)logic, which confused me somewhat previously.  I found the TED vid when I was looking for material to help support that secularists, humanists (whatever the term :)) are indeed just as moral - if not sometimes more - than those who chastise them as immoral unbelievers…

I also enjoyed The Irony of Poverty article and vids from the same site :)

Wandering through the links you share is a terrific, satisifying adventure. 

:) E.

I just finished your “Interview with Don Back” and after that this one. I simply follow you silently everytime I happen to come across your writings, comments. They are highly intellectual with insights and interesting. I just continue to read them as others in this pod claimed. I usually do not want to comment on your writings but this time I just wanted express myself. Continue your work. Thanks a lot.

I will always follow you. Thanks for the explanation.

It seems that Walter Kaufmann’s Faith of a Heretic would be relevant to this topic. He explores morality and ethics without a religious base. When I was starting out as an adult he had a big influence on me. In fact all of his writings did. He was an astonishing person. Even his poetry is blinkin’ amazing.

And I still resonate strongly with Ayn Rand’s monumental attempt to build a morality and ethics without God and religion, with human life as the “standard of value.” Of course, she never expanded beyond species-centrism….. The Virtue of Selfishness is only one of her wriitings about morality. There’s a lot in Atlas Shrugged, too.

I always wonder, in these discussions, who values freedom, who values liberty, how that gets counted in measuring progress and the level of a society. Never hear it mentioned…….

I’ve been living so many decades in the non-religious mindframe, it somewhat boggles me there are still so many, apparently, who cannot imagine morality and ethics without theistic-deistic God. Don’t think Wilber’s morality-ethics is separate from his idea of God, either, just realized that……

Computer acting up. Gonna quit while I’m ahead.

With Albert’s permission this blog plus comments is now entered into the Collective Wisdom Library of Community Threads.

And I fogot to mention that the United States Founding Fathers felt it necessary to invoke God as the foundation of their political stands; they could not imagine another basis. That unfortunately adds fuel and credibility to opponents of the viewpoints you are highlighting which seek to transcend religious “God-He” bases.

Perhaps the interesting spiritual questions are:

How could we derive a morality and ethics from a non-religious basis that could be deemed relevant and useful by the greatest number of First-Tier levels of consciousness development? We kinda discussed this among ourselves in Seattle Integral community awhile back, with no brilliant conclusions.

What indeed might be the foundations on which a society might be designed that would optimize the beneficial effects of the differences among people, and synergize the similarities, and are morality and ethics the only potentially relevant potential foundations?

[Came here via the link on the Community Threads blog!

Albert; one consequence –if not the main purpose–of religious thought, is to develop a worldview; a schema for putting people into universal or restrictive slots [“we’re all one” or “we are the only pure ones”].

In the absence of religious thought; what kind of worldview do these countries have? More importantly; is this something the “common man” thinks about?

On another note; I’ve to thank you for this blog; I met a Swedish acquaintance today; mentioned the book you’ve blogged about and from then on, our talk took an entirely different turn and we discovered a deeper connection in our experience of life. We discovered we were deep friends- in -waiting!

Albert, what a wonderful coincidence: I met with the Swedish mom of one of my daughter’s friends; I mentioned Zuckerman’s study; your blog, and that was the start of an amazing afternoon. I made a new friend!

Yes, you’re right; absence of a word does not imply absence of consciousness related to it; and there is a lot of history re religion and God in Europe. I still remember the breaking of the Berlin wall; it seemed like one of those completely magical days. Till it happened, I think  we feared it never would. Read a lot of true stories about it….

I’m wondering now:do you think that not using God is also like a dogma–don’t mean it facetiously; but I’m thinking of how in France, e.g., some [most?] people are quick to label any non-pragmatic activity as a cult and have a lot of fear about it. Even meditation….

Another blog this links to: The Happy Planet Index
Posted on Dec 11th, 2008 by Mila 

Albert, I was led here by Meenakshi and I am actually pleased to see the wider context to spirituality and life generally that it is giving. We have been discussing Quality of Life widely in different blogs and pods etc.

I have been fortunate to live in Scandinavia and can attest to the relative ‘heart-fullness’ [just made up that word lol] which pervades culturally. There were lots and lots of churches though, Christian religion still formed the basis of a lot of what we are seeing now. But no, the church is not the master of anybody’s morality or spirituality. By far, most of the churches were empty… pretty, but empty.

I am surprised to even see that there is a conservative and vocal Christian community in the U.S. - I became much more aware because of the Obama campaign - because of the shocking lack of care for your ‘fellow man’ that is the cultural norm in the U.S.! The hypocrisy is pretty blatant, isn’t it?

Apart from the extremely high cost of living in Scandinavia, [my currency couldn’t stretch quite that far!] I felt really comfortable in those places to be myself - a lover of life, of the higher things, of beauty, of wide open spaces, of humanity. I didn’t feel like a minority, my skin colour was mostly insignificant and in fact, the fact that I was from Barbados seemed to elevate my stature significantly because of the mental image of quality of life [I think!] that is associated with my country in the Scandinavians’ minds. Sorry for the generalising, but this was the case in Sweden, Denmark and Finland as well…

I assure you, this has never been the case for me in the U.S. Indeed I am always hard pressed [resistant] to visit the U.S. because of the immediate feeling of repression of myself as a human being.

I didn’t intend to be so elaborate in my comments here at all! Actually I was convinced I didn’t have much to add lol But I wanted to concur that religiosity is vastly overrated but it is a first step for people as we all need leaders to travel towards our divinity. And we will always go to the first, easiest route first. Truth emerges regardless of the path we take.

I have faced more abuse from the overly zealous, especially Christian, than I have of any other group, by the way…

I’d like to include the comment here, that I also posted in Mila’s Happy Planet Index blog:

‘So often I am asked ‘Which church do you go to?’ because this is still
the standard for being a believer or a ‘good person’ and when I admit I
rarely go to church, it is a shocker. Far as I’m concerned, my life is
worship, and church can actually limit my desire to fully express my
love for life and all of its parts!



I don’t miss religion, whatsoever! But I ‘preach’ to my Personal
Excellence course participants that an overload of any aspect of your
life, including your spiritual life, disrupts your balance, your
quality of life, especially your relationships with loved ones…

There is still much to be explored with respect to faith, divinity, spirituality in a societal context.’

Thank you as well for allowing me to explore this a little bit here as well.

With regards, always, Sherrilene