Spiritual Atheism

Sam Harris’s book deals with
meditation and more

At the Atheist Alliance of America convention, I met a woman who calls herself a “spiritual atheist,” so naturally I asked her all about that. She said that most people are flummoxed but the phrase, but it seemed to fit me, too. We talked about her outlook and about a profound spiritual experience she’d had several years ago. She means a natural experience, the same natural experience that religious people interpret religiously. The idea of spiritual atheism sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that’s about the change. Sam Harris, one of the New Atheists, has a new book, Waking Up, that’s about spirituality without religion. Being a spiritual atheist might be the next big thing. So here’s my take on spiritual atheism. The human spirit is not literally real but it sure is real metaphorically speaking. Spirituality is about tending to that spirit. Spirituality is about art, self-awareness, connection, identity, community, morality, justice and transcendence.

Art moves the human spirit, and art is real. As a young man, I thought of poetry as a sort of weird code, a clever way to say something when you could just be direct instead. Poetry, I thought, could be mapped to rationality. It didn’t have a reality of its own. Then I married an English professor, and I came to see poetry as expressing precisely what can’t be mapped to rationality. On one level, I know that everything in my favorite Wallace Stevens poem is contingent instead of eternal. On the other hand, that’s still plenty real for me. It’s no accident that drama developed out of ancient Greek religion and that theater developed out of the medieval Church. Religions have promoted arts of many kinds and occasionally promoted science.

Spiritual experiences that humans have are real. If you’re overcome by a sense of selfless union with the universe, you’re really having that sensation. Meditation is brain exercise, and it can really change the way your brain processes your experience. Praying together, especially with choreographed motions, really helps people feel united. Traditional explanations for these experiences are probably all wrong, but so what? If the practices provide some benefit, it pays to figure out how to get that benefit with secular alternatives. Harris’s new book, in particular, is about liberating meditation from religion and giving it a place of honor in atheist spirituality.

Spirituality is something you practice, not something you believe. Atheists tend to see religion as comprising false beliefs, as if it’s a failed science. Seen through this lens, religion seems preposterous. As society became more rational in the 1800s, freethinking people began leaving Christianity and Judaism, an exodus that continues today. Spiritual practice, however, isn’t like science. In public, it’s more like theater, an attempt to make sense of the human experience and to move an audience. In the 1800s, the ethical culture movement started offering a rational alternative to church. To their rational meetings, however, they soon added ceremonies for the milestones that religions traditionally mark: birth, maturity, marriage, parenthood, and death. People wanted not just ideas but drama. In private, spiritual practice is like a regimen, an ideal, or a connection to something greater. For me it’s mostly meditation and reverence for nature. Religion may include false beliefs, but it includes real events and real, human experiences. Over the centuries, religions have found practical ways of building intentional communities and supporting individuals through the cycle of life. These practices have value separate from the beliefs associated with them.

Spirituality connects us to other people. Superficially, connection can mean coffee hour, potluck suppers, softball teams and choirs. Actually, it’s not clear that such connections are “superficial” at all. Alain de Botton notes that church communities are unusual in that they bring the generations together like few other institutions. More profoundly, connections can be revolutionary. Florence Nightingale reformed nursing, turning it from a lowly job to a profession with high standards, and she did all that by consciously following Jesus’ example of caring for the sick and tending to the needy. We can also think of the Red Cross, the YMCA, Gandhi and King. Connections within a congregation are an important part of the experience, too. When my wife got really sick and passed away, I got a good sense for what a church community can provide to a family.

Is spirituality about faith? Maybe. You could say that I have faith in the human spirit. “Faith” gets a bad rap because people use it to mean “blind faith even in the face of contrary evidence.” The dictionary definition, however, is merely trust, and I trust that the human spirit is worth taking seriously. Ultimately, if someone demanded that I prove that my position is right by some objective means, I wouldn’t be able to do so. Can I prove that there’s really any ultimate justice in lending money to poor Muslim women who can’t otherwise get loans? No, I can’t prove it, but I take it on faith. Can I prove that a funeral is really worth the expense? How could I even put a dollar value on it? Issues of human value, such as justice and morality, are judgment calls, which implies at least a little faith. It’s not blind faith in something that’s been proven wrong, it’s faith in something unprovable.

Maybe “spirituality” and the “human spirit” are the wrong terms for all this activity. A lot of atheists say so. If there’s a better term for it, I’m all ears. I like the term because it affirms our commonality with other people. For some people, that’s probably a reason to dislike it.

Here’s a previous post about my family’s experience in the church as my wife passed away: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/life-death-and-religion.html

Here’s a post about the welcome ceremony I invented for our Burning Man camp: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html

A post about what a “soul” means to an atheist: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2011/08/our-real-souls.html

A post about the Temple in Burning Man, a post-modern sacred space: http://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html