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Please join us for our next service on Sunday, September 5, at 10:30. Since this is a holiday weekend we will be having a open forum discussion on the topic of Immigration. Here are some questions that may be considered during our discussion:
1) Should being present in the U.S. without permission be considered a crime?
2) What should be done with people already here illegally?
3) Should children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants be granted automatic citizenship?
4) Some argue that illegal immigrants help to keep prices low for things such as food, hotels, restaurants, landscaping, and other products and services. Are you willing to pay more for groceries, hospitality services, etc., in order to control illegal immigration?
5) How does fear affect US citizens' view on immigration today?
6) Some have proposed mass deportations of millions of people from the US who here illegally. What would be the consequences of the mass deportations?
We will be meeting at Wilkes Family Central at Lincoln Heights. Directions are from the mid-town intersection in Wilkesboro. This is the intersection where Wilkesboro Blvd, Main Street and Oakwoods Rd all intersect.
Traveling east through Wilkesboro, once you go through the light and up the hill you are on East Main. Continue on for .9 of a mile from the intersection.
Turn right at the Wilkes Family Central at Lincoln Heights sign. It's a yellow, red, black and white sign on a brick structure. Go .3 of a mile, through a residential area. You will see a gate and a drive that goes straight off the road, while the road turns to the left. Drive through the gates and down the hill. Park in the parking lower parking lot that is near the picnic tables. We meet in this building. Come in the brown doors at the end. Go about half way down the hall to the Family Room, number 107 on the left.
Coffee and socializing at 10:00 AM
Childcare will be provided.
For a sampling of recent sermons and programs, go to Sermon Archives above.
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Three practical ideals for getting through the day
1. Want what you have;
2. Do what you can; and
3. Be who you are.
From Forest Church's sermon, "How to Make the Most of Hard Times", see Sermon Archives or click here.
"Our Liberal Faith" 
UU Faith is not a believe whatever you choose to believe faith, rather it is a faith in which each of us is free to believe what we are each compelled to believe based upon a free and disciplined search for truth…
Excerpt taken from UU Faith Sermon by D. Doreion Colter, see Sermon Archives "Our Liberal Faith".
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Sundays 10 AM coffee time and socializing
10:30 to 11:30 Morning Lay Led Service
coffee and socializing also following the service
We currently do not have a permanet place to meet. Rose Glen Village has asked us to find a new location. Some of the residents were upset at our presence and since Rose Glen is their home, the director felt that she had to ask us to leave.
We have some ideas that we are pursuing. If you have any suggestions, please contact Clyde Ingle at 973-7839. We cannot afford to pay very much rent. We need two rooms, one for the service and a smaller one for religious education for the kids (usually just 2 or 3). We need restroom facilities. |
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| Spiritual Agnosticism |
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Spiritual Agnosticism
Presented by
Charlton Hall *
March 15, 2009
I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”
Maybe it was in the 70s when I turned my back on my fundamentalist Christian upbringing and began to explore Zen Buddhism and Native American Shamanism. Or maybe it was in the early 80s when I began to explore Celtic forms of Paganism. I don’t remember exactly when I first heard the phrase, but its meaning has haunted me over the years in my search for the Divine.
How is it possible to be spiritual without being religious? What does it mean? Maybe the answer lies in the origins of the words ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual.’
The word ‘religion’ has its roots in the Latin word ‘religare,’ which means, ‘to bind or tie up again.’ In its most basic sense, to be religious means to bind or tie yourself up to a god or gods.
As a spiritual seeker, I have spent most of my life trying to find out exactly what people mean when they use the term ‘God.’ I’ve never found a comfortable answer to that question. There are at least as many answers to the question, “What (or who) is God?” as there are people on Earth. There have been countless attempts by countless theologians to answer the question, but none of their answers have really ever satisfied me. Nowadays when people ask me if I believe in God, I ask them to tell me exactly who or what they mean by the word first, and then I’ll tell them whether or not I believe in him (or her). This answer usually causes a few seconds of head-scratching, which allows me to make a quiet getaway.
At the age of thirty or so, I came to the conclusion that if there is a God, we can know little or nothing about him (or her). I’ve often wondered how people could speak about this unknowable entity in such certain terms when there was so little conclusive evidence to support such knowledge.
If I am pressed to label myself, I suppose I would call myself an Agnostic Druid. I’ve always had a deep connection with nature and with both my Celtic and Cherokee heritage, so it seems to be the path that is most inclusive of all of my beliefs about the world. But since many people equate Druidry with a belief in gods, I’m often pressed to explain how I can be both Agnostic and Druid. For me, the answer lies in the realm of psychotherapy.
The psychotherapist Carl Jung originated the idea of archetypes. While studying the major religions of the world, he noticed that certain themes kept occurring over and over again. For example, the Sacred Tree could be considered an archetype. It was a tree that gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil. Buddha became enlightened while sitting under a lotus tree. Many Native Americans believed that life sprang from a sacred tree at the center of the world, and of course, Druids hold trees to be sacred as well.
Since certain themes kept cropping up in various places around the world, Jung came to the conclusion that these images must somehow be hardwired into the human brain, in much the same way that some birds are born with the knowledge of how to navigate when migrating. Just as birds don’t have to be taught this skill, humans don’t have to be taught the significance of these images that Jung labeled ‘archetypes.’
There's not a lot of concrete evidence for the existence of the supernatural, gods or spirits. Any time in the past when I've asked people to give me their reasons for their spiritual beliefs, it all comes down to personal, subjective experience. That doesn't mean that the personal, subjective experiences aren't valid to them. It's just that you'll have a rather hard time convincing others to accept your own personal experiences as absolute truth if they haven't had a similar experience. So what is the nature of these personal experiences? Could it be that when someone has a religious experience, they’ve tapped into the power of an archetype?
Some of the archetypes Jung identified have a great deal in common with the gods of different cultures. Jung believed that our gods were projected onto these archetypes. The gods may or may not exist in reality, but they most certainly exist as archetypes within our own minds. Could it be that our personal spiritual experiences of gods are the result of our getting in contact with our god archetypes?
From my work as a family therapist, I’ve come to learn the importance of ritual. If humans are deprived of ritual, they often invent their own rituals. Religions are nothing if not a collection of rituals for experiencing the divine. Maybe the rituals of religion are ways to get in touch with our god archetypes. And getting in touch with those very powerful archetypes can be a way to tap the power of the unconscious mind.
Although we take in about 2 billion bits of information per second, we are only consciously aware of about 4000 bits of that information. The rest of it ostensibly gets stored in our unconscious minds, available but not readily accessible to our consciousness. If we could tap into that power, what could we accomplish? I think that if there is anything at all to psychic phenomena, this is the source. Is a Tarot card reader who gives an accurate reading really predicting the future, or is she just getting in touch with that wealth of information stored just beyond the conscious level to make accurate predictions based on what her unconscious information tells her? Is a Christian who prays in earnest really communicating with God, or is he calling upon the power of his own Jesus archetype from somewhere in his unconscious mind?
Freud believed that dreams were the 'golden road' to the unconscious mind. By exploring the symbols in our dreams, we learn more about our unconscious desires. I keep a dream journal that helps me in this endeavor. Whenever I have a particularly vivid dream, I write it down to mull over later. I also think that forms of 'divination' practiced by some of the Pagan religions, such as Druidry, allow us to get in touch with that aspect of ourselves.
Omens function the same way. I associate crows with a Celtic Goddess known as the Morrigan. So when I see a crow in certain situations, I realize that a change might be in order. Perhaps my life isn't going in the right direction and I need to reconsider some options. So was the crow really a messenger from the Morrigan, or was it that my unconscious mind knew that I needed to make a change, and directed my conscious mind to notice the crow and pay attention at the right time?
The next question of course is, "Does it really matter?" If I choose to see a crow and interpret it as a message from the Morrigan, or if I see a crow and suddenly realize my unconscious is trying to tell me something, the end result is the same. Either way I have changed the path I was on to a more suitable and fruitful one.
To me, all Druid magic works this way. The tools of the craft of Druidry are really just methods of exploring the vast knowledge of our unconscious minds.
Likewise, if there is a God who is responsible for that sense of the spiritual we get in worship, or if it is just a god archetype somewhere deep in our unconscious minds, the experience is the same. A spiritual agnostic recognizes that we lack the knowledge and evidence to state conclusively whether or not a real God is responsible.
So what does it mean to be a spiritual agnostic? How can you be spiritual without being religious? The word ‘spiritual,’ comes from the Latin word ‘spiritus.’ It means ‘of the breath,’ or ‘that which inspires.’ The sense here is an event so mysterious and powerful that it takes your breath away.
So maybe when someone claims to be spiritual, but not religious, they are indicating that they seek the divine more in a sense of awe than in a sense of duty or obligation to a God. A person who is spiritual in this way is more concerned with inspiration than with a set of rules or dogma.
The German theologian Rudolf Otto called this sense of inspiration the ‘numinous.’ A numinous experience is a transcendent experience, totally unlike anything we experience in our day-to-day lives. Such experiences can be life-changing. Usually when you hear of such experiences, they are spoken of in religious settings where people share their feelings about their relationship with God, but is it possible for an agnostic to experience the numinous? Before we can answer, we need to first clarify what we mean by ‘agnostic.’
I was in my late twenties when I discovered Agnosticism. The term “agnosticism” was coined by Professor Thomas Huxley at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1876. In 1889 he wrote that:
"Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as in matters of intellect: do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable."
Huxley also wrote in Agnosticism and Christianity:
“I further say that Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.”
The reason Huxley started using the term agnosticism was because he found so many people talking about things as if they had knowledge on the topic when he, himself, did not. On this subject, Huxley said:
"The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis” — had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant."
What Huxley was saying is that if there is a God, then that God must by definition be supernatural. And since we live in a natural world, and not a supernatural one, we can never have certain knowledge of supernatural things. Therefore, to speak with any degree of certainty about a God and his motives is somehow dishonest.
After reading Huxley, I began to consider myself an Agnostic. I don’t take a position for or against the existence of a god or gods. I figure that if there is a God, and if he (or she) has anything that is important for me to know, I’ll eventually find out, one way or another.
As I began to label myself an Agnostic, a curious thing began to happen among my theist friends. Many of them began to tell me that they didn’t see how my life could have any meaning if I didn’t have a firm belief in a God. To their way of thinking, life without a god was just a series of meaningless events. An Agnostic friend of mine from Florida was so familiar with this attitude that he created the Apathetic Agnostics Association, whose motto is: "Don't know, don't care."
Is it really so hard for some people to give their lives any meaning without having to have a God do it for them? I don’t know. I won’t presume to speak for them. I do know that I have contented myself with creating my own meaning in my life, and my life is much richer than it was back in my theistic days of binding myself to a God.
I find that I now count myself among the people who consider themselves ‘spiritual, but not religious.’ This confuses my theistic friends, who equate spirituality with a belief in the Divine. So how can you be spiritual without a firm belief in a Deity? For me, the answer lies in determining exactly what we mean when we call ourselves ‘spiritual.’
Suppose you could take the tenets of every religion in the world, stir them up in a pot, and boil them down to their essence. What would that essence be? Would it be morality? Morality, by definition, is innate in all human beings. Even those who commit immoral acts have some sense that those acts are somehow ‘wrong.’ The ethics of every single major religion are built on similar moral values such as not killing, not stealing, not lying, and so on. A spiritual agnostic, rather than following the ethics of a religion out of a fear of God, instead follows the same moral values for the purpose of reaping, giving, and sharing the rewards of this lifetime. Spiritual agnostics do good because it is the right thing to do, not because they fear eternal damnation.
The idea of doing good simply for the sake of doing good can be further simplified to one word: connection. In short, the idea of spirituality without religion is the idea of being connected. For me, this sense of connection applies not only to my fellow human beings, but also to all life on Earth.
Chief Seattle, a leader of the Suquamish Tribe of Washington State, once said, “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
If you consider spirituality to be that which inspires, or takes your breath away, or gives you a sense of awe, then I can think of no more awe-inspiring thought than to contemplate that we are all a part of each other, and that what we do to each other, we do to ourselves. If we could really grasp that idea, it could change the world. Think about that connectedness the next time you’re angry with someone. Picture the person you’re angry with as just another aspect of yourself. Would you still be so angry if you saw that person as you?
Think about our connectedness to the environment as well. What if we could learn that when we pollute the environment, we are really polluting ourselves? If we saw the environment as just another aspect of ourselves, what would it tell us about ourselves that we’re doing our best to destroy it? What if we could learn to care for everyone and everything around us as much as we care for ourselves?
So ultimately, to be an agnostic who is spiritual is to be an individual who strives for positive connections. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this idea of connectivity is not necessarily exclusive to spiritual agnosticism. When you examine the spirituality of most of the major religions, it ultimately boils down to a sense of connectedness to each other. The only difference between a spiritual agnostic and a spiritual theist in this sense is that spiritual agnostics do not claim to know for certain that it is possible to experience a sense of connectedness to a supreme being.
On the other hand, spiritual agnosticism is a rejection of religion, not of God’s existence. Although agnostics do not dogmatically assert the existence of a God, we likewise do not assert the non-existence of a God. We simply dogmatically assert that there is no way to know for sure.
To my way of thinking, if there is a Supreme Being, it would not demand belief in its existence. Or if it did, it would certainly give us that knowledge without requiring us to search so diligently for it.
Spiritual agnosticism is distinguished from other types of agnosticism by the phrase "it doesn't matter." A spiritual agnostic would say "It doesn't matter whether God exists or not, or how you worship God, or whether or not there is an afterlife, or even whether you choose to believe that a God exists.” Since there is no way to prove conclusively whether or not a God exists, then for all practical purposes, any claims to knowledge on the subject of a God are pointless, from the point of view of a spiritual agnostic.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, "I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian."
I would add to Gandhi’s quote that agnostics should strive to be better agnostics as well. We achieve this by building and maintaining connections with our fellow travelers on the Earth. It doesn't matter what religion you call yourself a follower of, nor does it matter whether or not you believe in God. What matters is what you do, not what you believe. The goal of spiritual agnosticism is to express our spirituality through our actions, and not our words.
*Chuck Hall is a Marriage and Family Therapy Intern with a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy from Conerse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Chuck is also the author of two books on environmental issues: Green Circles: A Sustainable Journey from the Cradle to the Grave, and Cob Castles: Building Your Dream Home Yourself Using Natural Materials. Chuck is the author of The Culture Artist, an internationally-syndicated newspaper column on environmental issues and green living.
Chuck has been a practicing Druid for thirty years, and is a founding member of the Black Mountain Order of Druidry.
For more information, visit: www.cultureartist.org
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