|
By Islamic Humanist
The most central human issue in our
lives involves creating a more humane environment.
Creating a more humane environment begins by affirming the
need to make significant choices in our lives. Spiritual
life is rooted in self-reflection, but can only come to
full flower in community. This is because people are
social, needing both primary relationships and larger
supportive groups to become fully human. The democratic
process is essential to a humane social order because it
respects the worth of persons and elicits and allows a
greater expression of human capacities. Democratic process
also implies a commitment to shared responsibility and
authority. Although awareness of impending death
intensifies the human quest for meaning, and lends
perspective to all our achievements, the mystery of life
itself, the need to belong, to feel connected to the
universe, and the desire for celebration and joy, are
primary factors motivating human "religious"
response.
"The great use of a life is to spend it for something
that outlasts it," wrote Bertrand Russell. Wise and
thoughtful men and women in all ages have agreed that the
greatest lives are those given to the well-being of
others. In promoting human understanding and happiness, we
discover our own deepest and most enduring values. In the
best sense, religion may inspire dedication to the highest
ethical ideals. The cultivation of moral devotion and
creative imagination is an expression of genuine
"spiritual" experience and aspiration.
We must begin our quest for spiritual understanding on the
basis of sharable human experience--the foundation of all
genuine knowledge of the world--clearly observing the
characteristics and limits of that experience. Only then
can we even begin to address intelligently the conundrum
of the existence and nature of God or "ultimate
reality."
No matter how far our observations and discoveries extend
from the presently understood cosmos into the unknown, our
knowledge must remain always within the bounds of
"nature"--that seemingly trackless cosmos of
events, relationships, and processes in which we exist.
This is what the relativity of knowledge consists of--the
relational composition of all perceiving and knowing. The
means by which we comprehend the world, organized within
the logical structures of thinking and knowing,
necessarily shapes our knowledge and sets limits to its
reach.
Thus we can never penetrate "pure being" or know
ultimate reality "under the aspect of eternity,"
to borrow Spinoza's telling phrase. But even within the
limits of incomplete and fallible human understanding, we
can live compassionate, meaningful lives of love and
caring.
Our sense of right and wrong emerges out of the process of
living together as social beings. Humanity's social nature
is the product of a long evolutionary development having
its roots in the gregarious behaviour of the species from
which human beings descended. Yet in human beings the
development of language and symbolic thought has given a
whole new dimension of meaning to social feeling.
We learn to accept our lives with serenity. Inner peace is
the distilled essence of reflection on our profoundest
experiences, separated from the illusion and superstition
that unfortunately are so often associated with ideas of
the spiritual.
That unvarying principle asserts that the individual human
being is of infinite value and must not be degraded or
abused. "Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you," leaves room for the temptation to remake
others in our own image, to impose what we think is best
for them. As Bertrand Russell would later quip, do not do
unto others what you would have them do unto you, because
their tastes may be different! Felix Adler believed we can
avoid the problem of projecting our personal moral
egocentricity upon others--compelling them to conform to
our expectation--by recognizing the unique personal
difference of each and so conduct ourselves as to
encourage the fullest development of the special gifts and
distinctive positive attributes of others. By living in
this creative relationship, he believed, we would also
actualize our own highest moral potential.
Whether or not God exists may be an interesting question.
But the answer to that question--if answerable at
all--should make no crucial difference in how we ought to
live, how we ought to treat our fellow beings. My ethical
obligations and potentialities--and yours--remain exactly
the same. Our shared task is to live decently,
compassionately, and caringly in the world we inhabit.
This
article was originally published in The
Society For Islamic Humanists (message #1144) |
