What does spirituality mean to a humanist?

Most Humanists I know - don’t care for the word at all. Precisely because it could mean anything.

However there are secular uses of the word and definitions from various groups that can help us understand what it means - outside of a religious context.

First - the Spiritual Naturalist Society - What is Spiritual Naturalism? says - “to have spirituality is to be concerned with the larger, deeper, and essential matters of life and to apply ourselves consciously toward them in a committed practice or ‘walk’. This includes, as Socrates put it, the ‘examined life’, and this is what we mean by spirituality.”

For me personally - “Spirituality, in a secular sense, is the spirit in which you approach life. In this sense, it’s critical you attend to your spiritual life because it is actually attending to your motivational needs. How you motivate yourself. Why you motivate yourself. This is the realm of philosophy. Some people attend to this need with religious philosophy. Others with secular philosophy. I attend to this need with the Humanist philosophy specifically.”

The point is - if and when a Humanist talks about spirituality - they are talking about Secular Spirituality. There is a really nice wikipedia article that explains it and the tradition of secular spirituality here - Secular spirituality - Wikipedia

Materialism vs. Spiritualism

I was interviewed on Vortex Sarasota a while back (embedded video below). It was a great conversation and I really like the host George Lewis. It was one of the funner interviews I’ve done. 

At one point George asks me about spiritualism. And, I don’t understand what he is asking me. I do my best to translate his question into something that makes sense for me and fail.  Even though we agree on a lot of things, there is a basic disconnect in our world views.  I am a natural materialist, he is a supernatural spiritualist. 

For me there is only the natural world that consists of matter and energy. If something happens, it is quantifiable in this world. I have the same feelings of awe and wonder as anyone else. I have feelings of intuition. But for me, these feelings are a result of biochemical processes occurring in my brain.  That doesn’t make them any less special or any less amazing.  It doesn’t make me feel any less connected to the universe. It is just that I don’t view these things as anything other than a material natural process.

I think what trips people up is the choice of words. People associate the natural materialist world view with capitalistic materialism which refers to the gratuitous consumption of material, which is, for good reason, associated with greed. So they don’t understand how a natural materialist worldview can help people lead such satisfying emotionally fulfilling lives.

Grounding your view of the world as a natural materialist as opposed to a supernatural spiritualist simply means  that you accept the world as it is as opposed to hoping that there is something more there. It is a liberating, amazing and inspiring way to view who you are in the universe.  On the one hand, you are nothing more than matter and energy combined. On the other, you are you!  Matter combined, against all odds and against its tendency towards entropy to create you!  If that doesn’t make you feel special, nothing will.

PS – I am a board member for the Spiritual Naturalist Society – check them out at: http://spiritualnaturalistsociety.org/