Tiny Grass

I’ve been calling myself an atheist for years now, but it never really seemed like a totally accurate term for me. I’ve believed for about 10 years that god doesn’t exist, but there was this other sort of spiritual side of me that wasn’t totally satisfied with the atheist label. I’ve always felt a very spiritual connection to nature, and a belief that the natural world is somehow all spiritually connected in some way. Also, I’ve come to believe that when people die, some kid of spiritual part of that person joins the rest of the world and nature, and still exists in some way. Sort of like the scientific rule that matter can neither be created nor destroyed - I have felt that a persons spirit can’t really be destroyed at death either. But I’ve been keeping all these ideas to myself, thinking that no one really thought like me. Was I some kind of atheist hack or something? A strange human oddity?

Evidently not. About a month ago I found out there are others like me. They are calling themselves naturalistic pantheists, and a variety of other terms, including scientific pantheism, religious humanism, religious naturalism, religious atheism, deep ecology, and nature-worship, among others. So I guess I’m not so special.

I’m not sure why I’m so surprised by all this. But I am glad of two things: I’m kind of relieved that there are others like me, whom I can talk to. And I am happy that I came to my beliefs through a totally personal process. I sort of incrementally worked on my beliefs for many years by just living and thinking about the world. I think that is really the best way to come to a spiritual belief. It really bothers me when I see children being indoctrinated into a certain spiritual faith when they are young. I was raised a Lutheran, and I spent way too many years feeling confused and bitter and trying to escape the group-think. Arp and I finally watched Jesus Camp last night, and I feel an overwhelming pity for the children in that film. The more I think about it, I think those years I spent as a child in a mono-theistic church really narrowed my view on what was possible in terms of spirituality. Looking at the website last night for the World Pantheist Movement (WPM), I discovered that there are many other options I didn’t think were possible - “forms of wicca and paganism that see magic and the gods as symbols rather than realities” or “those in Unitarian Universalism who do not believe in supernatural beings”. I never even considered those options as possible. I had previously been drawn to some aspects of Wicca, but I had quickly stopped reading because the word “goddess” really repelled me. But maybe I’ve been imagining that term only through the eyes of an ex-Lutheran.

Here’s an old photo that I took in 2001 during a walk in the woods behind the house of a friend of mine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 12:22 pm and is filed under spirituality, the great outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.