"None of us is good enough for the world we have."

To the people of this land - as well as to many contemporaries who commit to living deliberately, and who seek to be aware of the world that has been given to us all - the world is "alive with spirit."

Some "intellectuals" would tells us that this world understanding is something they call animism,  and dismiss it as pre-modern and "superstitious."  The more mechanical and arrogant "science" that was in vogue in  the first half of the twentieth century lent authority to the imperiousness of modernist anthropologists of religion, whose own world view saw nature as an object to be manipulated, rather than the outward form of our mother earth and our father sky - that sacred realm in which we lived, and moved and had our being.

I am not in awe of "the science" of those who think of the cosmos as dead matter,  devoid of consciousness and vitality - I find that way of thinking dangerous and if my readers might indulge me  "unscientific."  Materialism as an intellectual movement has impoverished thinking and created the dangerous ideologies of the capitalism and communism.  Sometimes the materialists would have us believe that they are "naturalists."  The more materialist of the humanists are fond of that dodge.

Naturalists are those who seek a explanation of all events based on explanations drawn the processes of nature,  naturalists do not seek "supernatural" explanations.  Why did the Hurricane come?  The supernaturalist argues about a God that directs hurricanes,  a naturalist would point toward warm water causing updrafts of air, and wind currents forming convection cooling, and stirring currents.  But the naturalist is not compelled to the materialist conclusion that the earth is a mechanical system rather than a living ecology that learns and changes based on those learnings.  A naturalist is not compelled to ascend into "human only" ethics, but may assert with Gary Kowalski that animals have souls, and should not be subjected to vicious treatment nor raised for slaughter.

Edward Abbey speaks to me and for me as a cosmic mystic, pan-en-theist, religious humanist when he writes:
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures.
The croaking thing with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. . .

How utterly rich and wild
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.

We are none of us good enough
For the world we have."

Some have argued that religious humanist perspectives necessarily descend into "anthro-centric" points of view,  incapable of self criticism directed at the hubris of modernism with its "humankind against nature" mythologies that provide the rationales for the ecological destruction that we witness.  But religious humanism is not inherently modernist, nor is religious humanism incapable of transcending the dominant culture's technocratic corporatism and imperialism.  A liberating, multicultural, anti-oppressive religious humanism that realizes that the earth does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to the earth is being born.  A religious humanism that proclaims with ancient wisdom that our earth is sacred,  we are part of nature, and we are connected intimately and passionately with the whole.