Part 2: The Need For Naturalism
Society is in need of a new ethical framework, and the best way forward is to grow it from traditional frameworks
Read also earlier posts Intro: About Naturalism Part 1: Defining A New Faith During The Lockdown
In my last post, I described how the misguided and destructive lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 spurred me to think in detail about a new, nature-centered religion.
Part of my process of defining this new religion was the experience I already had with organized religion. But almost all the churches in the environs of Seattle were locked down per governor’s health directives. I felt that I couldn’t trust or depend on those churches because they were not resisting the quite obvious misdirection of public health officials.
A few churches not far from Seattle were rightly ignoring the lockdowns, and I enjoyed attending one such unafraid church. But I couldn’t bring myself to join it as a member because it didn’t seem satisfying to me beyond the very positive in-person togetherness it offered. The open churches were of the more fundamentalist types. They can touch my heart and soul with their companionship and age-old wisdom, but they can’t fully touch my mind, which can only easily believe its direct experience. I don’t accept pat answers in philosophy, and I prefer to really consider the underlying meaning of traditional texts rather than accept scripture literally.
Lacking any open church that I felt at-home in, I felt a personal need for a new spirituality.
In addition, I started to realize that any existing church—open or closed—was not capable of delivering the large cultural change that society really needs right now. There is a wider need for an ethical framework that relates directly to the pressing problems of modern life, such as misdirected lockdowns and dangerous vaccines. Leaders of established religions are almost never speaking to such problems.
Therefore, I felt not just a personal need for a new spirituality, but also a public need for it.
That’s not to say that some people of traditional religion aren’t making a lot of sense to me. Some are. Take Zev Zelenko, MD, the hydroxychloroquine proponent from early in the pandemic, and a devout believer in Judaism (he passed away from cancer in June 2022, RIP). Here are some excerpts from his interview with Dr. James Mercola published on January 16, 2022.
“Gates and Schwab [are] both talking talk about how these vaccines change who you are..... [With] the gene editing technology, they are making the human better. That's transhumanism. I call it Human 2.0. Human 1.0 is the version made by God. We are imprinted [with God] in our genetic code. We're made in the image of God because we have his code in us.
Now, would you give Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab the password to your home security system? Why would we give him access to our genetic code? Human 2.0—in the demented, depraved, deranged minds of these people—is the next step up in the evolution of human beings. And I'm saying that if you allow that to happen to yourself, you're no longer made in the image of God. You're made in the image of Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab….
In the Bible, there are two cities that were destroyed, Sodom and Gomorrah, and there's an analysis why that happened. It wasn't because of the immorality, because the whole world was immoral. It was because they codified immorality into the law of the land. That's exactly what has happened in [the U.S.] We've devolved.... We worship the god of science, the god of technology, the god of money, god of power. Anything but [the true] God. And we are clearly practicing child sacrifice….
Whether or not our children will be free depends on whether or not we are ready to sacrifice…. Are we ready, in this generation, to pay the price to ensure that our children thrive in freedom and have the ability to maintain God consciousness?”
Although I have some disagreement with Zelenko’s wording with regard to “science”, I could hardly explain my own feelings better than he has. In fact, I had also thought of the same “child sacrifice” analogy many months prior, an allusion to the fact that the vaccines, masking, and school closures were obviously much more harmful to children than the illness. I was very happy to see that a famous public figure was seeing the same analogy.
What I really like about Zelenko’s ideas here is that he is relating traditional belief to modern circumstances. Zelenko shows that meaningful modern ethics can be derived from traditional concepts,
But among religious leaders, very few pastors, rabbis, imams, or priests, will dare to touch covid-policy topics or the problems of governmental and technological over-reach. The world has just been assaulted by a genetically engineered virus and by power-hungry and corrupt “public health officials” and pharma corporations, but the churches, synogogues, mosques, and temples are mostly pretending it never happened. It’s clear that most existing religious institutions can’t be depended on for truth or good guidance on such issues. Generally, they seem like the “jellyfish” people I described in Part 1, whose primary connection with the world is their smart phone news feed, who are floating directionless in a manipulative current of biased mass-media. Most “houses of worship” are simply giant jellyfish. Many of these institutions have even promoted the same sort of child sacrifice that Zelenko and I decry.
Established religious institutions are simply undependable as a support for a new, necessary spirituality, which would directly address today’s problems. This does not mean that this necessary spirituality would avoid teachings from the past. On the contrary, sourcing from traditional religion, as Zelenko does, is very meaningful when the connection to modern problems is clear. Traditions are a firm grounding, a good place to start.
There is another problem with hoping that existing religious institutions will help counter problems such as corona-mania. Namely, that there are a number of different traditional religions. Even if some members of, say, a Protestant denomination organize into a new branch that challenges genetic engineering technology on moral grounds, this branch will likely be at odds with the “mainstream” of that same denomination. The same would be true with new branches of any other traditional faith. In this manner, the new, necessary morality would be piecemeal. There needs to be a movement that can tie together different traditions.
A separate, new belief system could incorporate a lot of earlier wisdom, not only from scriptures and traditions, but also from actual ritual practices. In fact, this incorporation of the old happens naturally. Existing religions are typically the basis of any new spiritual understanding. Centuries ago, Christianity and Islam emerged from the basis of Judaism. Buddhism similarly emerged from Hinduism.
As I mentioned in Part 1, in 2021 I was beginning to feel a need to define what a new faith could be. I began talking about my initial ideas with some friends and family, ideas such as that the new religion would value pro-biotic, rather than anti-biotic, in broad senses of both those terms. The new religion would value the natural over the artificial, and would make natural health paramount. The new religion would value independent thought and observation, rather than news-feeds on devices.
However, this new religion also would need grounding in tradition.
In fact, the modern pro-nature values that I just mentioned can all be ritualized with inspiration from traditional religions. For example, traditional dietary prescriptions, such as kosher eating, could inspire modern dietary prescriptions to use organic food. The Christian practice of communion could inspire a “air communion” ceremony, in which people breathe freely together, in opposition to the misguided and masked-up followers of Tony Fauci, who seek to separate us. Fasting is another traditional religious practice, and this could be ritually applied to electronic media, such as going on a “device fast” for a day or longer. The traditional idea of “sin” could be applied to the modern misuse of technology, when it meddles with nature, such as with genetic engineering. Vaccines or other manipulations of the natural immune system could be viewed as a “fall from grace.” Such adaptions of tradition to modern concerns could comprise a sort of “new covenant” between God and humankind. Even the traditional concept of “God” can be intimately combined with nature, as I’ll explore in Part 3.
Once I started on this track of thought, the ideas came to me quickly. That’s probably because I had unconsciously been developing a belief system for many years already. I realized that many other people had also developed similar, modern nature-oriented beliefs, but we all lacked any institution that could spiritually unite us. Because of lockdown, vaccine, and censorship problems, it furthermore became clear to me that the purpose for uniting is increasing.
In Part 3, I’ll discuss in detail the equivalence of God and nature.