Educators From The United States

"The tapestry maker first strings the warp, long strong fibers anchored firmly to the loom, and then interweaves the weft, the patterns, the color, the art. The epic of evolution is our warp, destined to endure, commanding our universal gratitude and reverence and commitment. And then, after that, we are all free to be artists, to render in language and painting and song and dance our ultimate hopes and concerns and understandings of human nature. Throughout the ages, the weaving of our religious weft has been the province of our prophets and gurus and liturgists and poets. The texts and art and ritual that come to us from these revered ancestors include claims about Nature and Agency that are no longer plausible. They use a different warp. But for me at least, this is just one of those historical facts, something that can be absorbed, appreciated, and then put aside as I encounter the deep wisdom embedded in these traditions and the abundant opportunities that they offer to experience transcendence and clarity."

"We arrived but a moment ago, and found [Earth] to be perfect for us in every way. And then we came to understand that it is perfect because we arose from it and are a part of it. Hosannah! Not in the highest, but right here, right now, this. When such gratitude flows from our beings, it matters little whether we"

"When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos."

"We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as: Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? Where did the laws of physics come from? Why does the universe seem so strange? My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things. The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else."

"Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees, and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

"For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn to their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are."

"We nurture our children selflessly. But we also recognize them as our most tangible sources of renewal — for a child, the world is always new. Renewal has been a religious theme throughout the ages … All of us see in children — our own and all children — the hope and promise of what we humans can become. As the forbears of our children we are called to transmit to them a joyous and sustainable vision of their future — meaning that we are each called to develop such a vision."

"It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next."

"Once there is empathy, then there can be the feeling we call compassion. A version of the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is found in most religious traditions. … and emergent from our sense of compassion, in mortal conflict with our insistent sense that we should win, is our haunting sense that things should be fair."

"We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone."

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence … And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace."

"Patterns of gene expression are to organisms as melodies and harmonies are to sonatas. It's all about which sets of proteins appear in a cell at the same time (the chords) and which sets come before or after other sets (the themes) and at what rate they appear (the tempos) and how they modulate one another (the developments and transitions). When these patterns go awry we may see malignancy. When they change by mutation we can get new kinds of organisms. When they work, we get a creature."

"The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate level, the chords and tempos, has to do with how the biochemistry and biophysics are organized, arranged, played out in space and time to produce a creature who grows and divides and is."

"The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us."

"Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances."

"We do have something of a story here, a true story, that we can work with religiously should we elect to do so. … There are clearly all sorts of flavors right now, just as there were when … Christianity was being put together, which took centuries to get the core in place and has been under revision ever since. Let's keep talking!"

"For me, Deism doesn't work because I find I can only think of a creator in human terms, and the concept of a human-like creator of muons and neutrinos has no meaning for me. But more profoundly, Deism spoils my covenant with Mystery. To assign attributes to Mystery is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance. I think of the ancients ascribing thunder and lightning to godly feuds, and I smile. The need for explanation pulsates in us all."

"Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor."

"The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about my own death."

"Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview — a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are; our scientific account of Nature, an account that can be called the Epic of Evolution… This is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true. If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reality — and I believe that they can — then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate. I will not presume to suggest what this ethos might look like. Its articulation must be a global project. But I am convinced that the project can be undertaken only if we all experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue."

"The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures — this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true."

"The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix. I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies."

"Scientific inquiry has provisioned us with a mind-boggling new core narrative — the epic of evolution, the epic of creation, the universe story, big history, everybody's story — where humans and human cultures are understood to be emergent from and, hence, a part of nature. Naturalists adopt this account as their core narrative, with full recognition that these understandings will certainly deepen and may shift with further scientific inquiry. They adopt the story currently on offer and do not simply select features of the story that support preferred theories of nature. … A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story. Importantly, these responses are not front-loaded into the story as they are in the traditions. Therefore, the religious naturalist engages in a process, both individually and in the company of fellow explorers, to discover and experience them. These explorations are informed and guided by the mindful understandings inherent in our human traditions, including art, literature, philosophy and the religions of the world."

"While I agree… that indifference is indeed our most dangerous capacity, I actually do believe that it's on the wane. When I scroll back to my 1950's Connecticut girlhood and recall how clueless everyone was about just about everything, how we mindlessly parroted concepts like "Better Dead Than Red" and the "Domino Theory," how my friends were all lily-white and Koreans were gooks and I would have had no idea where to find Nigeria on a map – when I go back there and then think about Adam's students and my students and my kids and what they've come to understand and care about, it gets a whole lot better."

"I think that with all the emphasis on achievement, careers and competitiveness, science education has become — with notable bright spots to be sure — a joyless, alienating and frustrating experience for millions and millions of kids. There are those science-fair-winner types and then there's the rest of the class, not grooving on the material and hence, they find out, doomed to mediocre futures. Seems like ambivalence and hostility aren't such surprising responses to such a message. … I think things might go better if the narrative of our scientific understandings of nature — what some are calling "Big History" — were told early and often, capturing the interest and imagination of students from a young age. They might then be eager to learn the problem-solving, evidence-based process of scientific inquiry that has led to these understandings."

"Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago."

"The concept of an independent "spiritual realm" does not augment, for me, the magic of the mystical dimension, whereas to think of this dimension as emergent from our minds makes it all the more wondrous to be a human."

"I profess my Faith. For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no super-ordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides. I confess a credo of continuation. And in so doing, I confess as well a credo of human continuation."

"Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition."

"With an a natural affinity for the epigram genre, I am, so to speak, a short breathed man and have an almost unthoughtout preference for brief definitive statements."

"This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained"

"Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out."

"She said he was a man who cheated. He said she didn't play the game. She said an expletive deleted. He said the undeleted same. And so they ended their relation With meaningful communication."

"What demon is our god? What name subsumes That act external to our sleeping selves? Not pleasure — it is much too broad and narrow —, Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride, And not in prowess, but pride undefined, Autonomous in its unthought demands, A bit of vanity, but mostly pride."

"Grief restrains grief as dams torrential rain And time grows fertile with extended pain"

"Despise me not And not be queasy To praise somewhat Verse is not easy"

"An old dissembler who lived out his lie Lies here as if he did not fear to die."

"What is needed is a noticeable unnoticeable style,... a directness of speech that seems to one judging easily imitable, to one trying it nothing less so."

"To be learned in literature is such a different thing from liking it."

"Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humour?"

"Not one daughter who had a good relationship with her biological father had a baby before the age of nineteen."

"Healed people heal people."

"While recess provides the playground in which bullying may be found, it is also the laboratory for reducing bullying."

"The negative symptoms of the male culture are harnessed by the prescription drug culture."

"Love doesn’t eliminate defensiveness, because love creates vulnerability, and defensiveness is vulnerability’s mask."

"It is exactly this men’s health void that creates your son’s men’s health opportunity."

"Men with lower sperm count, even if they can reproduce, are likely to have a shorter life."

"One in five young men are not fertile."

"Traditional men make their sacrifices in significant measure in the hopes of being appreciated when they come home, and having their learning experiences integrated into their homes."

"Veterans create privilege for all those who have not had to serve."