Philosophy

"'That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle."

"Not only is democracy mystical nonsense, it is also immoral. If one man has no right to impose his wishes on another, then ten million men have no right to impose their wishes on the one, since the initiation of force is wrong (and the assent of even the most overwhelming majority can never make it morally permissible). Opinions—even majority opinions—neither create truth nor alter facts. A lynch mob is democracy in action. So much for mob rule."

"You Own Your Own Life... To lose your Life is to lose your Future, to lose your Liberty is to lose your Present …and to lose the product of your Life and Liberty is to lose that portion of your Past that produced it A product of you Life and Liberty is your Property"

"‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh[ich] they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh[ich] was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature."

"[On completely popular government:] Its superiority in reference to present well-being rests upon two principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it."

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

"Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. Some of them love justice and righteousness; others do not seem to want to practice them-they do you a wrong. Your soul is not hardened to the suffering they inflict upon you in this way, but you search and examine yourself; you convince yourself that you are in the right, and you rest call and strong in this conviction. However much they outrage me they still will not be able to deprive me of this peace-that I know I am in the right and that I suffer wrong. In this view there is a satisfaction, a joy, that presumably every one of us has tasted, and when you continue to suffer wrong, you are built up by the thought that you are in the right. This point of view is so natural, so understandable, so frequently tested in life, and yet it is not with this that we want to calm doubt and to heal care but by deliberating upon the upbuilding that lies in the thought that we are always in the wrong. Can the opposite point of view have the same effect?"

"One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society. It does not follow that each of those essential rights is one that we as judges can enforce under the written Constitution. The Due Process Clause is not a guarantee of every right that should inhere in an ideal system. Many argue that a just society grants a right to engage in homosexual conduct. If that view is accepted, the Bowers decision in effect says the State of Georgia has the right to make a wrong decision—wrong in the sense that it violates some people's views of rights in a just society. We can extend that slightly to say that Georgia's right to be wrong in matters not specifically controlled by the Constitution is a necessary component of its own political processes. Its citizens have the political liberty to direct the governmental process to make decisions that might be wrong in the ideal sense, subject to correction in the ordinary political process."

"I think that freedom means being able to do what you want without harming others... Freedom isn't something given by the government. I think it is a God-given right, and you are born with this right as a human being."

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms...The phrase "the people" meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each and every free person. A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same way that Americans denounced select spokesmen approved by the government as the only class entitled to the freedom of the press. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society."

"People are usually surprised to discover that I hate the phrase "constitutional rights." I hate the phrase because it is terribly misleading. Most of the people who say it or hear it have the impression that the Constitution "grants" them their rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. Strictly speaking it is the Bill of Rights that enumerates our rights, but none of our founding documents bestow anything on you at all [...] The government can burn the Constitution and shred the Bill of Rights, but those actions wouldn't have the slightest effect on the rights you've always had."

"A right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never."

"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights."

"The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endowed him with the faculty of freewill. But every man, when he enters into society, gives up a part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase; and, in consideration of receiving the advantages of mutual commerce, obliges himself to conform to those laws, which the community has thought proper to establish."

"Religious Naturalism is a spiritual and philosophical orientation arising from profound responses to the wonder and mystery of Nature and its emergent manifestations in human creativity and culture. Its views of Nature are embodied in the Epic of Evolution and informed by scientific inquiry, without reference to supernatural explanations. It emphasizes reverence and gratitude for Nature and a deep regard for all life; it recognizes the imperative of planetary sustainability. It supports efforts that honor ecological and cultural diversity, that promote social justice and free inquiry, and that create a more compassionate, rational world where humans and non-humans alike can thrive."

"LibraryThing - Religious Naturalism"

"Religious Naturalism Information"

"Religious Naturalism"

"Ursula Goodenough"

"epic of evolution"

"I'll describe religious naturalism as a theology, a religion, an ethics, and a spiritual transformation"

"We try to make ourselves worthy of a universe of which we are an infinitesimal part. We will not agree on what worthiness consists of. For the religious naturalist, it is a mix of cautious skepticism and celebration"

"There are two flavors of God people: those whose God is natural and those whose God is supernatural. Certainly there are a lot of people within religious naturalism who have no problem with God language--God as love, God as evolution, God as process. People see God as part of nature and give God-attributes to the part of nature that they find most sacred. I encounter people like that all the time."

"One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished."

"(1) there exists a supernatural being(s) or power(s) outside the natural world, (2) this being or power has commerce with the world, and (3) the grounds for belief in both the supernatural being and its commerce cannot be seen, discovered or inferred by way of any known or reliable epistemic method. Note that this commitment to the dispensability of the supernatural does not contain a rejection of all forms of spirituality or religion. The theologians and philosophers who are Religious Naturalists reject the conjunctions of 1,2 and 3 above."

"Religious Naturalists will be known for their reverence and awe before Nature, their love for Nature and natural forms, their sympathy for all living things, their guilt for enlarging the ecological footprints, their pride in reducing them, their sense of gratitude directed towards the matrix of life, their contempt for those who abstract themselves from natural values, and their solidarity with those who link their self-esteem to sustainable living."

"Religious naturalism is today one of the outstanding American philosophies of religion"

"Religious Naturalism differs from this (naturalism) mainly in the fact that it extends the domain of nature farther outwards into space and time. It never transcends nature"

"It is true that 'religious naturalism', or the acknowledgment of the Divine in Nature, is also an element of the Christian religion….but it is by no means the characteristic, the tendency of the Christian religion."

"Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story—what we are calling religious naturalism—can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences."

"Dewey's religious naturalism is rooted in a criticism of Santayana's dualism."

"Before we can make any progress in a discussion of religious naturalism it will be necessary to clarify our terms. Many individuals – theists and non-theists alike – will balk at the word religious because they take it to imply conformity with institutionalized teachings and practices. And many naturalists balk at the word spiritual because they take it to imply belief in some supernatural being or metaphysical substance. I wish to be clear about rejecting both these usages in favor of a single definition that treats “religious” and “spiritual” as equivalent terms. I regard a religious or spiritual person to be one who takes ultimate concerns to heart. The important difference between religious (spiritual) persons and nonreligious (nonspiritual) persons is a matter of attitudes. Attitudes are valenced beliefs, that is, beliefs that are infused with appraisals of value and existential meaning, beliefs that have non-trivial consequences for the way a person relates to something or someone. The difference between a religious theist and a nominal theist is that the former takes God to heart. Likewise, a religious naturalist differs from a nonreligious naturalist by virtue of his or her suite of attitudes: the religious naturalist takes nature to heart."

"What is religious naturalism? It is a philosophy, a theology, a way of life. It finds its meaning in the processes of nature – in all its immensity, all of its delicacy, all of its freedom, and all of its fate. It can be atheist or theist. But it does make a distinction between the natural and the supernatural."

"The cumulative affirmation here is that naturalism, understood in a particular way – namely, as affirming most of the propositions in the list above – can be religiously relevant and can define a life world for people drawn to it."

"With these caveats in mind, I assert that religiously useful naturalism affirms most of the following:"

". . . we see an emerging consensus around a family-resemblance collection of features that religiously useful forms of naturalism tend to display. . . this emerging consensus is not on a single coherent doctrine, but rather on a list of propositions, most of which occur in a variety of combinations."

"Religious naturalism is best thought of as a generic term for mindful religious approaches to our understanding of the natural world. As such, it does not represent a detailed system of religious beliefs. Instead, the specificity shifts to, and resides within, the religious naturalists themselves."

"The religious naturalism of my book, therefore, might more accurately be described as spiritual naturalism; I tell of our scientific understandings of who we are and how we got here, and I respond with such sensibilities as belonging, communion, gratitude, humility, assent, and awe."

"Religious naturalism is many things. It is a life of contemplation, inquiry, and moral practice devoted to the beauty and creativity of nature. It is the belief that nature is the whole of reality and that this insight is religiously and morally significant. It is a form of life that takes nature as the context for the discernment of meaning, value, and what matters to us ultimately. It is a way of being religious that understands human culture and religiosity within the vast sweep of cosmic evolution. Its sacred text is an epic that arcs from the genesis of the Universe with the Big Bang and the swirling of the earliest cosmic elements, to the birth pangs of stars and planets and the constellation of galaxies; it includes everything from the Sun’s gestation of our solar system to the emergence of life on earth, from the stunning ubiquity of bacteria to the biospheric tipping point that our own species has precipitated. It is a humble religious path that decentralizes the human species within the infinitely broader metaphysical and aesthetic rhythms of the Universe. It is a way of knowing that reveres the wisdom of collective human experience and reason more highly than any single sacred book or tradition. It is a quest for wisdom from wherever it may come: from the symbols, myths and rituals of the world’s diverse religious traditions, from literature and the arts, from the intricate splendors of indigenous knowledges to the mind-bending ways of the modern sciences. For religious naturalism, there is no “outside” of revelation—the whole of the cosmos rings with it, from the subatomic to the interstellar, from the unicellular to the civilizational."

"Religious Naturalism is the view that nature is metaphysically ultimate and that nature or some aspect of nature is religiously ultimate. There is nothing beyond, behind or below nature. Nature requires no explanation beyond itself. It always has existed and always will exist in some shape or form. Its constituents, principles, laws and relationships are the sole reality. This reality takes on new traits and possibilities as it evolves inexorably through time"

"“RN” [religious naturalism] is a philosophy which seeks to live a religious life without a Supreme Being that is superior in power and value to the natural world. It is the attempt to think about life and live a religious orientation without a God, soul or heaven. There is a slightly different use of the term which overlaps with this first one. In this second view RN is the attempt to find in the natural world (including culture and history) the world as scientifically understood inspiration and resources for their religious life."

"Religious naturalism is the type of naturalism which affirms a set of beliefs and attitudes that there are religious aspects of this world which can be appreciated within a naturalistic framework. There are some events or process in our experience that elicit responses that can appropriately be called religious."

"Religious naturalism is a belief in the natural order as understood by ongoing scientific investigation, supported by a strong and positive emotional feeling about the wonder and efficacy of that natural order. Religious naturalism is philosophically materialistic, but affirms the sense of mystery that accompanies our contemplation of the emergence of matter (and especially life) from the Big Bang forward. Though largely informed by science for its cognitive understanding, it draws on traditional religious feeling for its artistic and emotional inspiration."

"Religious naturalism is a perspective that finds religious meaning in the natural world and rejects the notion of a supernatural realm."

"Religious naturalism is an approach to experiencing and appreciating nature with the awe, reverence, and respect that are usually associated with religion, but without the metaphysical paraphernalia of the latter."

"a shared sacred story that honors both objective truth and subjective meaning: For the first time in human history we have a creation story that not only addresses life’s biggest questions—Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? How are we to live?—but helps us answer those questions in ways that are both religiously inspiring and scientifically accurate. No longer are subjective meaning and objective truth isolated from one another in separate domains. Both are conveyed through the same story."

"As we have seen, Roman Catholic bioethics is a conceptually and institutionally mature set of inquiries. It has deep historical roots within catholic theology, doctrine, and canon law, and consequently a developed set of positions and methods of moral analysis. Although traditional authorities are accorded some respect by all engaged as Roman Catholics in bioethics, there are very significant disagreements among Catholic bioethicists. These disagreement reach so deeply into the fabric of moral life an thought that they suggest radical fissures within the Catholic community. These divisions of moral conviction would not be troubling if they were simply about new and difficult cases or about casuistical details; but, as the preceding summaries and citations indicate, they go to the heart of key norms themselves. The resolution of the most central of these disagreements is surely essential if the traditions of Catholic moralizing are to be effectively brought to bear on the bioethical perplexities facing the Roman Catholic community and others who may look to its riches for guidance."