nature-and-religion

"All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measure, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you - begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain it. They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings. It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifest in the Buddhas."

"The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world."

"I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings."

"You must give up eating meat, for it is very wrong to eat the flesh of our parent sentient beings."

"Buddhas bear the same relation to sentient beings as water does to ice. Ice, like stone or brick, cannot flow. But when it melts it flows freely in conformity with its surroundings. So long as one remains in a state of delusion he is like ice. Upon realization he becomes as exquisitely free as water. And remember, there is no ice which does not return to water. So you will understand there is no difference between ordinary beings and Buddhas except for one thing - delusion. When it is dissolved they are identical."

"The Buddha preaches the Law with a single voice, but each living being understands it in his own way."

"Ratnākara, the various kinds of living beings are in themselves the Buddha lands (buddhakṣetra) of the bodhisattva. Why so? Because it is by converting various beings to the teachings that the bodhisattvas acquire their Buddha lands. It is by persuading various beings and overcoming their objections that the bodhisattvas acquire their Buddha lands. It is by inducing the various living beings to enter into the Buddha wisdom in such-and-such a land that they acquire their Buddha lands. It is by inducing the various living beings to develop the capacity for bodhisattva practices in such-and-such a land that they acquire their Buddha lands. Why is this? Because the bodhisattva's acquisition of a pure land is wholly due to his having brought benefit to living beings. Suppose a man proposes to build a mansion on a plot of open land. He may do so as he wishes without hindrance. But if he tries to build it in the empty air, he will never be successful. It is the same with the bodhisattvas. It is because they wish to help others to achieve success that they take their vow to acquire Buddha lands. Their vow to acquire Buddha lands in not founded on emptiness."

"It is very dangerous to ignore the suffering of any sentient being."

"Bodhicitta is the medicine which revives and gives life to every sentient being who even hears of it."

"According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?"

"The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. Likewise, the places that we will experience in future rebirths will be the outcome of the karma that we share with the other beings living there. The actions of each of us, human or nonhuman, have contributed to the world in which we live. We all have a common responsibility for our world and are connected with everything in it. ... If the love within your mind is lost and you see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education or material comfort you have, only suffering and confusion will ensue."

"I admit, indeed that the expressions “Nature is God,” may be piously used, if dictated by a pious mind; but as it is inaccurate and harsh (Nature being more properly the order which has been established by God), in matters which are so very important, and in regard to which special reverence is due, it does harm to confound the Deity with the inferior operations of his hands."

"To the man whom death’s wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so which once did not seem important or which he did not even know existed. The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there.Henceforth this was what I sought to discover: the authentic being, “the old Adam” whom the Gospels no longer accepted; the man whom everything around me—books, teachers, family and I myself—had tried from the first to suppress. And I had already glimpsed him, faint, obscured by their encrustations, but all the more valuable, all the more urgent. I scorned henceforth that secondary, learned being whom education had pasted over him.And I would compare myself to a palimpsest; I shared the thrill of the scholar who beneath more recent script discovers, on the same paper, an infinitely more precious ancient text."

"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."

"To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image."

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

"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."

"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."

"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"

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

"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."

"(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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

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

"epic of evolution"

"Ursula Goodenough"

"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."

"Religious Naturalism Information"

"LibraryThing - Religious Naturalism"

"Religious Naturalism"

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

"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 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."

"“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 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"

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

". . . 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."