Spirituality

Notes toward a spiritual and religious life.

Rob James

June 1, 2026

[intro]

Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God (2013). The law professor and author of Taking Rights Seriously is a surprising source. So far, though, this book captures my spirituality better than the rest!

“Religion is deeper than God. Religion is a deep, distinct, and comprehensive worldview: it holds that inherent, objective value permeates everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human life has purpose and the universe order. … Many millions of people who count themselves as atheists have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a ‘personal’ god, they nonetheless believe in a ‘force’ in the universe ‘greater than we are.’ They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about vast space but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.”

The religious attitude accepts the full, independent reality of two central values: Life’s Intrinsic Meaning (human life has objective meaning or importance, each of us has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one—living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to himself and others) and Nature’s Intrinsic Sublimity (nature has intrinsic value and wonder; we are both part of nature and we are conscious of making decisions that, taken together, determine what life we have made).

Religion has a scientific component—answers to questions about the birth and history of the universe, the origin of human life, and whether I will survive my own death–and a value component—how people should live and what they should value. Some value prescriptions may be theistic—to worship, pray and obey—while others are “at least formally independent of any god.”  Theists and religious atheists differ on the scientific and theistic-value components but not the remainder of the value components. In that sense theists and religious atheists are closer together than either of them is to non-religious or naturalistic atheists. Religion, whether or not theistic, differs from naturalistic atheism—the latter thinks nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences, that there is fundamentally no such thing as a good life or justice or cruelty or beauty, those are just creations of humans.

Richard Dawkins is right that some “pantheists” are in fact referring only to the laws of physics. But some other pantheists, as Spinoza and Einstein are taken to be, have a numinous experience of something they take to be real—not just an emotional experience explainable by evolutionary advantage or psychological drives, but wonder or beauty or moral truth or meaning or something else of value in what they experience.

Theists believe in a god who will judge our lives. But do we think that that god created the values being judged? “If so, then we cannot think we have really made our lives good just by obeying his fiat. We have lived only as our god wishes.” There is an independent, objective standard of living, and even the God of the Sistine Chapel ceiling “has only his own opinion about what that standard holds.” “What matters most fundamentally to the drive to live well is the conviction that there is, independently and objectively, a right way to live.”  Make of your life a work of art—live well and love well in a family or community.

Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (1959), cautions against taking literally the concept of a Personal God: “The experience of the numinous can occur in connection with the impression some [events] make on the human soul, creating the feeling of the holy, that is, of the presence of the ‘numinous.’ In such experiences religion lives and tries to maintain the presence of, and community with, this divine depth of our existence. But since it is ‘inaccessible’ to any objectifying concept it must be expressed in symbols. One of these symbols is Personal God. It is the common opinion of classical theology, practically in all periods of Church history, that the predicate ‘personal’ can be said of the Divine only symbolically or by analogy or if affirmed and negated at the same time. … Without an element of ‘atheism’ no ‘theism’ can be maintained.”  A humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence points “to a common ground of the whole of the physical world and of suprapersonal values; a ground which, on the one hand, is manifest in the structure of being (the physical world) and meaning (the good, true, and beautiful), and which, on the other hand, is hidden in its inexhaustible depth.”

Carl Sagan “revered the universe. He was utterly imbued with awe, wonder, and a marvelous sense of belonging to a planet, a galaxy, a cosmos that inspires devotion as much as it does discovery.”

William James. The Will to Believe (1896):  There are “things in the universe” that are fundamental and exist prior to ourselves or nature, things “that throw the last stone.”  Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):  Religion “adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.” Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul.”

Albert Einstein: we can reach the beauty and sublimity of nature only as reflections of something not part of nature, beyond our ability to understand the most fundamental of physical laws. Some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe, value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena. “To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull facilities can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), per Leibniz, is “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”  Knowledge of this metaphysic comes not from professional philosophers but from enlightened sages in every age—in Hindu terms the directly inspired Shruti and the derivative, integrative Smriti. We can investigate values just as we investigate nature, by extending our ordinary powers of perception and feeling. A telescope extends what humans can see, and “the astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love” (Rumi). Nature is the divine, in Sanskrit tat tvam asi (“that art Thou”). “The more God is in all things the more He is outside them” (Eckhart). “Behold but One in all things, it is the second that leads you astray” (Kabir), leading to the pejoratives associated with “two” (dystopia, dishonor, dubious, two-faced). “In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself” (St. Bernard). Distinction between the eternal modeless Godhead through which things, lives and minds have their being, and the perpetual creator and re-creator God through which they have their becoming and disbecoming.

“As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things” (Eckhart). For a king to seek God while sitting on a throne is like guards looking for camels on the roof (Rumi). “Reason is like an officer when the King appears; the officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun” (Rumi). We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a state of grace. “Grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so—but grace in order to give salvation, free wil in order to receive it” (St. Bernard). “God is bound to act, to pour Himself into thee as soon as He shall find thee ready” (Eckhart).  An ounce of grace is worth a ton of miracles.

“It is within my power either to serve God, or not to serve Him. Serving Him I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create” (Tolstoy). Evil is within you and within your control. “Your own self is your own Cain that murders your own Abel” (William Law). “Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions” (Srimad Bhagavatam). God is eternal and timeless, not immanent in a moment of time. “All except God perishes. When I have sacrificed my angel soul, I shall become that which no mind ever conceived. O, let me not exist! For Non-Existence proclaims, ‘To Him we shall return’” (Rumi). Prayer can be petition for self, intercession for others, adoration of God, contemplation of Godhead.

Avoid emotional responses to divine—“the fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation” (St. John of the Cross). “Consider that your life is a perpetual perishing, and lift up your mind to God above all whenever the clock strikes, saying, “God, I adore your eternal being; I am happy that my being should perish every moment, so that at every moment it may render homagte to your eternity” (J. J. Olier). Follow Way of Tranquility and Way of Wisdom.  Keep at it and don’t get confident—the “arhat who thinks he is an arhat is not an arhat”.  Follow contemplation with good works:  “In the beginning was the Word; behold Him to whom Mary listened. And the Word was made flesh; behold Him whom Martha served” (St. Augustine).

Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists (2012).

Don’t have to believe in God to benefit from selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts. Address need to live in communities and to cope with suffering. Cicero:  appeal to logos, pathos and ethos; prove, delight and persuade. Auguste Comte was concerned that only the uneducated and fanatical would believe in God and secular society would be devoted only to accumulation of wealth, scientific discovery, popular entertainment and romantic love, bereft of ethics, consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity. Hence a Religion of Humanity. Priests would be married philosopher/writer/psychotherapists. Nurture morality and happiness. Churches would be paid for by bankers! Daily sermons and publications, festivals for giving thanks to different parts of society. He was naturally denounced by atheists and believers alike.  (All in all, a pretty silly book.)

On Yom Kippur right after start of new year, Jews review their acts in last year and seek out and apologize to those they wronged. A Bar Mitzvah is in part the letting go by the parents, especially the realization by the father that he is being equaled and eventually superseded.

Jaroslav Pelikan, Modern Religious Thought (1990).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov (18xx). Brother Ivan tells of Jesus coming to Seville in the time of the Inquisition. He is recognized and loved, he cures the sick and raises the dead. The Grand Inquisitor, dressed in nondescript cassock, arrests him and throws him in the dungeon; the people acquiesce. He tells Jesus he will burn him, and that the freedom he gave men “is over for good.” The three temptations show the wisdom of the tempter. First to make stones into bread and you said man does not live by bread alone—no, the vast majority of weak men will satisfy their need to worship, and they will say “make us your slaves, but feed us here on earth.” Second to cast self down so God can save you and lead others to worship you and you said do not put the Lord to the test—no, if men had witnessed such a miracle they would have been yours for all time. Third to have all the kingdoms of the earth, and you turned it down—no, I and my 100,000 unhappy guards would have guided millions in happy slavery.  Jesus only listened and then kissed the Grand Inquisitor on his bloodless aged lips. “Go, and come no more… come not at all, never, never!” And Jesus went away.

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion (18xx): “If I conceive of God as the cause of the world, is He not dependent on the world?” “If I omit the world, nothing remains of God.” “He is cause as such, the concept of cause personified as an independent being.” “His cause is the human intellect.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: there is a God-shaped blank in the soul. (Warning, some theologians hate this soundbite.)

Chet Raymo, Celebrating Creation (1999): “Traditional religious faiths have three components: a shared cosmology (the story of the universe and our place in it), spirituality (personal response to the numinous), and liturgy (public expressions of celebration and gratitude, including rites of passage. The apparent antagonism of science and religion centers almost entirely on cosmology.”

Paul Kurtz (2003): “Science and religion are compatible—but only if religion is reinterpreted primarily as a form of existential poetry, dramatizing the fragility and contingency of the human condition in an impersonal universe and recognizing with awe and wonder the vastness and mystery of the cosmic scene.”

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe and admiration the more frequently and continuously reflection is occupied with them; the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address (1838): Moral intuition not religious doctrine guides moral sentiments. “The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.” “To attempt to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul.” “Man is an infinite soul, the earth and heavens are passing into his mind, he is drinking forever the soul of God.”  [Emerson had already resigned his Unitarian ministry because of doubts as to the efficacy of Holy Communion.]

Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (19xx): Primitive man feels dependent on nature yet in communication with nature; the result was feeling and then an intellectual concept of divinity. Pantheism associated with polytheism, but those multiple gods just seem to be immortal flawed men. Amonarch emerged to rule among them (Zeus, Jupiter, the wartime Yahwe Cebaoth who became Yahweh and supplanted El and the consort of one or both of them, X). Then philosophy took possession and idealized a supreme being and then the monotheistic concept. But if you take reason as the basis for belief, you wind up with a “Bookmark God,” who marks what can be explained by science and keeps having to be reinserted later and later in the book of the universe, not a very useful concept. “Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God.” The feeling of a hunger for God is the foundation of the tragic sense of life. The Father of Love is the son of love in us.

William Grassie, The New Science of Religion (2010): “spiritual” comes from the Latin spirare, “breathe”: “we are surrounded by a divine reality as pervasive, intimate, necessary and invisible as the air we breathe.” “There is an all-encompassing realm, an invisible reality that somehow transcends and sustains human life, consciousness, and values, indeed the entire universe.” “[T]he phrase ‘spiritual, not religious’ is used disassociate oneself from the institutional and historical manifestations of religions. One wants the ‘goods’ without the long histories of failures and hypocrisy.” It is “a modern manifestation of a historical, sociological cycle of trying to recapture the imagined authentic, unmediated, and uncorrupted origins of religion.” A religion deals with self, society and cosmos—“what it means to be a fully realized individual human, living in a social context with other humans in a universe imbued with power, purpose, and significance.”  Note the social aspect—“religion” comes from the Latin ligio, “binding.” A religion addresses these subjects through tradition, scriptures and interpretations (in the original languages and in translations), history, authorities (churches and priests), legal systems, saints and sages, liturgies and rituals, teachings about everyday “mundane” life, leavened through the believer’s own experience as a participant within the tradition. Grassie: “Humans experience a universe filled with logos that is the precondition for science, but also with pathos, eros, filia, ethos and agape. … Abolishing God-talk does nothing to solve the theodicy problem [why is there suffering and evil]; it only relocates it to the universe.” Love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, covenant, justice, wisdom to know the difference.

It’s important to know about many religions. As Goethe said of languages, “he who knows one, knows none.” Attempts at universal explanation, like Eliade, Jung and perhaps the evolutionary theorists today, ring a bit hollow. There are as many differences within a tradition as between them: thus Buddhism encompasses ascetic practices and Pure Land or Mahayana with its adoration of bodhisattvas who made sacrifices and receive prayers, and so-called monotheistic religions often feature Satan as a now uncontrolled supernatural force and a bevy of saints, angels, family members and prophets.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) coined positivism to refer to a physical or social science. Later adopted by philosophers, first as the Positivist School of the Vienna Circle (Schlick, etc.) and later in the form of logical positivism (A. J. Ayer et al.). Influenced Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin, Freud and especially Durkheim. Hierarchical ordering of disciplines mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Took to extremes, coined a Church of the Great Being (i.e., humanity) with love as principle, order as basis and progress as goal; Brazilian followers put Ordem e Progresso on their country’s flag!  Comte agreed with Hume that science had replaced religion in matters of truth. But for Comte, the problem is that religion is vital to the proper functioning of society, provides the psychological and social glue for a harmonious, peaceful and productive society, promotes morality and curtails anarchistic tendencies. A new religion is needed. Religion passes from theological/fictional (fetishism, polytheism, monotheism in its supernatural guise) to metaphysical/abstract (universe governed by regular and impersonal laws, individual human rights emerge) to scientific/positive (more communitarian). Society needs a moral means to regulate opinions and will of individuals, a “continuous state of sacrifice” (anticipating Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents). Otherwise too much license, absence of public morality, egotism, materiality, government corruption (sound familiar?). At root, reality is becoming a matter of information—just the flipping into existence of a particle (or brane). Compare religions with information primordial to the material world—Om, Fiat Lux, Logos, etc. Epochs of particles, galaxies, stellar fusion, planetary formation, chemistry, biology, culture, each with an increasing energy-density flow (erg per seconds per gram).

William Blake (1757-1827), visionary printer, painter and poet. Read Swedenborg but broke with him. The Divine Image.

Rene Girard. Interesting thinker. I wish his major current expositor wasn’t Peter Thiel, who seeks to use technology to subvert or end-run around democracy, in order to install the values and enhance the profits and power of his unrepresentative cohort.

Mimesis. Humans at root are the animals that imitate—no imitation, no culture (cf. Auerbach). Biological appetites and needs, then psychological desires. Mimesis is not necessarily conscious; we may not know exactly what we desire; rather, we observe what another seems to possess. Desire is mediated or modeled to us, inheres in the relations among people. (Cf. Don Quixote, who thinks whoever imitates the perfect knight Amadis the Gaul comes closest to perfection; cf. a Kempis Imitation of Christ). Rivals desire what the other desires, even if not internally driven.

Violence and the sacred. As rivalry intensifies, rivals resemble one another, leading to greater overlap of desires and the possibility and reality of “sacrificial crisis”—violence at individual and social scales. Culture exists by maintaining differences—sacrifice crisis undermines that, endless cycles of violence ensue (warring brothers, like Romulus and Remus, the perfect rivalry). Release tension via a real imputation of blame to an unprotected, marginal Other. The accusation is what relieves the tension. At first this victimage is not a fiction; the victim appears to the society, which must believe the blame and expiation are correct. Over time this leads to religion—the legitimation or sacralization of the peace achieved by scapegoating, by institutionalizing the repetition of it in the form of sacrifice. Like Durkheim, Girard believe society precedes our concept of an individual; religion is not supernatural or interior-mystical; it’s the coeval workings of a social group. Not corrupt Voltairean conspiracy. No culture without religion either. Durkheim: religion unifying. Girard: religion addresses the violence in society and social relations. Myth, from Gk mu, covered, the trace of a real event. (For example, blaming Jews or witches for natural calamities.) The stronger and more improbable the blame, the more likely it is that both the calamities and the persecution actually happened.

Christianity. The Bible is distinctive because it repeatedly identifies God with the victim. Bible sides with the victim over and over—Psalms, Job, Isaiah 52-53’s scapegoat prophet Servant of the Lord. (Nietzsche castigated the Bible for that. Compares with Dionysus’s promise of earthly life, not renunciation.) The ultimate is the sacrifice by Jesus of his own life, making possible a social space in which all violence is sacred (?), revealing “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Luke 11.50). Evil is embodied in a person, Satan the tempter, the accuser, the liar. Both personal archon and spiritual arche (?).

Roger Scruton: Girard explains why violence is associated with religions. That’s not because religion introduces violence but because it addresses violence. Religion “contains” violence in both senses.

Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025). Douthat makes a case for religious theism, particularly Catholicism, not just a lukewarm hot-tub deist belief in an ineffable Spirit that cannot be described (“apophatic” theology describing divinity by negation). The case: (i) the universe began at a moment in time, but scientists can’t say why or why “then”; (ii) its physical constants (e.g., the relative strengths of the strong nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism) are amazingly fine-tuned to allow our existence, which scientists can only currently explain through improbable untold zillions of multiverses; (iii) heliocentrism, billions of galaxies, 13.8 billion years of history, and evolution through natural selection may all be true, but they don’t rule out (indeed, make more sense with!) an initially or continually guiding Creator; (iv) we humans uniquely among creatures experience an externally derived moral purpose and self-consciousness that, alone among animal emotions and sensations, have not been traced anywhere in the brain or in brain chemistry; and (v) spiritual and “supernatural” (his word) experiences continue happening to people into the present carefully scientifically monitored and “supposedly disenchanted age.” So you should be religious, you should believe in the theists’ God that created and is invested in you. He suggests joining in your religious journey with others, if no prior connection or preference then as part of a major religion with a community and heritage. He rather flippantly claims indifference among the principal faiths, saying all the big ones have more or less the same moral code, setting a few purgatory/hell and reincarnation/heaven rules aside. One should gravitate toward monotheism over polytheism, but the believer should understand that none of the major religion’s divine presences is indivisible given the Christian Trinity, the Abrahamic prophets, saints, angels, and even Satan and demons. Anticipating three objections, he says (x) that in a world of free with given sets of physical conditions, bad things must happen even to good people; (y) that religions are human creations and do wicked things, but no more than other institutions; and (z) that the dietary and sexual rules of any faith respond, however imperfectly, to real human concerns (look at the sorry state of Gen Z secular sexuality). He says Catholicism resonates for him personally because he believes in the reality of Jesus, the Son of God who Lived, Died and was Resurrected for our Salvation through Works and Grace (“when I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it”), and because he savors the communal rituals and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, even with all its many admitted human frailties.

Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (2009). Very misleading title, really a summary of the cases made for any kind of divinity by people throughout history (kind of performative—“see how many authors I can summarize”). In the premodern world people went out of their way to show that it was very difficult to speak about God, and that suits Armstrong. Religion was, and for her is, something that people do not think. The new atheists attack fundamental Christianity, not the older apodictic ineffable sprit. (? Seems they attack Stephen Jay Gould on similar grounds.) “Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.”

Francis S. Collins, The Language of God (2006). The public human genome project leader (the title refers to DNA). C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: All religions from Babylonia to “redskins” have much the same moral code and much the same search for divinity. Altruism and morality in humans cannot be explained by sociobiology or evolutionary ethics governing animals more generally—contrast a new alpha lion killing the old alpha’s offspring, and witness the kindnesses humans do when no one is looking or will ever find out. Trots out the usual responses to failings of churches as human failings typical of all institutions. But he also defends evolution against “god-in-the-gaps intelligent design,” and opposes literal reading of Genesis, He is agnostic (!) about miracles and about theodicy (the problem of God permitting the existence of evil men and natural calamities). Endorses Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria,” which Richard Dawkins and other materialist atheists call a cop-out. (Some old errors in this book—no, quantum mechanics would not fall apart in the absence of a conscious observer, the wave function only collapses as between such an observer and the object, not as between the object and anything else.) Lewis again: “But supposing God became a man—… then that person could help us…You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us but God can do it only if He becomes man.” Good Collins line: “Life is short. The death rate will be one per person for the foreseeable future.”

Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design). David Brierly Hart. Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos).