Today’s Post

Last week we explored how the concept of ‘sacrament’ can be interpreted as ‘articulations of the noosphere’, helping us to navigate our lives by the compass of and in cooperation with the energy of evolution, ‘grace’, as it flows through our lives.

Although the concept of sacraments seems to have risen in the theological evolution of the West, there are many other ‘occasions of grace’ (instantiations of the energy of evolution) in our lives which are more secular but just as important to our continued personal evolution as they are to the evolution of our society.

This week we’ll take a look at some of these.

Evolutionary Beliefs and ‘Secular Sacraments’

One of the ways of moving human evolution forward that we have explored in this blog is the development of the skill of employing our neo-cortex brains to modulate the instinctual stimuli of the lower ‘limbic’ and ‘reptilian’ brains.  Such skill is called for in nearly every religious tradition in human history, but requires guidelines, ‘signposts’ to insure that such employment really does align with the ‘axis of evolution’ as it rises in our lives.

Another way to look such evolutionary ‘signposts’ is provided by Richard Dawkins, as he sees human evolution proceeding by way of ‘memes’, nuggets of cultural evolution which foster our way forward.  In his vernacular, such ‘memes’ constitute the human counterpart to molecular ‘genes’ which shape the manifestations of matter as they emerge into living things.  From this viewpoint, sacraments can be seen as the ‘memes’ which we use as we evolve.

An example of such a signpost is the simple adage, seemingly first voiced by Confucius in 550 BC: “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you”.  While simple to state, it nonetheless requires a conscious decision to first understand what you would like to have done to you, then to make the conscious decision to act against what might be an instinctive motivation, such as to react in kind to a perceived threat.

Most thinkers agree that development of such skill is difficult, which acknowledges both the strength of our inherited instincts (which served our reptilian and mammalian ancestors so well) and the immaturity of the use of our human-unique neo-cortex brain.  The writings of both religion and philosophy abound with rituals designed to help the human person transcend his ‘lower’ roots.

As ‘articulations of the noosphere’, sacraments fall into this category.  They offer examples of human actions that require activation of our neo-cortex thinking centers instead of reactions to our instinctual stimuli.  In the ‘eucharist’, for example, we are called to replace our instinctive recoil from others with the conscious understanding of our common natures as ‘all made in the image of god’, or in our secular vernacular, as each possessing the spark of the ‘ground of being’ which energizes the evolution of our person.  We have taken a look at such examples proposed by religion, but our entire social systems are rife with those that stress objectivity over subjectivity, and deliberation over instinct, as a basis for action.  All of these activities, encoded in our laws and cultural norms, are based on values that are uniquely human and which transcend such instinctive goals as survival and procreation.

We have seen how Richard Dawkins understands that evolution in the human species continues by way of ‘memes’, which constitute the fibers of the fabric of culture.  These ‘memes’ are simply those insights, which when shared among the members of a group, contribute to its endurance.  Some examples of ‘secular sacraments’ can be found in such shared values as:

Human Equality 

At least in the West, the underlying concept of human equality has become widely accepted.  This simple value qualifies, in our secular search, as the basis for a true ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it underpins several practices which can be seen to contribute to both material and spiritual (by our secular definition) successes of the West.  While there is little doubt that Western societies are still evolving, the current of human evolution can be readily traced in the rapid (by evolutionary measure) evolution of societal organization from monarchies, through monarchies with ‘charters’ which recognized rights of the non-monarchy, to the United States Bill of Rights.

Thomas Jefferson expresses this value in very clear terms in the Declaration of Independence:

 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

   This fundamental value, an example of a Dawkins ‘meme’, leads on to a belief that is essential to Western democracy: if each individual has the same rights, an opinion of the majority will serve as a mandate to society.  Effectively this leads to the belief that ‘majority rules’ in the enacting of laws.  As Thomas Jefferson puts it succinctly there is

“. ..no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.”

   This, in turn, leads to the act of articulating “the will of the people”, voting.  From our secular perspective, voting, then, is an example of a ‘secular sacrament’.  When we vote we are effectively acting out the belief that the majority opinion is normative in human society, based on the value that each person has the same rights, and hence the same potential for understanding how society should work.  Thus, by our secular definition of ‘sacrament’, the act of voting is one by which the energy of evolution can be seen as active in the evolution of society.

Psychology

As we saw in in the posts beginning December 8, 2016,, psychology is an activity in which we explore our basic self, which from our secular perspective involves finding the ‘ground of being’ via the as the manifestation of universal evolution in our personal lives.  As such, psychology can be a profoundly human activity, a sacrament, since what is found is that which is most human in us.
The practice of psychology depends upon the belief that an essential characteristic of the human person is ‘improvability’.  Like ‘human equality’, this is another example of a Dawkins ‘meme’ which, when acted upon constitutes yet another contribution to the continuation of human evolution via the enrichment of human life.

The Next Post

This week we expanded the view of perspectives from church-developed sacraments to ‘secular sacraments’, ones in which we engage in our everyday lives.

Next week we will take a final look at sacraments in the light of values and morals.