One of the side effects of being a happy person is that unhappy people sometimes attach themselves to you hoping that a little of your sunshine will rub off on them. I’ve attracted people like this to me for as long as I can remember. I used to call them hangers on. But really, [Read More...]

Deep in the mountains of South Korea, a cicada hummed its last. Walking along the roadside, I saw a spider fall upon it with its venomous mandibles. Caught in the web, it had no escape, and cried: hum… hum… silence I stood equally silenced as the spider carried off the corpse into the splintered bark [Read More...]

The Spiritual Naturalist Society is proud to announce that the Charter for Compassion and the SNS have recently become partner organizations. This will mean that the SNS has agreed to share Charter announcements with its members, subscribers, and the public; and the Charter will likewise provide a link to the SNS on its website, and [Read More...]

Drumming is an ancient art that has played a ritualistic and spiritual role in different cultures all over the world. Drumming practitioners today may be most familiar with West African and Native American traditions, but there are many others – for example, Taiko drumming techniques from Japan. Why does drumming have a spiritual role in [Read More...]

“It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” –Paul Dirac. There is a general notion that “beauty” is something that belongs to the arts and humanities and has more or less been banished from science. Yet, in the last hundred years, many prominent artists and humanists* have [Read More...]

More and more I have come to realize that happiness is a matter of reflection. We rarely feel happiness in the moment. We may feel good, or pleasure. But it is only when we take a moment to reflect in the moment that we realize: we are happy. If we seek to have more happiness, [Read More...]

Skeptics have often been accused of being cynical, negative, etc. They will (quite appropriately) correct us that skepticism is not the same as cynicism – always about denying or a denial that we can reasonably know anything. While skeptics might reject certain claims on the basis of lacking or contradictory evidence, skepticism also includes the [Read More...]

Many philosophies and wisdom traditions have independently come to realize that anguish and emotional suffering is caused by our attachments. Buddhism is perhaps the best known, but Taoism is closely related in this, and many other philosophies touch on it as well. Some philosophies approach the matter by talking about fear, or greed, or false [Read More...]

This is the second of a 2-part series on spiritual transformation (link to part 1). After the article (below) we continue with an audio conversation between DT Strain and B.T. Newberg of HumanisticPaganism.com…   Is Extraordinary Transformation Possible? Granted, a more modest model of progress is essential, and perfection is most likely impossible. However, my [Read More...]

In this 2-part series, we will not only look at spiritual transformation in detail, but at the end of part 2 we will feature an audio discussion of the article between its author, DT Strain, and B.T. Newberg of HumanisticPaganism.com. Coming from a middle-American Christian background, one of the things that struck me as I [Read More...]