This is my Creed:
I suspect that humans are biochemical accidents of unguided evolution who are capable of making an indifferent, ahuman and violent universe aware of itself.
I believe that we and I are understandable only in intergenerational terms.
I believe that Humanity will continuously hone the tools it has developed for understanding ourselves and our cosmos, and develop new ones. Tools like science and rationality, as well as poetry and art. I believe in them all.
I believe in human ability – past, present and future. We screw up, then we autocorrect brilliantly, only to start the cycle again.
I know Each Human Life is of immense value because it is the concrete incarnation of humanity as a process; the holiness we sense in every newborn is never lost, merely hidden with age. We are that holiness.
Evolving Humanity Moving Forward is the transcendent entity we must believe in. not the inherited rituals, concepts and beliefs that are merely the remains of now anachronistic hypotheses and fossilized aspirations of earlier generations, detritus left over from our species’ search to understand ourselves.
As we come to understand scientifically and collectively more about our vast and mysterious cosmos, we will feel more wonder and awe. And our informed supra-rational spirituality will grow.
We Humans need to have the courage to take full ownership of the kindness and wisdom we have for too long attributed to the gods we have created. Let us be sure that we feel individually and collectively responsible and proud for morality and harmony.
The elytra of a jewel beetle viewed through a stereoscope or the shape of a healthy young adult will always give me more meaning and induce more awe than any religious symbol ever will.
We can know nothing with certainty. I find people who are certain to be irksome. (OK, some people who are certain are both irksome and essential for human progress.)
I believe in evolving and confused dualities. Not simple and mutually exclusive opposites that are static, but poles of reference and sparring partners - like a mating pair that rolls around and assumes ever changing relations, each individual able to take a position only because the other exists.
“And” is almost always superior to “or”.
I believe that together we can keep Thanatos at bay.