Life Practices
There are various practices that occur easily and naturally in a religious environment that are less common for Humanists simply because the natural conduit is not present. For example, the act of praying has medicinal value and helps the mental and healing processes. This is essentially a religious way to meditate and can be accomplished through secular mechanisms.
The sections below describe various practices you can consider as well as possible ways to accomplish those practices in non-religious ways.
Social
Social gatherings are a critical part of social development for children and for happiness and connectivity with the community for adults. In a religious environment, these happen periodically (usually weekly) in the form of worship and Sunday school (or equivalent) and less often in socials that bring the common religious community together.
Humanists can attend many of these events, but it won't be with a consistent group/community like it would be with a religious organization. The significant thing here is to be proactive about having and attending social events with like-minded people both for yourself and your children.
Some possible solutions include:
- Bright Organizations (Humanist, Free thinker, Skeptic, Unitarian, etc.) - find one in your area and join the organization. It isn't critical that you believe everything they espouse or that you like every person (do religious people like every person in their church); what is critical is that you interact with like-minded people and that you provide this opportunity to your children.
- Online Forums and Groups - these are less useful in terms of social interaction, but they do provide a means of interacting with like-minded people, even if it isn't on a social basis.
- Mother/Family Groups - These tend to be local groups for stay-at-home parents, finding one of these can be a great opportunity for repeatable social interaction with like-minded people.
- High Intelligence Organizations - it is generally known that most intelligent people are Bright and so you are likely to find Humanists there. See High Intelligent Groups.
Meditation
There are many forms of meditation around the world, most having originated in eastern countries. In modern times there has been a lot of attention in the medical world on how meditation affects people physiologically. In particular, there have been studies around the effects on motor function, the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, and the immune system.
There have also been studies around the religious and philosophical aspects of meditation (or how meditation fits into religion and philosophy). All of these show that there are medical and spiritual benefits to meditation. Individuals practicing religion generally practice meditation automatically in the form of praying. Humanists (and Brights in general) don't have such an automatic, natural mechanism to turn inward and relax the mind.
Contrary to popular belief, meditation does not take significant effort or time to accomplish. It can be as little as a few minutes at a time (or much more if you really want to). Generally, starting is as simple as getting a quiet environment, closing the eyes, relaxing the breathing, and concentrating inward for a short time. Sometimes mantras are used to clear and concentrate the mind since it wanders so easily; this can be as simple as: "Lead me from ignorance to truth" stated over and over. People practicing this kind of short meditation experience calming affects in general and frequently find themselves increasing the duration of the meditation.
To take it to the next step usually requires more research or a teacher who knows a great deal more than we do. These can be found at many organizations in every major city (and most smaller ones). But for our stand point, what is important is that we need to practice some form of this in order to gain the same advantages that religious people get automatically through prayer.
The Past
Quoting Sam Harris in The End of Faith:As a collection of self-regulating and continually dividing cells, you are also continuous with your genetic precursors: your parents, their parents and backward through tens of millions of generations -- at which point your ancestors begin looking less like men and women with bad teeth and more like pond scum.
He has a wonderful writing style, but the point is that we are all connected; with each other and with our past. I once read that if you go back 800 years then everyone in your geographical area are related and if you go back 1600 years, then everyone in the world is related. So if you take any one person in the distant past and know (or assume) they had enough children to survive and continue the process, then you are related to them.
The bible and many other documents give the religious a rich history with which to both teach and connect. With Humanism it is more difficult as we don't really want to teach the stories out of the Bible (or other dogmatically-followed books) and yet we need to have that connection to the past.
There are a few possible solutions to this
- Dive into your own genealogy. We did this and now have a book of about 120 pages detailing the history of our family, some of it going back to the 400 C.E. timeframe. We also have a wall of pictures in our living room of ancestors back to the 1800's. Seeing this so evident all the time helps the family to see the connection to the past and to appreciate who they are and how they came to be here.
- Make sure you keep in contact with your oldest living relatives. Frequently in America, we don't spend enough time with the eldest members of our family and so aren't seeing the connection to past people and past times.
- Read mythological books and other fun stories of the past. These stories usually teach something and help to connect us to a colorful past. Just read them as stories and not factual books.
- The same goes for the bible and other "Books of God". Don't be so worried about reading or telling the stories, just treat them with the same reason and skepticism you would treat any other book. They do have great things to say in many cases and it isn't the books that are the problem, but the belief that they are the literal and absolute word of God.
If you are interested, here is one image from our genealogy collection.