Spirituality without a soul

1. Spirituality without a soul Dr Jacqueline Watson Visiting Fellow University of Exeter and University of East Anglia & Humanist wedding and funeral celebrant Humanist pastoral carer with a hospital chaplaincy team

2. What is spirituality?

3. Spirituality I think is when a person is close to God and is filled with the holy spirit. • Something to do with wine and things like ghosts and scary things. It could be related to dead people. • Spirituality is your expression of inner feeling. • Spirituality is something that a deeply religious person has large amounts of. • I think spirituality is very mysterious. • I haven’t got a clue what spirituality means. • Mind stuff. • Spirituality is the belief in spirits or ghosts, also the belief in reincarnation and resurrection. I think if you’re spiritual you are with peace in your world and possible others, i.e. heaven. • Spirituality is what you truly believe. Even people who are religious may not believe everything their religion says they should. It’s what you think life is about, whether that just means being born, living, then dying, like we think of other animals, or whether you think you have a purpose and that you should do something e.g. for other people, animals or the environment.

4. “The spiritual dimension of life helps individuals create frameworks of meaning and provides individuals with a way of being in the world which influences their decisions and actions. It enables them to interpret their life experiences, which can help them to work through difficult and unhappy times, overcome challenges, and find purpose in being. … … no particular form or expression of spirituality is superior to another… .” (deSouza, Bone & Watson Spirituality across Disciplines: Research and Practice, 2016)

5. Ofsted School inspection handbook 2015 : “The spiritual development of pupils is shown by their: • ability to be reflective about their own beliefs, religious or otherwise, that inform their perspective on life and their interest in and respect for different people’s faiths, feelings and values • sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning about themselves, others and the world around them • use of imagination and creativity in their learning • willingness to reflect on their experiences.”

6. Rob, a 6th form student and strong atheist. At primary school, I just felt that it was natural that there was a God and stuff but you never really got the chance to think any other way. And we had, like, vicars come in, at assemblies and stuff, and teach us this stuff, you just, sort of, believed it. ... . Then you get up to middle school and you learn about other ones, and you start to think, oh, if there’s all these religions, why should I believe in just one of them, when there’s, like thousands of other people believing in another one. ... You start to think that you’ve got your own ideas and stuff, I suppose. You sort of go through a change of mind. ...

7. And then I started to find out scientific things and I found out about evolution and stuff like that, and that made me think that I was not sure whether I believed in any religion. In evolution we’re all a part of the cycle, growing with the world and just constantly changing - sort of more of a cycle and being a part of the world rather than just another person. I don’t really think there’s a spiritual part of your body or anything which, like, carries on. I don’t think like that. I just seem to believe that we die and the only way that we carry on is by rotting into the ground and have our body decomposing and giving nutrients to the soil and giving life to other things, really. I think that’s a good thing, a cycle, like the food cycle.

8. Spirituality =A search for meaning in life andA sense of connection with something greater than the self Stephen Fry BHA video on meanings of life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvz0mmF6NW4

9. Science, Awe and Wonder • Humanists use science and reason to understand the world. • Humanists see great wonder in the natural world and the achievements of human beings. • Science isn’t spiritual in itself, but it offers insights into reality which are true (until shown otherwise!) and which can be spiritually awesome.

10. Life began on Earth at least three and a half billion years ago, at the same time or soon after our planet was formed. Initially that life thrived on elements such as sulphur and hydrogen, but we, along with other animals, need oxygen. We need oxygen to produce energy – and for humans especially for our big brains! That energy comes exclusively from the sun. The only way in which that energy can come to us from the sun is through photosynthesis. So to get our energy to live, we crucially need plants to photosynthesise. In the process of photosynthesis, a plant splits water and releases oxygen as a waste product. Splitting water is very difficult to do: the process was invented only once - somehow, an early organism found how to do this and every plant on earth descends from this organism and uses the same process. Originally there was almost no oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere but, starting around 2.4 billion years ago, and because of the evolution of photosynthesis, oxygen levels in the Earth’s atmosphere rose from almost zero to its present level of about 21%. Without the ‘invention’ of photosynthesis by ‘primitive’ life, life as we know it today, including us, could not be here.

11. All animals are made up of trillions of cells – humans have about 10 trillion cells. When life became multi-cellular, it massively increased the complexity of living things. But these cells are not all the same: there are about 200 distinct cell types each with its own role in your body. Each knows precisely when and where to grow and divide, and when and where not to. Cells must follow the rules precisely. If they don’t – when they don’t – the body gets tumours and cancers. The body is a highly complex but organised and disciplined system and without that complexity and discipline we couldn’t exist at all. But furthermore, the cell itself is a community made up of many even smaller parts: the nucleus with the DNA, but also - what are called - mitochondria which do that crucial job of using oxygen to burn food and make energy. And then, the mitochondria are actually ancient bacteria which fused with other organisms long ago and now live within our cells. Both cell and bacteria live with each other symbiotically, and without that symbiosis our body would not be able to produce energy to live. We think of bacteria as the enemy, but they are crucial to our lives in many ways: life is complex and interwoven.

12. We are all human

13. Happiness Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

14. Spiritual practice • Mindfulness • Yoga • Music • Running …

15. For the one life we have • Death is the end. After our bodies break down, our atoms will go on to form other things. • Our genes can live on in our children and grandchildren. • Our actions, thoughts, and ideas can live on in the memories of others and influence others. BBC ‘Who do you think you are?’ “We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” (Richard Dawkins)

16. Is it so small a thingTo have enjoy'd the sun,To have lived light in the spring,To have loved, to have thought, to have done;To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes; That we must feign a blissOf doubtful future date,And while we dream on thisLose all our present state,And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? (Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888)