[extropy-chat] Secular worship

[Samantha Atkins]

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 00:30:53 -0800, Zero Powers <zero.powers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually maybe "secular worship" is not the right lingo.  After all,
> if it's truly secular, what is it that you're worshipping?  Worship
> is, and should be, reserved for the divine.  In the thoroughly secular
> world view, there is no divine, only the unknown.  So perhaps instead
> of "secular worship" we should think (and talk) in terms of "secular
> fellowship."

Are you sure about this notion of worship?   What is the Divine
exactly?   Couldn't we have a state nearly again to worship for the
highest human and > human potential?  Do Buddhist worship?   What do
they worship?  The enligthened one, no?   So why would it be
impossible to worship the Transcended One?   That isn't quite it
either but I believe it is somewhere in this direction.

> 
> There is a church nearby where I live, Agape International Spiritual
> Center, http://www.agapelive.com.  I am by no means a regular
> attendee.  But on those rare occasions when I'm inclined toward group
> meditation, communion and entertainment (the musical department is off
> the hook!), that's where I head.  Unlike me, they are not a bunch of
> atheists.  But their spirituality is broad enough to encompass just
> about every belief.  There are roughly equal numbers of people from
> Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and less main-stream spiritual
> backgrounds.  There are even (I'm told) more than a few atheists
> besides me who attend.  It is one of the VERY few churches I can
> stomach because while it is heavy on the love, service and communion
> of humanity it is very light on the religious dogma.
>

Sounds like a lovely place . 
 
> Of course I'd prefer to commune at a place that left all aspects of
> fairy-tale belief out of the fellowship.  If I could find a place as
> inviting, loving, entertaining and dedicated to meeting the needs of
> the local and global community as they are at Agape, but felt no need
> to encumber that sense of community with fairy tales, that would be my
> idea of a perfect place of secular fellowship.
> 

What kind of fairy tales exactly?    How about our own fairy tales
full of grasping for what we and our "mind-children" will become and
what will be necessary to get there?  Not fairy tales necessarily but
good working mythology and other tools of envisioning and living into
being.


> Secular worship?  I agree that's pretty much an oxymoron.  Secular
> fellowship on the other hand I think could work.
> 

Again, Buddhists have been doing stuff that looks like worship more or
less for a long time without the notion of a God that western raised
people seem to associate with it.

- samantha