Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.


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Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Religious Naturalism is a positive worldview that finds wonder in a universe without any need for the supernatural. Nature is astounding and life is precious. What more is needed?

Nature is astounding exactly because it is self-sufficient; a creator god or supernatural manager ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, has recently promoted HumanLight Day, a humanist replacement for Christmas. On the HumanLight website, they say:

HumanLight illuminates Humanism’s positive secular vision. In Western societies, late December is a season ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

It is time to hear some different voices at Sacred River. You are invited to submit an essay regarding the following topic:

“Inspiration and the Natural World”

You are free to write a personal narrative, an exploration into American Transcendentalism, a treatise on physics, a ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

A wonderful “song” using bits from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, featuring an appearance by Stephen Hawking. It is a lovely example of the awe, curiosity, and joy that nature can inspire.

Click to view

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Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

The following comment was written in response to a theist named Bridget from the last Dawkins post [here is her original comment]. I wanted to present this on its own page since I think it begins to address some core issues in Sacred River.

Where does the evil and good come ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

The abundance of even non-religious conspiracy theories is yet one more reason to challenge faith-based thinking. But it isn’t all roses…


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Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

Pascal’s Wager essentially states that it makes the most sense to have faith in the Biblical God because if he is real then a believer will earn entry into Heaven while a nonbeliever will suffer for eternity in Hell, whereas if God is not real, both lose nothing (unless to say ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

In his latest book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins presents his own Alternative Ten Commandments. I enjoyed the list so much I wanted to share it here. [Edit: it has been pointed out that this list was not written by Dawkins, but only offered in his book. Whoever wrote it, I ( Read more... )

Originally published at SacredRiver.org. You can comment here or there.

There are already plenty of good overviews of religious naturalism, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have one more. It certainly doesn’t stack up to the work of Jerome Stone [PDF], and I’ll probably update it over time, but I think it’s healthy to have multiple viewpoints that ( Read more... )