Bridging the Divide between Religious & Secularists and Theists & Atheists

Based on evidence, existence in the natural world appears to be an interaction between a person and the environment (extension of Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory).  However, the qualities attributed to people and the environment vary based on personal and cultural disposition and personal and cultural situation.  The person and the environment are simultaneously an influence and a reflection of both the person and the environment.  The best predictor of religiousity/secularism and theism/atheism is, however, personal and cultural situation.  In the property investment market, people speak of location, location, location.  Similar thinking helps to explain propensities toward religiousity/secularism and theism/atheism; the location where one is born is very predictive of one’s beliefs and behavior.  From this perspective, the religious & secularists and theists & atheists should approach the topic of belief and behavior with humility.  However, this is often not the case.  Remarkable injustices have been committed or selectively neglected in the name of religion, secularism, theism, and/or atheism.  When one reviews the history of belief systems, he/she discovers that the inevitable interpretation in the process of human communication leads to a projective test that transcends the well known Rorschach Test.  For example, when one person looks at a text he/she may find hope, humility, connectedness, and plurality, whereas another person reads dread, pride, hate, and singularity.  There must be a framework and measure in the natural world that diverse people in diverse situations can use to find common ground for the betterment of humanity in the natural world.  Social justice acts as a framework to distinguish the prosocial & the antisocial and the humane & inhumane.  Dimensions of social justice could and should be forwarded by religious, secular, atheistic, and theistic people.  Simply assuming that the label of religious, secular, theist, or atheist necessitates a functional superiority in the natural world is not only dysfunctional but overly simplistic.  Any person in any of these groups could perform malignant and/or benign injustices toward people and/or the environment.  Injustice is not negated by group membership, though some people in all of these groups have and still do hide behind their label while blatantly conveying bigotry, hate, intolerance, and indifference.  Some people find protection in group membership but also use group membership to shield themselves from the difficult task of furthering their intellectual, emotional, social, existential, and physical development and well-being.  Thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, policies, and environmental structures that advance social justice could and should be created, supported, and celebrated, whereas group membership should simply be described and explained with humility.  A common prosocial and humane framework for humanity must be advanced or the needless horrendous death and suffering within humanity will continue.                     

Erich Fromm, Relatedness, and Freedom

Over fifty years ago, Erich Fromm positioned a vision of The Sane Society in which humanistic beliefs of relatedness and freedom prevailed.  In contemporary American portrayals of popular culture, arguments are positioned regarding gender identity and sexual orientation that apply to these Frommian principles.  Some proponents of equality have taken steps toward love, plurality, freedom, relatedness, and compassion with regard to gender identity and sexual orientation, whereas opponents of equality have promoted fear, hate, alienation, conformity, and orgiastic experience.  Contemporary attempts to degrade and control minority groups exemplify the promotion of orgiastic experience (or escapism).  Additionally, opponents of equality disregard social justice principles of respect and self-determination.  Erich Fromm believed that without developing the capability to love our self and other people, people devolve into insanity and alienation.  Contemporary opponents of equality intentionally attempt to repress, suppress, and/or oppress freedom and relatedness thereby promoting alienation and insanity.

Critical Humanistic Health Promotion and Morality

Through experience and reason, I categorize morality into five types: prescriptive, normative, reasoned, representative, and available morality.  These types of morality are not mutually exclusive meaning that more than one type of morality can be used by people at one time or across different time periods.  Additionally, the five morality types are not necessarily independent.  According to prescriptive morality, people make moral judgments based on tradition, rules, laws, and authority.  A person using normative morality will conform to contemporary morality of salient cliques, peers, groups, organizations, communities, or cultures.  Reasoned morality uses logic, context, discussion, argument, and cognition to make moral decisions or reach moral conclusions.  Representative morality builds off of the representative heuristic.  According to representative morality, moral judgments are made based on salient superficial characteristics of people or contexts at a specific time; stereotypes often are  a result of representative morality, and representative morality often reflects lower level cognitive processing.  Available morality relies on the availability heuristic and thereby utilizes the most salient parts of human experience across time to make moral decisions.  Available morality is bound by the similarity between one’s experiences and the actual moral landscape.  Critical Humanistic Health Promoters attempt to improve their abilities to use reasoned morality while recognizing the magnitude and frequency of the remaining types of morality.