The human abode

Interesting discussion in A&P yesterday of the Varieties of [Religious/Scientific] Experience, and their point of convergence in Carl Sagan's appreciation of WJ's longing to get back home. "Carl admired James's definition of religion as a feeling of being at home in the universe." What else is experience finally for, if not to acclimate us to our abode? 

The human abode, Dewey called it. Wherever we go, there we are. Wherever we are, there we go. Here we are. This is us, this natural world, this secular universe. The religious dimension of life here, on his view, embodies a "common faith" embracing nature and culture, anchoring us to the universe and to one another. Supernature can be dispensed with.

The way I'd put that point: supernatural yearnings are natural for some of us. Not for me, but for many. We can thus understand religion as the natural expression of that yearning to connect with something large and meaningful. We don't have to exit our universe to make that connection, it is implicit in the "natural piety" which is our inheritance and our birthright. 

Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just perspective in life.

Natural piety plugs us into the "continuous human community in which we are a link" and, Dewey concludes, furnishes "all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race."  We need to make it "explicit and militant"--but don't call it atheism, which in Dewey's analysis too frequently spurns association with religion and piety and that universal human linkage some of us call humanism.

So we turn next in A&P to Richard Rorty, who was more partial to Dewey than James. One of our questions, in which you may detect a Saganesque echo: Who speaks for pragmatism?

A bigger question: What practical difference does it make? 

What significant value for life hinges on whether we're Jamesians, Deweyans, Rortians, Humanists, Natural Pietists, Methodists, Genesis Creationists...? 

(I'm still puzzling over Gary's charge that Carl Sagan "misunderstood" Genesis, that it was never meant to be taken literally. That's enlightened Methodism for sure. But I think I understand from long experience that literal interpretations of Genesis are more nearly the rule than the exception, at least around these parts.)

But anyway, and most important of all: Can't we just all just get along? Those who come after us will have been counting on it.