To some people “secular spirituality” is an oxymoron. To them, spirituality involves the divine by definition. How can anything be said to be “spiritual” if God has no part in it?

But then to secular people like myself, none of the gods posed by various religions exist. There’s no “guy in the sky,” and any spiritual urge anybody has or ever had is by definition secular, even if it’s explicitly about God or gods.

It’s hard to talk about this important subject because it feels like just describing my spiritual views insults other people’s core religious beliefs. Maybe it seems sacrilegious. To be fair, I can see how this is so. In India, “hurting religious sentiments” is a crime enshrined in the penal code, so the phrase carries more weight than just “hurting people’s feelings,” even if it means the exact same thing. What I’m saying may sound provocative or inflammatory, but I really don’t mean it to!

I don’t know how else to describe my views aside from calmly and peacefully laying forth what I think. Not everybody is calm and measured when it comes to the topic of god or religion.

The New Atheists—writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins—loved to attack religion and pull the rug out from under the feet of believers. I don’t. Not exactly. Part of me thinks the New Atheists were understandably combative because they got tired of the custom of sitting back and laying off beliefs they thought were pure junk, buncombe that evil charlatans use to exploit vulnerable people and gain control in and over society.   

I’m a little torn in how to write about this topic gently, bearing in mind that, in practice, religion is both a violent international horror and the source of people’s fundamental views that give them precious comfort and strength in daily life.

I’ve started writing on a defensive note in a way people speaking about their religious views would never do for atheists. Even if they were a considerate person, would a religious person ever suppose that describing their belief in God would offend the sensibilities of atheists? In a religious world like ours, atheists defer to believers, never the reverse.  

Yet I do think it’s worth stating my intentions and reasoning explicitly about my lack of belief, even if it means making an overture that would never be reciprocated. It’s a very strange, sad, and helpless feeling to look at the world and know that many of the forces separating people are fictions only existing entirely in their own heads. On a smaller more local level, it’s also upsetting to know that even in a so-called secular society, religious people are often assumed to be on a higher spiritual plane and even morally superior too.

An atheist’s lack of belief in God is taken as a negative or a void; people assume that because we don’t believe in organized religion or the gods they’re founded on that we have no spiritual beliefs of any kind or even any system of morals!

To understand how a secular person feels culturally in a world that is only technically or legally secular but in practice isn’t, just imagine an atheist claiming they’re entitled to a paid-day off work to celebrate something spiritual. It’d seem like a student not just flagrantly skipping school, but asking their teacher for money to see a movie while they play hooky.

Of course, to an atheist, all religious belief is rooted in secularism, the world without god or gods is the one we all live in. From where I’m sitting, everybody’s religious beliefs are essentially secular since there very much is no god, God, or Gods for you, me, or anyone else. It’s all just us here! Religious and secular people all live equally under this reality, except secular people aren’t in denial about it.

Spirituality and Music

There’s a phrase which some people use lightly or half-jokingly that to me really resonates lately. “Music is my religion.” I’ve always loved music, both listening and playing it. But I’ve got to thinking lately about the role of my religion, music, in other conventional religions.

Frankly, I’m not sure any religion would have survived without music. Music is the essential component that popularized religion and made people really believe in God.

If you want to convince people to believe in God, you can’t just speak to them. You need to preach, and that takes rhythm, singing. Prayers are sung. Even better, get a choir to sing harmonies in a giant room designed to have unbelievable acoustics. Get Bach to compose organ music. What they’re hearing then, that is God. Even if Bach would often write at the end of his compositions, Soli Deo Gloria–to the glory of God alone.

Religious people couldn’t just state that they didn’t like the blues; it was the devil’s music. The drum has always had a prominent role in religious ceremonies in too many places to name. “Music is my religion” may sound like something written on a graphic t-shirt the wearer doesn’t believe in too seriously, but it’s no accident that music played an enormous role in the origins of many religions. Maybe music isn’t just my religion, but yours, too.

I just finished reading a novel by William Gaddis called The Recognitions, an extended meditation on art and religion, creative originality and imitation, and [spoiler alert] at the very end, Stanley finally gets to play the music he’s been composing, but it includes the “devil’s interval,” and when he pulls out all the organ’s stops, the bass is so overwhelming that it collapses the dilapidated church he’s inside and he dies.

God speaks the world into existence. It’s sound that creates. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the bards play and the muses sing the epic mythologies. Scientists describe the universe’s origins as a “big bang.” Sound is essential at the very start of things. That’s why it’s still so fundamental today.

It’s no accident that today music is still the main driver of many rituals that make people feel a heightened sense of togetherness. Concerts, raves, and religious ceremonies all encourage elation, euphoria. When people hear music in a room together, they feel so elevated that they’re all but compelled to move their bodies in accordance with the sounds, otherwise known as “dancing.” The trembling in your soul is from notes, soundwaves displacing the otherwise still air, not a literal god. But to me it all amounts to the same thing. Music is god.

I’ve been listening intensely to Sun Ra lately and wonder if he’d hate this essay and pity me! When asked about his early influences in music, whereas most musicians might say “Jimi Hendrix” or maybe “Duke Ellington,” Sun Ra responded, “the planets, the creator, mythical gods, real ones, people, flowers. Everything in nature…musicians get their inspiration from environmental things, and all musicians are inspiration to me, no matter what style they play in.”

This is a very beautiful answer! I never know how literally to take Sun Ra. He was an extremely mysterious, profound man. But I can’t help feel like his eccentric spirituality and my seemingly cold secular one overlap considerably, even if on the surface they’re at odds. I’m sure every Sun Ra fan who feels his music also feels like they have a shared philosophy. Who knows.

In any case, as religious fundamentalism is on the rise in North America, people talk about godlessness as if secular people are missing some vital part. I can’t speak for other secular people in general, but as far as I’m concerned, everybody has an instinct and urge for something higher.

Religious people may imagine the godless spiritual world to be empty and nonsensical. Really, again, our secular spiritual world is the exact same as theirs—everything religious people believe in religiously is believed in a godless world, the only world there is and ever will be.

The romantic poet and early atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley writes very well about the sublime, the overwhelming response people feel when they behold something in nature too grand to process or even see at once, like a mountain chain, specifically Mont Blanc. There’s God in that nature, that shiver that is felt but can’t be communicated.

There’s nothing new here exactly about the attitudes I’m describing, but I wish non-believers weren’t so badly misunderstood and even despised, or at least distrusted.

It’s a hard conversation to have because it touches on a very live wire. I don’t mean to attack what people think of as their sacred beliefs! I resent that attitude some atheists have where they seem to derive joy or meaning from mocking religious belief. The beloved comedian and noted Tolstoy reader Norm Macdonald despised this attitude too, and even if I get why atheists are tired of being disrespected, that isn’t the right approach either.

The world can be a bleak and hard place, and belief helps people get by. Atheists aren’t necessarily more rational or intelligent people, even if we tell ourselves that we are. Lots of religious people are way smarter than I am! But my beliefs about spirituality and music are my own, I think they’re correct and I believe in them, and they make me happy to think about.