Tweet from Secular Coalition for America (@seculardotorg)

Secular Coalition for America (@seculardotorg) tweeted at 8:24 AM on Tue, Aug 18, 2020: Today on the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which declared that the right to vote can not be denied on the basis of sex, we remember the long tradition of secularism in the fight for suffrage. #suffrage100 Thread. h/t @FFRF https://t.co/ZHvsFCzQuV (https://twitter.com/seculardotorg/status/1295713070715744259?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Winterton Curtis, humanist

LISTEN. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I choose to draw down the curtain on our short summer course with one last nod to my old landlord Winterton Curtis. I've already posted a small excerpt of his Dayton recollections below, but Tompkins' D-Days at Dayton (LSU Press,1965) includes a lengthier essay and his formal affidavit as submitted to the court... (continues)
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"The best life in America"

LISTEN. Feeling nostalgic for ordinary campus life, as we used to know it, I recall the way my first landlord Winterton Curtis concluded his "Damned Yankee" autobiographical notes:

...IT WAS [Mizzou] PRESIDENT LAWS who admitted publicly that he settled the competition between the various Protestant denominations for representation on his faculty, by choosing his appointees in rotation. If he needed a chemist, he chose a chemist who was a Methodist, if it was the Methodists' turn. The Baptists had their chance for a place in the . sun when the next vacancy .occurred. Since the father of George Lefevre was a Presbyterian minister, he was razzed by his friends as being a Presbyterian appointee, even though he came to the University in 1899, and the administration of President Laws was only a memory. No such accusation was ever pinned on me, although my father was a Congregational minister, since Congregationalism was a denomination unfamiliar to most Columbians.

I MIGHT HAVE included here the story of how I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906, but that account is reserved for another section of my autobiographical notes.

It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield , to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.

 

And Murfreesboro, once upon a time... and someday again, maybe?

A big thematic resonance for me, in Curtis's writing and in our course, is this idea of making a home for ourselves on this earth. Carl Sagan also said that what drew him to appreciate William James's approach to questions of spirituality was the latter's emphasis on the feeling of being at home in the universe. That was also Sagan's understanding of the spiritual promise of science, that we would--through the steady application of scientific and rationalistic methods and insights--come to feel ourselves, as a species, at home in the universe. We would come to see ourselves as embodying what John Dewey would call "the continuous human community"...

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith

Atheists Are Sometimes More Religious Than Christians

Survey shows how poorly we understand the beliefs of people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. — https://getpocket.com/explore/item/atheists-are-sometimes-more-religious-than-christians?utm_source=emailsynd&utm_medium=social
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"America is a country so suffused with faith that religious attributes abound even among the secular. Consider the rise of “atheist churches,” which cater to Americans who have lost faith in supernatural deities but still crave community, enjoy singing with others, and want to think deeply about morality. It’s religion, minus all the God stuff."

As Wm James said, the deepest religious impulse is not for god but for life, "more life, a richer life..." etc.

The etymology of the word is telling: "religare" means to bind or connect, to nature and to other humans.

But...

“I hypothesize that being ‘spiritual’ may be a transitional position between being Christian and being non-religious,” said Linda Woodhead, a professor of politics, philosophy, and religion at Lancaster University in the U.K. “Spirituality provides an opportunity for people to maintain what they like about Christianity without the bits they don’t like.”

I don't think spirituality is a merely-transitional phenomenon. Etymology again: "espiritu" means breath. To breathe is to live, and to deliberately honor and gratify the life impulse is to serve the spirit. Check out Carl Sagan's posthumous "Varieties of Scientific Experience" for a lucid discussion of the spirituality implicit in science.