An excerpt from this classic of the ’60s counterculture: How to Start Your Own Religion First, decide with whom you will make the voyage of discovery. If you have a family, certainly you will include them. If you have close friends, you will certainly want to include them. The question, with whom do I league for … Read more“Start Your Own Religion” (Timothy Leary, 1967)
This is what really happened; in 1917, and again in 1920, two rural English schoolgirl cousins went into the local woods and took photographs of paper cutouts shaped like fairies. All historical evidence suggests that the girls intended nothing more than a simple, silly prank, which then spiraled out of their control. As one of them … Read moreSkepticism, Faith and Compassion in “FairyTale: A True Story” (1997)
“Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or … Read more“Every Thing to be True Must Become a Religion”: Oscar Wilde’s Confraternity of the Faithless
Artist Peter McGough explains the Oscar Wilde Temple, a secular “celebration of the creative process through which experience is transformed into art and reality abstracted into revelation.” For more information on this project, please see the Oscar Wilde Temple website.
In his 1909 book Memories of My Life, English polymath Sir Francis Galton reflected – in the language of his era, whose sentiments on civilization do not match our own in some regards – on several curious and creative experiments in poetic faith: In the days of my youth I felt, at one time, a passionate … Read moreSir Francis Galton Worships Mr. Punch
Nontheistic spirituality and spiritual naturalism are umbrella terms for spiritual disciplines that require no faith in the literally supernatural. Examples include Humanism, numerous forms of atheistic/secular Paganism, Humanistic Judaism, Secular Buddhism, The Satanic Temple’s approach to Satanism and so-on, as well as present-day revivals of ancient philosophies such as Stoicism and Epicureanism. My Way of Life and Death can be considered and practiced as part of … Read moreThe Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith and Nontheistic Spirituality
Social philosopher, Religion for Atheists author and School of Life founder Alain de Botton presents his concept of Atheism 2.0, a life-stance and process of inquiry that begins with the understanding that the “supernatural” is fictional and then asks “how can this fiction help us live meaningful and fulfilling lives?” This is also the premise of my Way of … Read moreAtheism 2.0 with Alain de Botton
Despite their distinct lack of streaming video options, the ladies and gentlemen of the late 19th century were not short of amusing and instructive pastimes. Late Victorian social media was centered around clubs running the thematic gamut from banal to whimsically outré. During the 1890s, examples of the latter kind ranged from the Whitechapel Club of … Read morePoetic Faith (or, Why Oscar Wilde Declined to Join the London Thirteen Club)
So wrote American scholar of new religions Robert S. Elwood in 1973, describing the then-new and burgeoning religious movement known as neo-Paganism. Elwood was among the first academics to pay any serious attention to the phenomenon that it pleases us, now, to refer to as Cultpunk, or (less edgily, more splendidly) as Poetic Faith; the … Read more“… a religion of atmosphere instead of faith, a cosmos, in a word, constructed by the imagination.”