Pantheist ethics: respecting the sacred in nature and humanity.

The call and rights of living things.

If we are nature's children, then other species and individual living things are our siblings. We are part of the same family, and they are our brothers and sisters, with equal rights. We are called to have a feeling of kinship with them. Most people do not find it difficult to respond to this call: they do so instinctively. They love plants and keep plants near them in their homes and gardens. In modern societies many people keep animals as part of their families.

Recognizing the fellow-sacredness of other living things, acknowledging their ethical value, means respecting them not just as means to our ends, but as ends in themselves. We must recognize their basic goals as well as our own in all our dealings with them. We must accept their basic right to pursue their natural goals.

These goals are related to their own perpetuation. Though they lack nervous systems, plants and single-celled animals develop and struggle to survive, to get the food and water they need, to avoid stress, and to reproduce. These are not conscious goals: but they are the ends to which they strive. Animals have wider goals: drives to forage and feed, to avoid danger and pain, to find mates and to breed.

These goals make up the natural life of each living thing, and through them wider ends are served - the transmission of genes, the survival of species.

We must recognize the rights of living things to survive and thrive, to fulfil their natural drives and to live their natural lives in natural surroundings.

Recognizing the rights of life does not mean providing a cast-iron guarantee: nature herself often subjects living things to stress, pain and death. But it does mean accepting our own duty not to infringe the rights. So we should not impose suffering on animals or unnecessary stress on plants. We should not expect animals to live in conditions where they cannot satisfy their basic instincts.

At the same time we have to accord to humans the same natural rights as other species: the right to survive and thrive, the right to eat, the right to avoid danger and pain and threats to life.

Respecting and preserving species and ecosystems.

Living things do not develop alone, but in association with members of their own species, with other species, and with non-living things. These communities form and evolve over hundreds, thousands or millions of years, and each species evolves to fit until the whole meshes together in a complex interlocking web. All ecosystems are linked with the earth's waters, rocks and atmosphere in the larger system of Gaia.

These larger groupings, species and ecosystems, don't have goals of their own, so strictly speaking they cannot have rights. But they form the basic framework for the prosperity of all their living members. Individual animals cannot be thriving if their numbers are dwindling to danger levels. Preserving a species is fostering the rights of all its members.

If an ecosystem is harmed, then many of its members will be harmed. Conversely, conserving habitats is the very best way of conserving the species that live within them. Respecting the stability of ecosystems and of Gaia is part of respecting the rights of the living things that make them up.

But there are wider issues involved in the overall diversity of species. Biodiversity is a unique value with many dimensions: aesthetic, ethical, cognitive, economic. Laboriously built up over hundreds of millions of years, it is the supreme expression of the infinite creativity of matter and life. Mass extinctions have halted its rise, but every time life has bounced back and climbed to new heights. At the present time some 1.75 million species have been catalogued and described. Cautious estimates suggest that the total figure may be between seven and twenty millions.

Clearly we cannot guarantee that every species will survive: not even nature does that. The average mammal species in the Cenozoic era had a life-span of around one million years. But we should at least do everything in our power so that we ourselves do not become the agents of mass extinction. Instead we should become agents for the preservation of biodiversity.

The ethical call of other humans.

It goes without saying that we have a relationship of kinship and interdependence with other human beings - indeed studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that we may all be descended from a single family.

We must treat other humans as members the same family. We must preserve and care for them when they are vulnerable or needy. We must help to eradicate poverty and social exclusion in our own societies and in the world as a whole. In these areas pantheist ethics echo the ethical systems of most societies.

What pantheism adds, perhaps, is an extra intensity of recognition of other humans, an extra strengthening for the idea of human equality. We see other people as other sparks of the one divine fire, other waveglints on the one divine ocean, other facets of the divine diamond.

Every one of us is an participant in divinity, not in some distant future after death, but right now. Every one of us is a potential focus of consciousness of divinity. So we are called to respect others humans as sacred, fellow members of the divinity.

We should also help others to realize their kinship with nature and their belonging to the universe - realize in the dual sense of "to become aware of," and "to make real." Helping others become aware of the connection is a matter of spreading the message of pantheism. This is an obligation of pantheists which is important for the environment and for human welfare. At the same time we should cooperate with changes in environmental attitudes in more traditional religions.

Even if people are aware of the connection, there may be obstacles that prevent them making it real.

These include physical factors such as separation from nature and the night sky. We must work to increase everyone's right to at least some piece of natural area within walking distance of their homes. And we must join the struggle against light pollution, which is gradually blotting out the glorious vision of the heavens. For city dwellers the stars are disappearing one by one, like lights being put out. Often it is difficult even to make out the great constellations. Increasingly we are shut in our own little box, cut off from our own galaxy and the rest of the universe. Visit the International Dark-Sky Association to see about joining campaigns in your own country.

There are also psychological factors - especially those feelings that preoccupy us for long periods and undermine our enjoyment and belonging on this earth. These include obsession, addiction, anxiety, excessive grief. Some of these are under our own control, and with the help of pantheist meditation and the pantheist approach to natural death, we can learn to free ourselves.

They also include emotions caused by the structure of society: feelings of injustice, exploitation, oppression, envy. These are natural emotions, designed to help us overcome unfair situations. We should work to eliminate the sources of these emotions in economic insecurity, violence, lack of democracy and participation, and gross inequality.

The ground of human rights.

Many religions talk of the equality of humans. The US Declaration of Independence states: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Yet traditional religions don't provide a solid grounding for such statements.

The fact is that we don't know that God created us equal. Humans are unequal from birth - not just in their social situation, but in intelligence, motor skills, drive, looks, health. If God himself handicaps people in this way, before they have made any conscious actions in life, then why should we believe that he requires us to treat people equally?

Eastern religions have different problems. If the state in which we are currently incarnated is the result of our past actions, then our present inequalities are merited, and we deserve to be treated unequally.

Pantheism provides a far more solid basis for human equality. We are all equal parts of the divinity. Every individual consciousness is an equal focus of awareness of the divinity. Whatever our talents or failings, whatever our abilities or disabilities, we are all absolutely equal in these central respects.

Recognition of this equality implies that we should treat other humans as ends and not means. We should respect their ends for themselves, that is, their legitimate life goals. Of course human goals are far more complex again than animal goals. These legitimate goals have been summarized in the body of international human rights, probably our greatest ethical achievement as a species, and the most inclusive common ethical system in existence in the world today. See Human rights.

Pantheism provides the solid religious basis possible for human rights on the basis of equality.

PANTHEISM

is the belief that the universe and nature are divine.
It fuses religion and science, and concern for humans with concern for nature.
It provides the most realistic concept of life after death,
and the most solid basis for environmental ethics.
It is a religion that requires no faith other than common sense,
no revelation other than open eyes and a mind open to evidence,
no guru other than your own self.
For an outline, see Basic principles of scientific pantheism. Top.

Scientific pantheism: index. History of pantheism. Basic principles of scientific pantheism. Join the World Pantheist Movement