Unfortunately, in this Handbook I wrote as if the Creative Spirit of the Universe is the sole source of life, love and inspiration. More correctly, The God of Spiritual Humanism is a spiritual duality. The Creative Spirit of the Universe and Mother Nature, "divine partners" that create life and endow that life with its many gifts, such as the gifts of being able to reason and experience emotions such as being able to love.
Spiritual Humanists also believe that there is another kind of partnership that has to exist in order for the "divine" purpose of the universe to unfold," and that is the partnership between the creative Spirit and Spiritual Mother, who can create life but can't nuture it once created, and we human beings as "boots on the ground," who can nurture life once created but can't create it in the first place. We call this "life's essential partnership."
Spiritual Humanists agree with Huston Smith that we have been lead astray by Atheists, including Secular Scientists and Secular Humanists, who contend there is only one "Real World," our material world that we can identify using the "scientific method," a method that utilizes our five senses. That mistaken belief is, If you can't recognize it through the scientific method, it doesn't exist.
Spiritual Humanists say that is baloney, that there is another world that exists, the World of Spirit, the world that includes our Spiritual Mother and Spiritual Father with whom we can partner in making ours a better world... This is the world that Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Transcendentalists contend (as defined in my Encyclopedic Dictionary) there is a higher reality than that found in sense experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than that achieved by human reason. Nearly all transcendentalist doctrines stem from a division of reality into a realm of spirit and a realm of matter. Such a division is made by many of the great religions of the world. And now, that transcending belief has become a cornerstone of Spiritual Humanism.
Although I lost faith in the Christian God when I was a kid, I never lost faith in the value of religion, and I spent years in trying to find a believeable God to go with my firm belief in the value of religion. And now I have found one, or actually two in one!
I first became conscious that there is indeed a God when my wife Dorothy gave me Wayne Dyer's book, Manifest Your Destiny on my 77th birthday. In that book, Dyer told a story about how an acorn becomes a mighty oak. Within that acorn there has to be life, and the question became, how did it get there? Certainly no human being had the power to put life into that acorn. Humans had been endowed with the ability to nurture that oak seedling once it grew out of that acorn, as I did a number of times, but the question remained, how did life get into that acorn in the first place?
In a later book, Dyer asked, "Can you grow a flower?" The answer was the same; you can nurture a flowering plant once it starts to grow, but you can't breathe life into that flower seed in the first place. My conclusion came to be, "Only God can make a tree," or a flower, or a you and me.
There were times when I was a young pilot in World War II that I wished I had a God I could pray to for help, but I had to accept the fact that I had been endowed at birth with the talent to become a good pilot, and I was now on my own.
America has now become such a Secular Nation that I fear for its future, but I find hope in that 80% of Americans still say they believe in some sort of God or Higher Power, and in a national survey conducted in 2010, an amazing 24% of Americans reported they no longer consider themselves religious, but are now more spiritual.
Spirituality's day isn't any longer coming. It is here. Thanks to Wayne Dyer and many other great spiritual leaders, I now believe that our destiny lies in The Creative Spirit of the Universe and Mother Nature, the Spirtual Mother of us all, a duality we think of as "God."