Party on Dude!
Behaving as you are advocating could just be thought of as "being nice." However, it could also be defined as "being spiritual," in the sense of transcending the ego and (evolutionarily-defined) selfish and self-centered instincts. Even when people use the term "spirituality" in purely secular terms, they're typically talking about nothing more than warm/fuzzy feelings. Yet, the warm/fuzzy feelings that one experiences watching a beautiful sunset have little real value.
Modern science has provided us with unequivocal evidence that everything in the universe is interconnected and interdependent, that fish and rice plants are our relatives, that the entire biosphere is a single organic system, and that the physical universe can only really be understood in terms of field theory. If we ever do discover a unified field theory, it will only work because the entirety of the universe is one big super complex meta-fluctuation in the very fabric of space-time.
As humans, our perceptions and cognition are thoroughly defined by our genetic programming. No living organism can survive without a sense of self and other, or self and environment. Even a single-celled blob of protoplasm needs this convenient fiction in order to move across a lab slide, run from predators, chase after food, etc. Natural selection has used two principle strategies in shaping human interpersonal behavior. One is selfishness and the other is altruism. It continues to use these logically-incompatible strategies because both work extremely well, and because natural selection has no interest in logical constancy. So long as our altruism is primarily directed at individuals who are most closely related to use genetically, and our selfishness is primarily directed at less closely genetically-related people, they work extremely well.
Rationally-driven human spirituality is essentially an attempt to find harmony between these two, apparently logically incompatible, evolutionary strategies. That harmony is probably to be found in the fact that selfishness and violence work well when individuals and tribes are only loosely-connected and generally independent. Altruism and compassion work best among individuals who are tightly-connected and interdependent. Human "tribes" now contain hundreds of millions of individuals, and the world is rapidly moving towards becoming a single global tribe. War, exploitation, and cruelty just don't work as well as they used to. When one economy crashes, they all do; we can't afford to go to war with China because they make all our stuff. In functional, practical terms, selfishness and exploitation just aren't as effective as altruism and cooperation these days.
As a species, we're also too scientifically aware to continue to believe that such a thing as a "single human being" exists in any meaningful scientific way. A "single human being" exists in the same way as a "single human cell" or a "single tree leaf." Examine the DNA in the nucleus of a tree-leaf cell and you won't find instructions for making a leaf. You won't even find instructions for making a tree, because natural selection depends on POPULATIONS and GENE POOLS to work. The DNA inside a tree leaf contains instructions for making a forest, and the DNA inside a human cell contains instructions for making the human race. That's what we humans are-- leaves which can walk and talk and write poetry. We are organic vortices-- sucking in air, water, animal/plant matter, heat, information, and expelling gaseous, liquid, and solid waste products, heat, and information. A vortex doesn't have any real border; it's only a qualitatively-differentiated region of a larger system-- a larger whole. Though the convenient fictions that our instincts thrust upon us lead us to think of ourselves as separate, independent, autonomous and unchanging objects, the truth is that we are no more a separate object than a tornado or hurricane is. Tornadoes and hurricanes are regions of the atomosphere. They ARE things, but only in a very particular sense, and their region-ness far outstrips their thingness.
The point that I want to make is that there is a rational, logical, scientific foundation for altruism, ego transcendence, and spiritual experience. Religions would be ideal institutions for exploring and manifesting rational, logical, scientific altruism and self-transcendence, if only we humans weren't so frickin stupid and irrational. Religion doesn't have to be dumb or unscientific. "Faith" can be secular-- as in "I have faith that my country isn't going to allow itself to go down the drain" or "I have faith that the human race won't destroy the planet and itself." Faith doesn't have to be psychotic rejection of reality. It can just be FAITH.
The problem isn't religion. There's nothing wrong with religion. The problem is that they're all doing it wrong. And, by the way, gods exist. Lots of 'em. It's almost certain that the universe is full of them. But that doesn't really change anything, and we're still all going to die.
Behaving as you are advocating could just be thought of as "being nice." However, it could also be defined as "being spiritual," in the sense of transcending the ego and (evolutionarily-defined) selfish and self-centered instincts. Even when people use the term "spirituality" in purely secular terms, they're typically talking about nothing more than warm/fuzzy feelings. Yet, the warm/fuzzy feelings that one experiences watching a beautiful sunset have little real value.
Modern science has provided us with unequivocal evidence that everything in the universe is interconnected and interdependent, that fish and rice plants are our relatives, that the entire biosphere is a single organic system, and that the physical universe can only really be understood in terms of field theory. If we ever do discover a unified field theory, it will only work because the entirety of the universe is one big super complex meta-fluctuation in the very fabric of space-time.
As humans, our perceptions and cognition are thoroughly defined by our genetic programming. No living organism can survive without a sense of self and other, or self and environment. Even a single-celled blob of protoplasm needs this convenient fiction in order to move across a lab slide, run from predators, chase after food, etc. Natural selection has used two principle strategies in shaping human interpersonal behavior. One is selfishness and the other is altruism. It continues to use these logically-incompatible strategies because both work extremely well, and because natural selection has no interest in logical constancy. So long as our altruism is primarily directed at individuals who are most closely related to use genetically, and our selfishness is primarily directed at less closely genetically-related people, they work extremely well.
Rationally-driven human spirituality is essentially an attempt to find harmony between these two, apparently logically incompatible, evolutionary strategies. That harmony is probably to be found in the fact that selfishness and violence work well when individuals and tribes are only loosely-connected and generally independent. Altruism and compassion work best among individuals who are tightly-connected and interdependent. Human "tribes" now contain hundreds of millions of individuals, and the world is rapidly moving towards becoming a single global tribe. War, exploitation, and cruelty just don't work as well as they used to. When one economy crashes, they all do; we can't afford to go to war with China because they make all our stuff. In functional, practical terms, selfishness and exploitation just aren't as effective as altruism and cooperation these days.
As a species, we're also too scientifically aware to continue to believe that such a thing as a "single human being" exists in any meaningful scientific way. A "single human being" exists in the same way as a "single human cell" or a "single tree leaf." Examine the DNA in the nucleus of a tree-leaf cell and you won't find instructions for making a leaf. You won't even find instructions for making a tree, because natural selection depends on POPULATIONS and GENE POOLS to work. The DNA inside a tree leaf contains instructions for making a forest, and the DNA inside a human cell contains instructions for making the human race. That's what we humans are-- leaves which can walk and talk and write poetry. We are organic vortices-- sucking in air, water, animal/plant matter, heat, information, and expelling gaseous, liquid, and solid waste products, heat, and information. A vortex doesn't have any real border; it's only a qualitatively-differentiated region of a larger system-- a larger whole. Though the convenient fictions that our instincts thrust upon us lead us to think of ourselves as separate, independent, autonomous and unchanging objects, the truth is that we are no more a separate object than a tornado or hurricane is. Tornadoes and hurricanes are regions of the atomosphere. They ARE things, but only in a very particular sense, and their region-ness far outstrips their thingness.
The point that I want to make is that there is a rational, logical, scientific foundation for altruism, ego transcendence, and spiritual experience. Religions would be ideal institutions for exploring and manifesting rational, logical, scientific altruism and self-transcendence, if only we humans weren't so frickin stupid and irrational. Religion doesn't have to be dumb or unscientific. "Faith" can be secular-- as in "I have faith that my country isn't going to allow itself to go down the drain" or "I have faith that the human race won't destroy the planet and itself." Faith doesn't have to be psychotic rejection of reality. It can just be FAITH.
The problem isn't religion. There's nothing wrong with religion. The problem is that they're all doing it wrong. And, by the way, gods exist. Lots of 'em. It's almost certain that the universe is full of them. But that doesn't really change anything, and we're still all going to die.
