https://www.snsociety.org

S2E43 TRANSCRIPT:

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----more----Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark.

And today we have a really wonderful opportunity for our listeners. We are interviewing Daniel strain who is executive director of the spiritual naturalist society.

Daniel is a humanist minister, a speaker, and a writer on the topics of ethics, spirituality, and ancient philosophy. And he leads meditations and speaks on occasion at the Jade Buddha temple for the VA hospital meditation program and for other local groups in the Houston, Texas area. So we're really delighted to have you with us.

Welcome Daniel.

Yucca: Yes, welcome.

Daniel: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Thanks. 

Mark: So we thought that it would be really interesting to interview you because your approach to spirituality goes kind of beyond the, the focus area for most sort of pagan paths which tend to be ritually oriented and more around ecstatic experience, kind of trans based experience that kind of. Ritual experience rather than the contemplated meditative sorts of experiences that are also kind of another pillar of religious practice and, and practice, I guess, throughout the world.

So, 

Daniel: can understand that. True. 

Mark: Yeah. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to spiritual naturalism and and about the society. 

Daniel: Okay. Yeah, I I guess my own personal practice includes elements of both ritual and static experience. I guess I'm a little bit of a mix of a stoic, a Buddhist and a pagan. and everybody has their own little cocktail of things that works for them. And so for about, I guess since 2005, I've been you know, pretty careful a comparative study especially between Buddhism and stoicism overlaps in those two philosophies. Somewhere along the line, You know, originally I come from a conservative Christian family than in my young adult time. I, I became an atheist and humanist, secondary being involved with a lot of the humanist organizations. I'm still a human to celebrate. Conducted weddings and things like that.

And I still am the humanist. But also I've found that even though I agree with the principles of humanism they're all very they're intentionally designed to be general principles. So there wasn't a lot there in 

terms of you're dealing with life and living and how to live well and all that thing in a more detailed sense.

So I kind of went back to philosophy, which I'd already always been interested in, but what I learned with stoicism and Buddhism is that what you are is not just about some laundry list of. For beliefs. This idea of something you put into practice that's transformation that transforms who you are and how you experienced the world and your quality of life.

That was kind of foreign to me, growing up as a conservative Christian, there was this 

list of things you were supposed to believe if you believe that you were saved. And then after I became a humanist, there was a different list of things you were supposed to believe to be a humanist. And they were all just lists of weeks.

Not about practice. And so, oh, it's really became a true believer in all of that. And I it's still in the course. And so, I was looking for organizations out there that were based around spiritual practices. We rely on things supernatural or faith-based kind of leaves that sort of thing.

I couldn't find anything at the time. So in 2012, I decided to start the spiritual naturalist society and found a lot of wonderful people from all kinds of different backgrounds and traditions. Religious in non religious that we're kind of seeing the same thing. I call it, the convergence, it's this kind of in the, the spectrum within all of these different religious and philosophical backgrounds, that's on the naturalistic.

Meaning, you know, within almost every religion, you've got a spectrum of interpretation, one that's a lot more supernatural.