Judeo-Christian sacred (founding) texts never talk about any other world than this. There is no attempt to define the transcendent. The focus is always about how you live your life, how you value your life, your family, your neighbour, your venture to be godly, to be creative. The focus is man’s environment, the world. The message: open as wide as you can your mind, your heart, your arms, and you can trust (believe) that that attitude will never fail you, that your life will always find its way to deeper and greater meaningfulness and purpose, despite every and all apparent failure. That is the whole of the symbolism of cross (failure, despair, and their ultimate form, death) and resurrection (meaningfulness to life, every life, beyond even death in the spirit we leave in and with the loved ones and the world that we leave behind us).
Religion is about providing not answers, but visions. It is not about the meaning of life, the definition of the indefinable or what is beyond our world; it is about creating meaning in human life and training the human spirit to rise ever higher. It uses narratives and poems, rituals, music, dance, and art in all its forms to achieve that. These are its tools, its exercises for the spirit of man. When it starts to worship them rather than use them, it becomes institionalized idolatry and deserves to be ignored.
I think our great problem today is that religion has become too greatly an institutionalized idolatry. But as humanism, the latest child of our Judeo-Christian heritage, takes its place as the Western world’s secular religion, where are the ritual re-enforcements to keep that system of values before our eyes and minds? We have a Charter of Rights in Canada, and the UN has a nest full of such inspiring visions for humanity. We have feasts to remember those who have sacrificed themselves for the well-being of others. How do we keep them? Where is the community gathering to celebrate and hold them up and dear, to re-enforce them in ourselves and transmit them to future generations? We are remiss as a society to give so much latitude to business and business hours, and so piteously little time simply to be together and cherish and celebrate what we have. It is shameful that Remembrance Day is not a national holiday, and that national holidays are constantly eroded by celebrating them as days to ever expand retail hours and sales. A society that is all about business and bottom lines and profit cannot and will not sustain its higher values. We become what we worship (literally, obey). Is our ideal, our vision for humanity, really things like the charters of rights or ever expanding profit and consumerism?
You object to “god-fearing”. It is an interesting phrase well worn by thumpers of bibles, people who seemingly have little interest in understanding words and the art of translation. The word “fear” here is really better translated as “astounded, overwhelmed” as in overwhelmed by the sheer power of the gushing endlessly forth of whatever all it is–life, being, nature. When one is overwhelmed, knocked over, there is concomitantly a loss of bearings, a need for reorientation.
“Nature”, the term you want to apply to the absolute of absolutes, is a wee less than clear. I am not comfortably disposed to the idea of “Nature” as the first principle of philosophy. First, it is a quotidian term with a multitude of meanings and nuances. Second, philosophy has usually tried to envision the dynamic of existence as a dialogue, a back and forth encounter between a transcending element and an immanent element—God and Nature, Ideal and Real, Mind and Matter. When the God-Ideal-Mind element falls out of that equation, Nature becomes pantheistic and ultimately anile. It is rather like subscribing to the infinity of positive numbers to the exclusion of the negative and zero. The term or idea of Nature being nature fell out of fashion long ago because of that deficiency. I realize some philosophers have, and justifiably, like concerns with the terms “Being” and “God”, but, to date, no one has devised a vision or terminology to either sway or capture the mind of our society. We have been discussing the meaning of Being and God since well before Alexander conquered the world, and perhaps in another two and a half millennia some philosopher will find the words to re-direct the reflections of the species. Until that date, we live the language we have as best we can to express the all and the beyond all of our experience.
Early in Christian history, its scholarship navigated a revision of a philosophical system by one Plotinus (a reviser of Plato’s thought) to get around the root problem of Nature and their sacred texts; they called it “Trinity”. The absolute is the totally Transcendent, beyond any ability to discuss or understand it (Father), but it is also the totally Immanent, found in and being the foundation of all that is (Son Incarnate) and so allowing us some understanding of what the Transcendent is all about, and it is also and lastly the totally Dynamic (Spirit) constantly pulsing and drawing all things forward; it is never just one of these aspects, but always and everywhere all three united. It is a brilliant solution to “Nature” which as a totally transcendent idea is irrelevant to daily life, “Nature” as immanent, a concept that lacks power by being excessively mundane, and “Nature” as nothing more than a will to power or to be, a concept eviscerated of care. It is and shall always be one of those astonishing insights into “Being” that will constantly fall below the horizon, because most people will not go about puzzled by the irregularities of existence as just existence, just as we do not go about puzzled by the variants between Newton’s physics which we use every day, and quantum mechanics that also operates every day, but below our horizon of experience.
How does a drop of water comprehend the ocean in which it exists or what so ever might be beyond the ocean? Yet, I and an assortment of others have by inclination or institution been forced to rehearse that problem and its history.
How do I live a decent life? That’s an easier problem to tackle. Be gracious. I think that’s Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and the lot in two words.