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This web site is an experiment in a vision of religion for the 21st century. It is directed to agnostics, ex-clergy, and any persons and families disconnected with organized religions (Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islam, American Association of Atheists, etc.) who desire the human community ritual services such as birth welcoming ceremonies, coming of age ceremonies, wedding ceremonies and funeral ceremonies, etc. My vision is to develop with the aid of many others a religious alternative for the 21st century, wherever that might lead me and the people who believe that most of what religions have adopted or claimed as their own are really the ritual services and beliefs of all humanity. People outside of organized religion have no readily accessible resources for a community of faith in humanity, the natural universe, and the celebration of the important events in the human cycles of life.
It is my aim to invite others to share their beliefs, ideas and visions of the human community based on sharing what is good and fighting what is evil.
Introduction
Prologue
by Carl Sandburg
from The Family of Man, created by Edward Steichen
for The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1955.
The
first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon,
has the same pitch and key, each saying, AI am! I have come through! I belong!
I am a member of the Family.@
Many
the babies and grownups here from photographs made in sixty-eight nations
round our planet Earth. You travel
and see what the camera saw. The
wonder of the human mind, heart, wit and instinct, is here.
You might catch yourself saying, AI=m not a
stranger here.@
People!
flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among
lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridgemen, musicians,
sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords
and the landless, the loved and the unloved, the lonely and abandoned,
the brutal and the compassionate--one big family hugging close to the
ball of Earth for its life and being.
Here
or there you may witness a startling harmony where you say, AThis will be haunting
me a long time with a loveliness I hope to understand better.@
In
a seething of saints and sinners, winners or losers, in a womb of superstition,
faith, genius, crime, sacrifice, here is the People, the one and only
source of armies, navies, work-gangs, the living flowing breath of the
history of nations, ever lighted by the reality or illusion of hope. Hope is a sustaining human gift.
Everywhere
is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation
keeping the family of Man alive and continuing. Everywhere the sun, moon and stars, the climates and weathers, have
meanings for people. Though meanings
vary, we are alike in all countries and tribes in trying to read what
sky, land and sea say to us. Alike
and ever alike we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing,
work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun.
From the tropics to arctics humanity lives with these needs so
alike, so inexorably alike.
Here
are set forth babies arriving, suckling, growing into youths, restless
and questioning. Then as grownups,
they seek and hope. They mate,
toil, fish, quarrel, sing, fight, pray, on all parallels and meridians
having likeness. The earliest
man, ages ago, had tools, weapons, cattle, as seen in his cave drawings. And like him the latest man of our day has
his tools, weapons, cattle. The
earliest man struggled through inexpressibly dark chaos of hunger, fear,
violence, sex. A long journey
it has been from that early Family of Man to the one of today which has
become a still more prodigious spectacle.
If
the human face is Athe masterpiece of God@ it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak what words can never
say. Some tell of eternity and
others only the latest tattlings. Child
faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces
of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others
light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wind.
Faces having land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning
sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering
where to go this afternoon and tomorrow morning.
Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in
an instant of agony, mouths in a dumb show mockery lacking speech, faces
of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm
and ready-for-death faces.
In
the times to come as the past there will be generations taking hold as
though loneliness and the genius of struggle has always dwelt in the hearts
of the pioneers. To the question,
AWhat will the story be of the Family of Man across the near
or far future? Some would reply,
AFor the answers read if you can the strange and baffling eyes
of youth.@
There
is only one man in the world
and
his name is All Men.
There
is only one woman in the world
and
her name is All Women.
There
is only one child in the world
and
the child=s name is All Children.
A
camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven
of fun, mystery and holiness--here is the Family of Man!
The
family of men and women and their group ceremonies celebrating the crucial
phases of their lives are as ancient as the cave people. It is my intention to share with others these
ceremonies, collect as many as possible and pass them on to our posterity.
The celebrations of birth, adulthood, marriage and death are the
property of all peopleCnot the possession of those in organized religion. They should be celebrated in the home, in groups,
in the natural universeCwherever humans gather to celebrate
and use the words, songs, or images of their ancestors.
THE PEOPLE WILL LIVE ON
(from AThe People Yes@ C 1936)
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg website: http://alexi.lis.uiuc.edu/~rmrober/sandburg/home.htm
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for root holds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can=t laugh off their capacity to take
it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
AI earn my living.
I make enough to get by
And it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
I could read and study
And talk things over
And find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.@
The people is a tragic and comic two face:
Hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twisting
To moan with a gargoyle mouth: AThey
Buy me and sell me ... it=s a game
...
Sometime I=ll break loose. . .@
Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
And the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
The people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
While reaching out when it comes their way
For lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
For keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
For lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
And the strength of the winds
Lashing the comers of the earth.
The people take the earth
As a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
With constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
A spectrum and a prism
Held in a moving monolith,
A console organ of changing themes,
A clavilux [i.e., an instrument for throwing upon a screen
varying patterns of light and color that permit combinations analogous
to the successive phrases and themes of music‑‑also called
a color organ] of color poems
Wherein the sea offers fog
And the fog moves off in rain
And the Labrador sunset shortens
To a nocturne of clear stars
Serene over the shot spray
Of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
Shot on a gun' metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
The old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can=t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can=t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
The people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
Keeps, the people march:
AWhere to? What next?@
Last updated: September 14, 2006, by Keith Landers
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