Good evening. Welcome to Secular Solstice.
If you haven’t been to a Secular Solstice before, you might be asking yourself: What exactly are we, as secular humanists, doing here, in this building which is for ostensibly religious services, participating in a ritual which includes readings and group singing and other elements that sound suspiciously like a religious service?
If you have been to a Secular Solstice before, then go ahead and ask yourself that question anyway, because I think it turns out to be kind of a deep question.
Religion has been a feature of most human societies for the past 12,000 years or so, though some aspects of it are older. We don’t entirely understand how it began. One story, which you may have heard before if you attended a previous Solstice in New York, is that human brains have evolved to be good at dealing with other humans, so when early humans encountered natural phenomena like the weather, they tended to attribute them to human-like agents—the gods. And so they would start asking these gods for things like a good harvest, and over time these prayers and practices evolved into religion as we know it today.
It’s a neat story, but it’s not the whole story. Why the social aspects of religion? Why pray and sing and have all these rituals in public, with other people? Why isn’t religion just a personal thing?
Perhaps—and I’m not an anthropologist, I don’t know how much agreement there is on this among experts—but perhaps religion helped tribes to coordinate.
Rituals and music served to provide group bonding ex