Suppose the Jewish Community or the Indigenous community were suddenly stripped of all their ceremonies, days of observance and inbuilt customs, imagine how psychologically bare, how colourless and empty their lives would be. Socially, ideals would be diluted, values untransmitted would be lost, the arts (the components of ceremony) would be significantly diminished. The social, cultural, and emotional life of the Jewish Community and Aboriginal life and its rich contribution to the larger society would be no more.
This is how Lionel Murphy and others Including me) observed the possibilities for “secular” people (increasing in numbers all the time) who could not accept the supernatural infrastructures of the religions for the bases for their culture. So we conceived a way to establish meaningful and substantial ceremonies for people like us. As we are honest and authentic people, l our ceremonies are non-religious in content. Non-church people have welcomed our ceremonies with joy and deep appreciation, we have enriched Australian and western world society – but we still have a long way to go.
In the establishment of civil ceremonies we saw that non-churchgoers were best served by celebrants who focused on ceremony which could be as good, nay better, in their power and substance than church ceremonies. So rather than spending their energy on attacking religion and believers Murphy urged humanist celebrants to co-create the best ceremonies ever.
Dally Messenger. ————- Read more about Murphy here.
Australian Humanist Celebrant Network 