Daniel’s presentation covered the notion of ethics.  He suggested that if we abstract the metaphysical elements of religion - those that can be neither proven or disproven - we arrive at a concern for spirituality.  These, Daniel says, are the same questions that are covered by Humanistic Psychology, namely, “What is the best way to be human?,” “What is healthy and wholesome?,” and so on.

However, he says, absolutized religion becomes fundamentalism.  The only other option he sees is to adopt a postion of critical thinking, and such crtical thinking must soften even the belief of people who still do hold to any religion.  What is left is fundamentalism on one hand and critical thinking on the other.

We must be open, he says, to the core of humanity.  Human science cannot avoid ethics and the normative.  The very fact that one may doubt or object to any such notion is evidence that the human mind spontaneously raises questions about the truth and falsehood and rightness or wrongness of things.

To further illustrate, Daniel discussed one of his studies in which he examined ten sexuality textbooks and concluded that each one was professed to be value-free, but none actually was. Furthermore, in disturbing cases, he found, for example, no outright statements that rape and child abuse are wrong, and only one noted the immorality of knowingly transmitting STD’s.  Thus, he argues the suppostion of value-free science can lead to some disturbing conclusions.

However, he noted that Abraham Maslow is clear about the fact that Humanistic Psychology incorporates ethics into its enterprise.  Daniel described human spirit as the capacity for wonder, question, marvel, self-awareness, and awe.  This, he says, entails an inherent, dynamic, open-ended, self-transcending dimension of the human mind in which we may ponder the big questions and construct a world of meaning.  He assets that this human spirit is, in part, the human potential about which Maslow speaks.

Daniel argues that human spirit has built-in requirements, and these are the primordial basis of ethics. The requirements are these: Be open-minded, questioning, honest, and loving or good-willed.  Bernard Lonergan, whose thought Daniel is following, phrases these four more technically as follows: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.  In the long-standing Western philosophical tradition, these innate requirements can be seen as filling out the content of “natural law.”

This analysis inspires hope that as a global society we can move beyond the narrow particularities of religions and cultures and gather around a common center, grounded in the inherent nature of humanity itself.  Such a move would not imply that religion be replaced or rejected but that it be purified.  An adequate psychology of spirituality -- a comprehensive humanistic psychology -- would be competent to criticize religions and cultures against the criterion of human wholesomeness and, thus, to effect such purification.  Such a move would also provide a humanistic basis for cooperation among various religions and the formation of a coherent global society.