By providing a unified picture of ourselves embedded in nature, culture, and biology, naturalism serves as the basis for enlightened social policies. Naturalism holds that persons are not self-created, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed. Therefore, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status.
What would it be like to discover yourself a fully natural creature, completely embedded in the world science reveals? It would mean discarding any remnant of supernaturalism about who you are. Just as a thorough-going naturalist discounts the existence of god or the supernatural “up there,” so too she discounts the existence of anything supernatural “in here” inside the person, for instance a soul or immaterial mental agent.
As the old hymn by James R. Lowell puts it, and forgive the sexism:
Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.
"Indeed, one of the important challenges to us as a species is how we can figure out ways of dealing with our inability to conform our behavior to our long-term best interest."
- Steven Hyman, neurobiologist, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT, and former director of NIMH, interviewed by Bill Moyers.
This links listed here help you explore the viability of naturalism as a worldview along with the ensuing beneficial personal and social implications.
Living in the Light of Naturalism - personal observations from everyday practitioners of naturalism
Common errors and exaggerations made when encountering naturalism
"...if we understand that there are good evolutionary reasons for our wanting people to suffer when they have done direct or indirect harm to us, then we can account for our strong feelings about the appropriateness of retribution without presuming they are a guide to moral truth....
A commitment group helps its members make and keep commitments toward a common goal.
To help group members make and keep commitments to action that will reduce global warming, to help create and sustain the personal and political will to act now.
Make friends, influence people, develop group cohesion and identity, find a larger purpose in life, get group discounts on environment-related products.
Libertarian Tibor Machan, writing in the Desert Dispatch (and reprinted in Free Inquiry, Oct-Nov, 2005), inveighs against liberals, claiming that "Liberals tend to excuse all evil with stories about bad luck and disease and a bunch of other impersonal forces that make people do bad things." He goes on to say that "The basic philosophical thesis behind the liberal mentality...is the denial of free will." So according to Machan, by accepting that evil has causes, liberals deny free will, and in so doing deny the basis for moral judgments.
