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"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup." -- D. H. Lawrence, Etruscian Places, 1932.

"Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity." -- Ludwig Feuerbach, preface to 1843 ed. of The Essence of Christianity (1841).

The church of human bodies lives in all of us, even if unrecognized. If we are alive, we belong to it. Even though we deny it with each breath we take, we belong. If a scoop of fire glows in our breast, if a leap or a skip lies scuttled in our legs, we live the life of the church even as we perhaps vehemently dispute its ideas. It is the church of our bodies, as opposed to the tomb of our thoughts.

This is a church, then, which doesn't need buildings. It doesn't need a pope, an archbishop, a guru, a minister, a rabbi, a collection plate. It is the church we find within us, as human bodies.

Our place of worship is this world of our bodies: the forest, the meadow, the grassland, the mountain, the ocean, wherever wind blows and sun shines, wherever clouds, moon and stars whir overhead. Wherever we seek communion with these.

It is inherently individual. But it is also inherently communal; a gathering or congregation of people with common human feelings, common needs, fears and hopes. By coming together we support and celebrate each other, and augment the flame of life that glows within us.

Together we can develop a fuller understanding of what it is to be alive. Together, perhaps, we can make the world a better place for bodies like us to share in. And in recognizing our stake in each other, we can -- together -- encourage fairness, justice and sharing among all.

Such a church of human bodies doesn't need to carry the name. It may be called church, or congregation, or religious community, or something else, but whatever the name it will be based on our commonality as human bodies.

These communities will not be alike; they will not be cut from the same cloth, organized around the same practices, or pinned to the same ideas.

Nevertheless, we believe there are some concepts natural to the premise of a church of human bodies.

• An attitude of religious respect and appreciation for our human feelings and experiences.
• An approach of intellectual honesty and skepticism toward our thoughts and beliefs.
• The recognition that we are body beings; we are not disembodied minds, or souls that happen to inhabit bodies: we are our bodies ourselves.
• The realization that, as experiencing bodies, we can never experience the cessation of experiencing; that our living as we experience it will never seem to end.
• Concentration on life here and now: the notion that life, not afterlife, is the end-all and be-all of our existence.
• Rejection of God, and of the notion that life requires a creator or external source of meaning.
• The worship of earth, of oxygen and water and the biological eden we live in.
• The appreciation that we belong to wide and wider circles of life: as humans, as primates, as mammals, as animals, as organisms.
• The recognition that we are individual and unique, and therefore valuable, and at the same time we have a commonality of bodily identity which brings us together and gives us a shared stake in each others' lives.
• The realization that we die; that all our thoughts, feelings, hopes -- our very aliveness -- is lost at death; that all that survives of us is the life we had in common with others who are still alive, who carry on life for us.
• The realization that this bodily commonality forms the basis for our moral decision-making.
• The conviction that government must be democratic and fair; and is legitimate only when it protects the welfare, environment, and equal rights of those it governs.
• Over all, faith in the experience of living -- that life is worthwhile no matter what we may discover about it.