First off, what does secular mean? Secular folk, like myself, believe that we fallible humans have the sole responsibility to figure out the world around us. It's that simple. While religious people believe that life's big questions were answered in the past by others claiming to receive supernatural guidance, secular people don't have confidence in those claims for a variety of reasons.

Secular people have a large diversity of views on different subjects, but the core belief is the necessity of human beings to figure out how things actually work, where everything came from, what actions are helpful versus harmful, and what things are meaningful to our lives. Since I'm what would also be described as a humanist, meaning I believe human rights form the basis of morality, my view of being secular is more commonly called secular humanism. Not being a big fan of the whole "ism" thing, I tend to just say secular. But you get the point.

Most secular people rely heavily on the scientific method as used by the scientific community to figure out the natural world. It's a fallible process run by groups of fallible humans, but overtime it has proven itself to be the most successful tool we have to increase the accuracy of our understanding of life on planet earth.

Since there are many big questions that science hasn't and may never be able to answer: enter the elephant in the dark room. When we speak of that something that has always existed, that allows for all the complexity in our world to exist and evolve, when we speak of having a sense of relationship to that something, and when we ponder the possibility of there being an afterlife, we are doing what we humans have been doing for thousands of years: feeling in that proverbial dark room and trying to understand what we find. Yes, there really is something there. Exactly what, well, that's the big question isn't it.

Over on the left you can find the 19 chapters of my book "A Secular View of God" as well as some of my writings from Beliefnet.com. I'll probably post more stuff as time goes by. Hope you enjoy it!

(Last updated April 28, 2011.)