First a quick NFN news roundup.
On Thursday (2nd November) we had a most interesting presentation by Al Palmer of Saline, Michigan USA at our monthly Quaker Meeting and Creative Conversation. This has prompted this longer than usual post. About a dozen Friends from the USA were present (out of 64 in total) and a number of these attend or organise the NTF meetings in America which a few of us from the UK attend occasionally.

Nontheist Friends in North America (NTF) continue to meet regularly and details can be found through the google group; https://groups.google.com/g/nontheist-friends/
I believe the next meeting of NTF (after the Contemplative Sharing meeting at 4pm tomorrow 11 November) will be on Sunday 19th November at 7pm EDT so rather late for us at I think midnight GMT when Robin Alpern will present on ‘Do you consider yourself a pacifist?
Does nontheism have anything to do with your views on the peace testimony?’

The NTF meeting after that is December 5 which is the first Tuesday in December.
When it is hoped to talk about the the first four writings in ‘Godless for God’s Sake’.
This will be at 4pm Eastern Time so a little more convenient 9pm (please check!) in the UK.
I understand Robin Alpern, whose piece was the first of the four, and David Boulton as editor of ‘Godless for God’s Sake’, will likely be in attendance.

Our next NFN meeting will be on Thursday 7th December at 7pm (2pm USA Eastern) on ‘FOX AND US: What does the life and ministry of George Fox mean for a nontheist Friend?’
January’s (4th January) is still being finalised but may be a conversation about meditation and the practice of silence or stillness.

Reflecting on the State of Your Spirituality
Al Palmer’s presentation gave us much to reflect on.  David Boulton raised the question of ‘two types of nontheist Quaker’: those who are content to stick with poetic, metaphorical and non-literal interpretations of ‘old or traditional’ language (God and all the rest as metaphor and so on) and those who need ‘new language’ to say what they mean. (In the plenary session, it was Andrea Henley Heyn from the US who raised this question of old and new language and sensitivity around this and David later put it in terms of different kinds of non-theists.) I think we will have to refer again to ‘God, words and us’ to which David, Michael Wright and others contributed.
I think there is quite a broad range of nontheist views which does not just depend on language used. We can perhaps see a continuum from ‘no nonsense’ materialists or convinced atheists at one end (there ain’t no God’) to agnostics, universalists, ’I may be mistakens’, ‘still seekings’ and nontheist cuckoos ( not your usual conceptions of God) at the other.
At most, we all agree (I think) that there is no ‘old man in the sky with a long white beard’ as portrayed by William Blake (who didn’t believe in that kind of God either).
What to make though of other language and concepts like the divine, spirit, spirituality, mysticism, worship, prayer and so on.
In what follows, I’m going to include a number of links to articles in Wikipedia as an easy way to start looking at what others think or hold.
Some nontheists are uncomfortable with the word ‘divine’ for example, thinking that it implies a divinity (God) in which they do not believe. Others (non-theists) like myself are quite comfortable with that word as a loose term (perhaps thinking of chocolate) and even with the ‘divine presence’ – something like a ‘gathered meeting’ or ‘the sense of the meeting’ perhaps. When Georgina and I got married at our meeting in London, in our declaration (QF&P 16.52 – https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/16-52/) we chose promising, ‘through divine assistance,’ rather than ‘with God’s help’.

Mysticism is another word uncomfortable for some nontheists, perhaps associating it with magic or something ‘supernatural’. For other nontheists it is simply an acceptance some things are a mystery (consciousness for example?), that we don’t (yet) know everything and that in any case there is more to life and our psychology or mind than the purely rational.
Wikipedia writes: “The term “mystical experience” has become synonymous with the terms “religious experience”, spiritual experience and sacred experience” in an article entitled ’Scholarly approaches to mysticism’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_approaches_to_mysticism#Mystical_experience

‘Worship’ as a word to describe Meeting has its difficulties, not fully resolved perhaps by Advices and Queries 8&9 for example, which rely heavily on ‘God’. See what Michael Wright (our former clerk, who died a couple of years ago) said towards the end (p17 handout 2) of his talk on ‘Prayer beyond belief’ ten years ago; https://nontheistquakers.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/prayer-beyond-belief.pdf (or under Articles on the website). See also what he had to say about Gretta Vosper and her approach to prayer further down the Articles page.

Spirit and spirituality seem to raise fewer problems for nontheists although some (incorrectly I think) tend to associate them with ‘spiritualism’, genies and the many spirits of older religions. Intriguing NT passages for me are when Jesus says, in effect, you may ‘blaspheme against the Son’ (and in one case ‘the Father’) but not against the Spirit; Mark 3:28-30  “28 Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: 29 But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.” (KJV); Luke 12:10 “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.”; and non-canonical Thomas logion 44 “Jesus said, “Whoever blasphemes the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, neither on earth nor in heaven.”  I’ve always taken these to mean that there is some ‘spirit’ behind everything which might be ‘the light of pure reason’ (Winstanley) or the life-force found in everything which is alive.
Non-duality, related to meditation or contemplation ( see the talk on 4th January) was the subject of two talks by John Tissandier to the Quaker Universalist Group in April and May. But see the article in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondualism

Let’s see what tomorrow brings.