Why this website ?

This website has been created to draw attention to the human hearted way; and to explore the resources it offers for answering the challenges of today. The plan is not to return to the past but to explore and build on the insights and resources the human hearted tradition offers to develop a human hearted vision suitable for today’s issues and circumstances.

The core message of the human hearted tradition is that love compassion and sympathy come from the human heart, not from an external source. The only resource we need to start cultivating a life more based on love and compassion is to be open to accepting our own best potential. Building on human heartedness we can create better versions of ourselves, of our local communities, of all of humanity, and of our world.

The inspirational power of the human hearted tradition comes in many ways. It is evidence based: We do indeed have a potential for love and compassion, whereas supernatural beings and iron laws of history and morality are not supported by evidence. It is developmental: It does not say we are innately perfectly good, just that we have a potential we can build on, should we choose to. It offers hope: No matter how many times we fail we still have a potential we can try to realise at our next attempt. It is flexible: How we realise our best social potential may be different for different people, and may be different at different points in history. It can lead to fulfillment and happiness: People who engage in acts of kindness and are open to love and compassion feel more happy and fulfilled.

With the rise of Christianity in the West the western versions of the human hearted tradition were slowly lost. Christianity claimed the source of love and ethics was an external one - the God of the Christians. As Christianity declines there has been a tendency to seek externalized replacements for God: The nation, the communist party, rationalism, the laws of the marketplace, etc. rather than a return to the human hearted tradition. This has been a tragic mistake, and carrying on the quest for an externalized replacement for religion, for a new idol, amounts to a continuation of the patterns of thought established during the age of religion in the West. Even though many of those placing their faith in new idols do not seem to realize this.

As long as we continue to look outside ourselves for the sources of love and compassion we continue to run the risk of placing our faith in false idols; this not just an abstract intellectual error, but a source of cruelty and suffering as, sadly, we too often exploit, persecute, and even kill each other in the name of these false idols. We need to break the habit of trying to replace religion with new idols and new certainties. Its time to renew our understanding of the human hearted way; and time to start writing its next chapter.