(Or, Why On Earth Are We?)
Why are we on earth? I believe we are here to help extend an ancient trend from instinctive personal survival, to self-sacrifice for group survival, to seeking methods of universal survival and even well-being. The quadrune mind model is melioristic, meaning it believes the world naturally tends to get better and especially that it can be made better by human effort. We have seen throughout recorded history that human beings are becoming more Human, meaning better able to care for those outside their group and less tolerant of pre-Human activities such as slavery, war for territory, sexual exploitation, or public executions.
I believe the universe can be usefully understood as teleologically ordered, even if it might be a post hoc teleology. Complexity can arise out of simplicity despite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. God is not dead; God is being born. For us that birth must occur within the human brain.
Spiritual enlightenment and to become fully Human are precisely the same thing. There is no spirituality in any religious belief that denigrates human nature. Jesus understood this attitude; he did not call people to deny their human nature, but to fulfill it as both religious and secular followers of Jesus have expressed. God is a Humanist. And each human being must be his own theogenesis. The great spiritual task of each of us is to process moral meaning from the two greatest abstractions of human thought: God and Self. This task requires the functioning of a brain dominated by the prefrontal cortex, which guides us toward how this moral conception is to be represented.
This enlightenment requires much effort and cooperation by many other people. Few of us stay the course to fruition. The error of the atheist is not that he doesn’t believe in a God that “really” exists. Rather, the error is to fail to do the necessary introspective and interactive work of living in order to “know” the God that the human brain has been designed to “know.”