Why I prefer the term naturalism to humanism

People like Irving Babbitt defended “humanism,” his version of morality against “naturalistic assumptions” and “gross naturalism,” always talking about the “dualism” of the spiritual and the material, always sure to point out the sentimentality and brutishness of the senses, and being sure to point out the doctrine of original sin, and this all done to maintain his version of the proper order.

First of all, Babbitt's kind of conservatism greatly demeans an underestimates naturalism, especially if you believe as I do that natural evolution leads toward Godhood. And secondly, there is no duality between the spiritual and the material because there is no spiritual, there is only the material evolving to the supermaterial.

This religious transformation, like evolution itself, can retain and conserve the best of past religions---the Inward Path to the God within of traditional religions is transformed in the Outward Path of material evolution to real Godhood. This transformation becomes easier to absorb when ascending levels of Godhood are seen as arrived at by way of material, not spiritual, evolution, as described in theological materialism.

And as to the belief in free will, a naturalistic direction or goal to the will means that we don't have a completely free will, we have free will limited to choices within the determined path of life and evolution, like a boulder rolling down a mountain. We evolve toward more efficient forms, more complex forms, with starts and stops and backward goings along the way, heading toward ascending levels of Godhood at the zenith of evolution.

That's why I prefer the term naturalism to humanism.