An article by Professor Paul Heelas in New Humanist begins by setting up a polarity between two alternative sources of ethical validation: on the one hand, the realm of the sacred, the transcendent, what is god-given; on the other hand, law, humanly-made. Of the historical trend away from the former and towards the latter Heelas writes:
The shift has been away from the claim that certain rights exist independently of, or prior to, the law by virtue of the fact that they are a gift from God and towards the law of legal positivism, namely the claim that rights derive from judicial decisions and legislative acts, extrinsic to the individual in that they are derived from the operation of the legal system itself.
This is an odd, and non-exhaustive, delineation of how rights can be morally validated. Odd because legal postivism does not entail that law itself is the fundamental source of rights or of moral validation. Legal positivism, properly understood, is a doctrine about what defines law: its proponents take it to be the case that the distinguishing characteristics of law are such that there can be immoral laws. For that very reason, there have to be ethical standards independent of law, by which laws may be assessed; and it therefore follows that, unless all legal positivists believe in God (which not all of them - us - do), they must find those ethical standards somewhere else than in either law itself or in the God-given and the sacred. Heelas seems to have an idea of where this might be, for he also says that for humanists 'The bedrock is an appeal to the fact of human nature'. So I'm not sure why he should want to present law as if it might be the sole alternative to God as a source of moral validation.
In any case, that he does this creates an opening for him to commend New Age spiritualities as a possible ground of moral inspiration. If humanists will have no truck with God, and law is a bit too dry to speak to us 'from the heart' – Heelas refers to the 'barren, disembodied formalism of the law' – spiritualism of a New Age provenance might do the trick. What can one say? This... Either spiritualism has a religious component or it doesn't. If it does, it won't be of help to genuine humanists. If it doesn't, if, that is, its meaning is compatible with the belief that we have what we need for a humane code of values within ourselves, it becomes unclear why we should need 'alternative forms of spirituality' which go beyond the vast wealth, including of a normative kind, that human culture already provides.
[Amended at 7.00 PM.]