I love that you wrote about this, Michael. I sometimes think there is a "cone of silence" around secular and Humanist writing. It's as if it doesn't exist. So kudos on noticing and taking it seriously.
But C- on doing your homework, or bothering to understand Humanist thinking with depth or nuance. You treat a Manifesto as the alpha and omega of Humanism, instead of the compressed platform statement that all such manifestos are.
Your bias shows up with bells on in this: "The religious vacuum to the left of center in the U.S. and Britain, where liberal Protestantism has undergone a similar collapse, has been filled with three new creeds. " This, plus your previous paragraph's false equivalancy, indicates you frame this around religion, religious concepts, and religious history. It might surprise you to know there are a few million Americans enjoying multiple family generations without religion, who are moral, well-educated, and happy, without religion or creed or dogma. Whence cometh their morality?
From exactly the kind of complex, rational, and "natural" morality you snipe at here. A morality based on critical thinking, first and last, but leavened by practical realities. You write as if these were silly theories by well-meaning atheist oafs, instead of what they are: the on-the-ground reality for many, going back centuries.
What you miss, as a big picture and in the fine-grained details, is that Humanism, which can contain faith or no-faith, is not the "opposite" of belief. It is a whole other thing. You could make a credible counter-argument that a manifesto is nothing but a creed of course, and you would be right. But that's why you cherry-picked that manifestation, as it were, and did not account for the publications, debates, productive lives -- the whole complex of accomplishments and literature of the 200-year-old humanist tradition in America. Because it suited your simplistic duality portrait.
You say: "equivalent of the Nicene Creed"? Whoa, Nelly. I strongly suggest "Jesus Wars", by Phillip Jenkins. Frankly, you don't know what you are talking about. That kind of creed, a forced compromise imposed by an imperial power sick of theological pinhead-dancing, and forged from gossamer, not science, is not even the opposite of the Humanist Manifesto. It was a political act masquerading as a religious work, based on imaginary wish-thinking about the supernatural nature of a theoretically supernatural being, and was then a blunt instrument used to justify centuries of holy war between Egyptian, Syrian, Roman, and Byzantine factions. Read up on the "Gangster Synod", wherein monks from Egypt went on murderous rampages in order to"win" their argument at a Syrian council.
Or are you suggesting that Humanist meetings suffer from similar thug wars, factions of secular "monks" armed with clubs, roaming the DC Hilton, over which aspect of Kurtz's "cooperative" has merit, the realpolitik deal-making of 1950s Italian socialism that kept Italy whole, or the effective if flawed US agency creation in the early 70s that resulted in oversight and regulation? ("Death to the compromisers of the doctrine of rational accomodation in support of the long-term aims of protecting our water resources!" I mean, huh?)
The Humanism of Ingersoll, Twain, Einstein, Sagan, and Kurtz is not anti-religion by definition. It is a recognition that religious belief is but a subset of the whole of human experience and culture, and that it contributes so much and no more. And when we set aside the fixed dogmas and stop attending the morality finishing schools of all "religious" traditions -- Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Marxism, Reaganism, et al -- we find meaningful lives and positive values emerge, quite naturally.
Your paragraph about Hume is, to say it mildly, absurd. You trot him out as if Hume's ideas had merit today, were still respected. Perhaps in obscurantist circles, mostly Catholic, but not in any serious Philosophy department. It's common sense: Hume's skepticism about all things led him to a rational-at-the-time formulation that ethics must be based on feeling. This was observational, thus loosely empirical, but fails under the test of "the plural of anecdote is not data". The days of pure intellectual philosophizing are long past. Hume would have changed his mind, had he access to the last 50 years of brain science and game theory, among many other things. You live this truth every day, Michael: you make practical choices to preserve your well-being and that of others, and understand it generally as rational and "moral" to do so, not "required" by Jesus or Mohammed or Zoroaster. I doubt you engage your religious ideas when you choose, moment-to-moment, to not cross the yellow line on the highway, or when you co-operate when navigating through crowds.
You are correct about this apish world. My in-laws are optimistic, for Holocaust survivors, but from them I gain a pretty stark idea of who and what we really are, given poverty, nationalism, religious extremism, and just plain barbarity, unleashed. And on a local level, I can notice daily examples of the cruddy way we all are.
But you are way too selective, in order to grouse. The overwhelming fact of human existence is not our capacity for brutality, as obvious and terrible and constant as it is. It is how billions of us are still HERE. And we all get up every day and co-operate, regardless of the minor, superficial differences of faith or no-faith. Personal ethics are manifestly intrinsic, and tested daily, by all that is average and ordinary, across cultures. Kurtz and others are asking us to shift our focus, to see ALL of it, not just the blindered, passion-play-fable architecture imposed on us from childhood.
When we do this, we do not become less moral. We understand morality without sentiment or discoloration. And that effusive feeling in his words, that sense of glory and beauty in our human abilities, that he celebrates? It's real.
Our civil engagement in the free marketplace of ideas, right here, right now, is historically new, and a profound proof that Humanist optimism is not misguided. It's simply appropriate, given the many positive aspects of how we all navigate our lives together.
~|~
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Seer
daisyjane
The Good Daughter
Chicken Mãâàn
the traveler
Ashley F. Miller
Salon.com
Comments
I think one of the philosophical advantages a Jew may b born to...and I am not suggesting that Judaism is in any way 'better' other religious cultures...is that we know that our being born Jews does not in any way bar us from a secular-oriented humanism. Many of us do not, then, have to posit the either-or world to which you brilliantly reply in this piece. I am born a Jew; my belief is a separate matter. Lack of it (belief) in no way disqualifies me from being fully a Jew. Religious constructs/cultures predicated on faith may have trouble seeing the nuanced distinctions you make here. I do not, and I credit, ironically, Judaism, my secular Humanist Judaism, for my sense of your piece.
r.
It's a popular and affordable wine from Mahone Bat, Nova Scotia, and it's fermented.
Get @ Hackmatack.
It's a brewery Farm.
Honest. I feel good.
Bumping is not sin.
I go to Nova Scotia.
I's planning heehaw.
`
I am enjoying some old chants.
Gloria Dei Cantores Schola chants.
We are just to be true humans.
I never listened to chants seriously.
The teachings behind the chants?
Well. They won't hurt the psyche.
Great musicians ref Angelic Spirit.
Mendellssohn and Brahms etc.,
I listen to the old Requiems too.
The 21st century may enjoy too.
This world is vast. Ay Adoration.
Nikki Stern? I spill wine in shirt.
The bump was worth the danger.
I think Lind would feel right at home in the pages of Free Inquiry, Reason, Skeptical Inquirer, and the Humanist magazine, even with his POV. That's the problem: he skims the manifesto from the inside cover and then ignores or pretends to how ALL of those "creed" ideas are fiercely debated by Humanists. He shoehorns the whole of secular thinking into the false duality in order to construct a "yeah, Humanism religion sucks, too" parlor game. Unpacking his article tested my commitment to compassionate discourse, it was full of so much straw and so thin on research or knowledge. But I really see Michael as close kin, whether he does or not. It is ONLY in Humanist circles that his ideas would be taken seriously. Liberal Protestants can be just as antagonistic as fundamentalists to the "new Atheists", and lumping them together is ridiculous. All Believers, right and left, resort, sooner or later, to a higher power, and would dismiss his ideas of brutal humans as decreed by God, or fixable by Jesus, or whatever, but they would not engage as I do here. That requires critical thinking, as per Humanism, based on merits of the arguments and avoiding fallacious reasoning. He is embedded in that tradition in what he writes about, if not the sturdiness of his logic or scholarship. We are ALL humanists, him included, except for a few Copts in caves, and perhaps a few alcove Marxists on Avenue A.
Skypixie has a good, if somewhat crude-in-comparison, post that says some of what you said, namely that belief and non-belief are not two contending opposites. My comment was that belief is important to believers (and I guess they extend that to everyone else), but non-believers (in religion) just don't hardly think about it, any more (to use a Sky analogy) than we brood about the non-existence of Santa Claus. Not thinking about Santa Claus doesn't interfere with living a decent life - maybe aids and abets, in that we work for practical ends rather than hoping for toys in the Xmas sock.
"The religious vacuum to the left of center in the U.S. and Britain, where liberal Protestantism has undergone a similar collapse, has been filled with three new creeds. "
... isn't an argument, but a historical fact. The many of mainline denominations, who had formed the progressive left in the early 20th, have all but collapsed or have gone into survival mode. Walter Rauschenbusch certainly has no currency today, left or right. While some in the emergent church like Jim Wallis want to revive it, it is true that few religious types are found or even welcomed in the center left. It is not his closet dreams of religious revival, but a reality. It seems that Rob Bell, as example, would not be welcomed into most progressive political circles.
I am not sure you aware of this but the ethicist Joel Marks just reiterated Hume's is/ought divide in a similar fashion to Lind in the NY Times. (He found it liberating.)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist/
Sam Harris also got shredded for trying to bridge (unsuccessfully I might add) the Hume's is/ought divide.
1. I don't see how that is his central point. I don't even see where Lind or I even make that kind of point (Atheism leads to Humanism). I don't think that, nor have I ever thought that. It is an odd idea.
2. "...historical fact." -- Make the case, I suggest.You miss my point: it is a false equivalency. Most non-believers, especially those with parents and grandparents who are non believers, are not shadows, echoes, or opposites of religious believers. We are perhaps many things but we increasingly do not identify ourselves as "not-believers". Lind's error is a common one and you repeat it here: Humanists have well-defined ideas and principles, quite apart from those defined by "belief" or "faith". And where we share morals and ethics we do not define them by aspects of faith. So the whole idea that we "fill" a void with "three new creeds" is pretty ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the idea that science is a creed equivalent to religion. I suggest you study up on the scientific method, and Karl Popper's idea of falsifiability in particular.
3. We are not concerned with theology. We find it an empty idea categorically, and plays out with stringed-together sequences of make-believe, and appropriations of manifestly human characteristics. What this schism or that denomination does or does not do politically is, I think, only of interest to most Humanists when it threatens to intrude on our rights in the secular sphere, as with Opus Dei, and the Dominionists Perry and Bachmann. That said, you seem to think that the center left, as you put it, rejects religion. Prove that please. Define the Center Left.
Further left there are the variants of liberation theology, toward the center there are popular liberal believers and thinkers like Harvey Cox and Thomas Merton, and many more besides, all of whom gained traction in the mid and late 20th century and beyond, contrary to your assertion that this all "collapsed" in the early part of that century. Moreover, it was the engagement of nuns and priests, and protestants like the folks at Riverside Church in NYC, who transformed the anti-war movement in the 60s and 70s from being mostly students and activists to include religious leaders and the majority of the middle-class. I also note how many mainstream, and approximately liberal churches there are, still, in North America.
And there is no monolithic definition you can tie most congregations to. When the Fred Phelps's came with his "God Hates Fags" demonstrators to my home town of New Paltz, every single church in town, across the spectrum, joined SUNY students, local business people, and average citizens in putting up "All you need is love" on their buildings and streets, and a thousand of us counter-demonstrated with even more Beatles songs.
They left early. And decidedly downcast. The traditions of progressive, liberal believers are alive and well.
On the whole this is a diversion from Lind and my post both, this linking of politics and who is welcome by what church, waning or not. Lind was all about the fractured, wanna-be, weak-tea quality of Humanism; well, that is, his poorly researched, strawman caricature of a single document that he spun into the thorough-going whole of secularism and Humanism. Inane, and I burn about 3 calories refuting it. Lind simply took gross shortcuts, and Salon had no credibility posting it.
I took a short cut in my post, and you and another commentor are correct to tweak me about it. I teeter on suggesting that Hume is utterly worthless and absent. He is neither. But his is/ought divide is an artifact, not a serious idea. And instead of waving your hands at someone saying something about liking it, how about a credible case for how is/ought bears up in the face of new science, like replicable OOBs when the brain is electrically stimulated, or the advances in game theory that can now predict human behavior in defined circumstances, using algorithms of advantage, cooperation, and altruism. All I mention here have the great benefit of making predictions that can be tested and the results quantified, and can and do bring into the discussion technology, control groups, and measurement, all of it replicable. Hume's is/ought makes no prediction, offers no theory of mind, and does not lead to any falsifiable statements. It is interesting for undergrads, a meaty subject for a practice debate, but it does not lead any where.
Your final snipe at Sam is incoherent. I read and reviewed The Moral Landscape, in detail, for the critical thinking site "http://doesthismakesense.com", as an editor there, and the only shredding I saw was his calm, methodical dismissal of the whole sophistic idea of if this is is then this ought ought. He makes a solid case for a natural morality, and the operational reality of morality that precludes any need for supernatural agency. But by all means give us 700 tight words, make your case, on how Harris was "shredded", and by who, and why those other ideas were better, and what studies support you, and what you conclude from them. I am all ears. If you write it well, I will advocate for printing it in our dtms "Reason Enough" column, whether I agree or not.
That's a big difference right there between dogma and Humanism: we critical thinkers enjoy the merits of the case, the facts being mustered, the wit of the presentation, and we require challenges. They keep us honest. Believers demand adherence and conformity and a blind acceptance of "mystery". This perhaps explains why Conservatives still have strong ties to fundamentalism, and why Progressives are less tied to their churches and, in my case, my synagogue. We simple don't need fantasies reinforced every week. The world is far more interesting than that, and our delight in new discovery and deeper understanding leaves little room for rote learning and pretense.
That aside, the argument that there can be no morality outside religion is simply foolish, and to turn "secular humanist" into a derogation -- as is far too often the case, is an example of just how foolish the religious can be. The non-religious have a far better charge to make: If religion alone is the fount of morality, why is there so much evil among the religious?
When I said that Sam Harris was shredded for his take on Hume's is/ought distinction, this was not about his atheism verse believers debates. It was about Sean Carroll (atheist scientists from Cal-Tech) being very critical in Discovery, again a publication not known to be friendly to religion, over Harris's points in both his latest book on Morality and Harris's most recent TED talk. PZ Meyer, no friend to anything religious, came out in support of Carroll and against Harris. In the Moral Landscape and most of Harris's defense of the critiques he received of bridging is/ought have been lacking. This has nothing to do with reason verses faith argument as all sides in the debate are rationalists and either scientists or secular philosophers as opposed to religious believers0. Harris, in short, was shredded by fellow atheists for his arguments. He has yet to offer good reasons in answer. (Though he did attack Carroll with this tweet: "Please know that I will be responding to this stupidity." Nice rationality, Sam, nice.)
First dang my first answer was rejected for too many links. I linked to Sean Carroll's and PZ Myers's post about Harris's latest book and their critique of it. (Google it if you are interested. There are many others that took the same track with Harris, but Sean was the first.)
I also posted these quotes from Michael Lind essay, which makes the case that he is saying that being rational and scientific does not lead to secular humanism.:“But reason itself is a neutral instrument, which can aid sociopathic murderers and genocidal tyrants as well as saints and heroes. If Hume’s version of atheism is correct, then the entire secular humanist liberal project in its current form is fundamentally misguided.”
“Unfortunately for Humanist Lennonism, evolutionary biology does not provide much hope for the sort of altruistic personal commitment to planetary solidarity that secular humanists want to encourage.”
“But social animals are not altruists. Nor are they strict individualists. They are nepotists.”
“They assert scientific naturalism leads to the currently fashionable attitudes of North Atlantic left-liberals, but they never provide any convincing arguments for the thesis that if you believe in Darwin, you must follow Dewey.”
“But what about the right-wing secularism of Ayn Rand? What do militant atheists who favor socialized medicine and world government have to say to other militant atheists who follow Rand in wanting to substitute the dollar sign for the cross and celebrate unregulated capitalism? For that matter, what would conventional secular humanist liberals have to say to an intelligent, thoughtful, scientifically literate, secular authoritarian -- say, the late German jurist Carl Schmitt or Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor?”
“Given the fact that there are secular conservatives, secular libertarians and secular authoritarians, as well as secular liberals, what conclusions, if any, for politics and economics follow from the scientific account of nature? I don’t pretend to know. I suspect that scientific naturalism, properly understood, provides more warnings than answers.”
“Science can tell monkeys where they came from, and technology, informed by science, can build a cleaner and safer monkey house. But a knowledge of science cannot turn monkeys into something that we are not.”
I also share your views on Cox and Merton, though I think that Dorthy Day would have been a better choice. But none of these are national figures the way the early Social Gospels proponents were, in the case of Merton and Day, their influence was stronger fifty years ago. Jim Wallis seems to be the most prominent (full disclosure, I am a feature contributor to his God's Politic Blog) and he certainly lacks the power that those of the earlier Social Gospel had.
I am not sure what the intention of the lengthy re-quotes are. I point out the excessive circularity in Lind's post, and this strikes me as even more circularity. Moreover, those quotes underscore Lind's general incoherency and lack of research. I read them the first time. What's your point?
I will find those links and read those articles. Thanks for that. I already knew of PZ's counter-points on Hume, and he's out of his depth, methinks (nonetheless, I love Paryngula, and Freethought Radio). Hume identified a core disparity in moral philosophy, with is/ought, so his place in history is assured, but Harris makes a credible case for an Ethical Naturalism that remains in flux, always. This is not the same as relativism, despite what religionists say. He simply, and accurately, notes how the changeable reality we are embedded in requires a changeable, flexible naturalism in how we define morality. This is how it is actually practiced by all Believers, too. No one stones young brats anymore. I love an absolutist philosophical argument as much as the next guy -- please, get me started on free will! -- but in the real world, morality is contingent. Formulating a sound philosophy on morality requires that we put "oughts" in contexts, and sometimes they are -- yes, they really are -- operationally true. Sometimes they are not.
But visibly, demonstrably, some oughts have an arc, a truth, if not a Truth, that is first and always natural. (Throwing babies into the mouth of Baal is bad for species survival; we ought not do it.) As opposed to the un-moral "oughts". (Like the crux of Christianity: thought crimes require you burn for eternity, in a physical realm that magically affects the incorporeal "soul".) Bosh.
Rather than address these aspects head-on he circumnavigates the implications of is/ought, and shakes his fist at the optimistic Humanist kids on his "it's a nasty world after all" lawn. He didn't change subject. He never discussed is/ought at all. He ought to know better.
I recently posted reviews of critical thinking podcasts here and on dtms. Since your are familiar with PZ, perhaps you'll want to listen to some of the ones on my list, to better understand why is/ought has been discounted for so long and by so many.
Day was pertinent, I agree, but she was 30+ years prior to Cox, and I was selecting religious writers from later, making the point that mainstream liberal theology/churches are and were vital and thriving, way past your arbitrary time frame of early 20th. Cox regularly made it onto the best seller lists, and Merton has never been out of print. I think you mistake statistical membership decline for overall robustness, regarding mainstream liberal churches.
Nonetheless, Pew shows for over a decade that overall "church"-going is in steady, slow decline, when all denoms are combined, and the category of "no religion" steadily increases, and in excess of the growing memberships of humanist, secular, atheist, and science-ist on- and off-line member orgs. (Again: those categories are not interchangeable, and are not corollaries to creed-, dogma-, or theology-driven belief systems.) So who are these 100s of thousands who eschew religion, but don't get vocal or self-identify as humanist or atheist? Ordinary human beings, I suggest, and not on any path from or to anything, necessarily.
I would suggest that a dilute form of Day's and Merton's social gospel was absorbed by the American culture, and manifested in the 40s , 50s, and 60s as tolerance and fairplay, laying the groundwork for civil rights breakthroughs. This could only happen once humanist values, like fair treatment of workers, an end of child labor, an integrated armed forces, etc., were achieved and thus also mainstreamed, by a combination of Catholic activists (Day), atheists, feminists, progressives, socialists, wobblies, and intellectuals, who manned the barricades decades previously.
But none of them were on a path, arbitrarily, one to the other, either. Each were distinct, or combinatory, like the non-believers and Humanists today. We were right about social justice in the 60s, but wrong about tiers of enlightenment, or correctness. Lind misapplies such pixie-dust ideas, angrily, dosed illiberally with religious tropes and frameworks that simply don't apply.
Of course, I might be wrong. We all are, regularly. But the insistence by Lind and you, Ernesto, that these ideas can only be seen through the lens of religious dichotomies is way, way, wrong. It's as if I would say: the Protestant doxology is virulently anti-science because it says "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen", proving Protestants misunderstand history, physics, and the arrow of time. In other words, I would be willfully ignoring the religious context, and imposing a strict scientific litmus test. You and Lind apparently can't imagine a vital, moral, and keen intellectual life that does not exist in reference to, or serve simply as reaction to, theology. I understand this. Our culture is saturated with Judeo-Christian ideas, and you folks start us very young, with the promise of hell for doubting. It is ingrained to Believe.
But when the scales fall, and the world is perceived directly, it is a far more exciting, wonderful, strange, terrifying, and dynamic place than your church of artificial sparks, your small box of rituals, your genuflect-for-salvation, permits. Lind's barbaric apishness notwithstanding.
Thank you for the kind words. I hope that I am being respectful, for after all it is your blog, and I am only a visitor. I believe that I read Lind differently from you, and I maybe wrong. But I think he has a point that skeptics run the great spectrum of political and moral thought. Randians, objecticivist and many libertarians share a distinctive atheistic outlook with secular humanists, but I would hope you find them as dangerous as I do. As to the idea of the need of God for morality (Kant's move) I would say that history has proved that false. Many atheists are good moral people and anyone that would claim otherwise is burying their head. Also, as a theist, I think there is a problem in turning God into a cosmic cop. I don't think Merton, or Moltmann (one of my favorite) experience God as a cop, and if I maybe be so bold, neither did Jesus. Now I can imagine a robust intellectual and moral life without religious component. What I think Lind was saying, and I am making the claim: it does not necessarily follow. I know that simply saying you are a Christian makes you an automatic noble human being is clearly false. The world is full of to many examples to the contrary on any side of non-belief or belief in God poles. We still live in the human condition and within most of our hearts are embedded both light and dark, and this is independent of our belief structure.
A lovely comment, in so many ways. I am repulsed by Ayn Rand, but some libertarian ideas have merit. And among the 5 finest human beings I have known personally, two were Christians, including my beloved grandmother.
You say several things at the end here that move me, but especially, to paraphrase, that no belief, or lack of it, gets us a free pass. We have to earn, with compassion, humility,and critical thinking, the merit we desire.
I think we would probably enjoy a sit on the porch together.
I'll read `gin slowly
I spiel Michele now `
Michellle ( 3 "l's)`
She was wooed when
I was 2- months in a`
DC VAMC. He lazy.
He mooch of her.
I can't tell all tho.
No smooch good.
He needs Viagra
`
hi Michele. Smile.
She not sneaky.
He just creepy.
Oh, sigh my.
We just say
howdy bye.
`
I'd sit on the porch where all the deadly thermal waves don't scramble the brain.
City Life is Danger.
I heard Cindy Sage.
She is with E.M.F.`
`Safety Network.`
www?
She exposes the cancer producing cell/gadgetry - high frequency Zones. Worry? Yup.
No use micro-waves.
We (technology) kill slowly.
EPA & FCC ignore Meters.
Meters sense thermal waves.
Sludge on farm fields? Gag!
I was almost arrested. Ugh!
Before blogs I protested it.
Sludge is industrial soups.
Sludge? FDA? Science?
It's letal free farm dung.
It's mafia profitable shit.
Protest? Dead Horse sit.
A horse head sit on seat.
P.U. seat gets horse head.
Sludge haulers make bucks.
Sludge?
Human feces with lead.
No wonder we half/dead.
It don't take the egg brains.
`
I am not in a mood to blog.
What an insane Era/Eon.
Many Immigrants died.
They no read or wrote.
They has spunk/Soul.
`
In a city you may fall.
N fall down sewer hole.
Politicos steal manhole.
They rob of underpants.
I may have to did a well.
My well went dry. Damn!
No Water
No Farm
No Food
Yes Beer
Survive
Thanks
Serious
Greg C.
Take care.
Salves the fragged nerves.
“Humanism, which can contain faith or no-faith,
is not the "opposite" of belief. It is a whole other thing.”
They say it opposes ‘absolutism’.
That is , sort of, black & white thinking, I think.
Too much of that.
………………………………………
Protogoras
“man as measure”…in the Renaissance, old Erasmus, unsung hero!
Yeah well that’s the past. Noone notices that kinda stuff unless tis pointed out they be
A new cicero, or plato, or socrates, or jesus, or buddha, or…well..
That’s a short list.
Those guys could be called uber humanists.
…………………………………………………
Man is the measure, say the nay sayers, is hogwash.
Well, it IS, for the human world anyway.
The interstellar or submolecular, not so much.
Though we got strong ties to both….
………………………………………………..
Humanism respects what is called, by me, inherent human dignity. Or…integrity.
Whichever.
There are limits on human cognition and perception, sure. But so far we are doing good.
For the most part.
We are everywhere, we took over this planet, it is now our responsibility, and ‘responsibility’ is something humans, not ants or plankton or stars talk about.
Salves the fragged nerves.
“Humanism, which can contain faith or no-faith,
is not the "opposite" of belief. It is a whole other thing.”
They say it opposes ‘absolutism’.
That is , sort of, black & white thinking, I think.
Too much of that.
………………………………………
Protogoras
“man as measure”…in the Renaissance, old Erasmus, unsung hero!
Yeah well that’s the past. Noone notices that kinda stuff unless tis pointed out they be
A new cicero, or plato, or socrates, or jesus, or buddha, or…well..
That’s a short list.
Those guys could be called uber humanists.
…………………………………………………
Man is the measure, say the nay sayers, is hogwash.
Well, it IS, for the human world anyway.
The interstellar or submolecular, not so much.
Though we got strong ties to both….
………………………………………………..
Humanism respects what is called, by me, inherent human dignity. Or…integrity.
Whichever.
There are limits on human cognition and perception, sure. But so far we are doing good.
For the most part.
We are everywhere, we took over this planet, it is now our responsibility, and ‘responsibility’ is something humans, not ants or plankton or stars talk about.