Secular humanism
The belief that humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment without belief in God.
Secular humanism is comprehensive, touching every aspect of life including issues of values, meaning, and identity. Thus it is broader than atheism, which concerns only the nonexistence of god or the supernatural. Important as that may be, there’s a lot more to life … and secular humanism addresses it.
Secular humanism is nonreligious, espousing no belief in a realm or beings imagined to transcend ordinary experience.
Secular humanism is a lifestance, or what Council for Secular Humanism founder Paul Kurtz has termed a eupraxsophy: a body of principles suitable for orienting a complete human life. As a secular lifestance, secular humanism incorporates the Enlightenment principle of individualism, which celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state, increasingly empowering each of us to set the terms of his or her own life.
Is this the reasonable conclusion if atheism is true?
27 comments:
You mean if God doesn't exist, right? Atheists tend to reject the idea that atheism could be true or false. Atheism is just a lack of belief, they say.
So anyway, if God doesn't exist, it's certainly reasonable to act as if God doesn't exist.
Humanity is capable of morality and self-fulfillment even if God does exist. It's just that God might punish us for trying.
But actually, religions tend to say we get fulfillment from God alone, so that suggests it's impossible to get self-fulfillment if God does exist.
I think it's also possible to embrace secularism even while believing in God. Secularism just means you don't emphasize a particular religion in public, and don't try to force others to believe as you do. That's how I understood the word. The United States is a secular society insofar as you have freedom of religion and no official state religion. But obviously lots of Americans believe in God.
Humanism is the big thing - I guess you can't really be humanist if you believe in God. You can't serve two masters, after all. Either you serve God or your own humanity. It's clear from the Bible that God's commands and requirements go against our human (earthly) interests.
Is this the reasonable conclusion if atheism is true?
It is a reasonable conclusion, but there have been others. In order to fully understand human fulfillment, you'd have to understand human nature, so there is currently room for debate.
I still think of atheism as the belief that God does not exist. The "lack of belief" idea seems like spin to me.
Is this the reasonable conclusion if atheism is true? No. Does it follow from God's not existing that 'emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state' is worth celebrating? I don't think so.
What if everyone believed that all there is to reality is matter in motion. I mean what if an entire society based themselves on that idea and rationally followed it to it's logical conclusions. People really are nothing more than some sort of energy that got transformed into a particular shape and that energy will transform into something else again.
Some people think they think this way right now in this post-Christian age but they still retain that nagging ghost of the past.
It turns out that society did exist, reasoned flawlessly and became a dominate power. We are only now finding out about their metaphysics.
The Aztecs. Seems some people haven't thought their nihilism out sufficiently.
bmiller,
What if everyone believed that all there is to reality is matter in motion.
That's not what nihilism is, and the opinions of a renegade anthropologist with an axe to grind are a thin gruel indeed.
Hello BM, I'm afraid I can't match your faith in human rationality! After all, every human culture has started out in pretty much the same place, facing the same ultimate questions, and they have arrived at wildly divergent conclusions. So I'm not sure anything follows from your axiom. Mr Kurtz and I probably start from roughly the same position but he reaches radical conclusions that I don't. Which of us is the rational one?
Hi David,
I've always been fascinated by the Aztec story. Vast, rich (Primitive?) Native American civilization that built cities rivaling the best in the world. But with unrivaled bloody human sacrifices and killing (recent archaeology says even more bloody than when I was in school). All brought down by a small band of Spaniard military adventure seekers.
Evil on a massive scale defeated by a seemingly insignificant opposition. If you wrote a fictional story like that, no one would publish since it would be too outlandish.
Always wondered why they did the sacrifices. I think the author of the article gives a fair summary of the research focusing in on the metaphysical framework of the culture. I find it interesting that it's a sort of Heraclitus version of pantheism but without a god or God. A form of nihilism that concludes that no thing truly exists since every thing is just a momentary state of a process. It seems that they wanted to maintain some sort of process stability of either the oscillatory kind or the weaving kind to avoid the chaotic kind of process change (if chaos can even be termed a process). The sacrifices were done to prevent the 5th Sun, the chaotic end of the world. At least the world of the other 2 kinds of change.
I'm not sure the author would die on the ground that the Aztecs didn't make any mistakes in reasoning, but if they did, what were they?
Other people argue that the Aztecs were, in the end, really no different than any society.
I think it's interesting to find the best arguments from all perspectives.
Well, I doubt we will ever have an argued account of the Aztec belief system, so I can only approach your question indirectly. I for one cannot see how we get from a Heraclitean flux to blood sacrifice without bringing in other premises. For example, one of the articles you linked to suggests that the Aztecs believed that the god or gods sacrificed themselves to bring about earthly creation and that this sacrifice must be reciprocated. So a moral value here and hardly a nihilism, incidentally. And in contrast to the Aztecs, the pre-Socratic Greeks didn't get to human sacrifice, and they were no slouches as logicians. Victor's OP asks if secular humanism is a 'reasonable conclusion' from atheism. My answer is No, it's not. I take this to be a question of logic. But it doesn't rule out the possibility that a rise in secular humanistic attitudes will accompany a decay in theistic belief in Western culture as a matter of historical fact. There are plenty of other ideas and values swirling around which will get us there. Unconstrained freedom as the highest good, for example.
The teotl is neither good nor bad. Or maybe it is equally both. It is the ultimate uncaring reality.
This being true, it doesn't necessarily follow that there should be human sacrifices. But it does follow that there is no ultimate good in refraining from killing others or ultimate evil in doing so.
The flux of Heraclitus was not necessarily uncaring. It seems he believed in divine law and maybe even an afterlife. So there was an ultimate good.
I added the second link for balance. It seems a lot of people think that no culture is better than any other. There is no good or bad culture per se. Sort of a cultural teotl.
Thanks BM. I think Kant is right about the limits of reason in principle. But, and this connects with the present topic, human reason in practice is hobbled by all manner of fallacies and biases that we stand little chance of approaching the Kantian limits.
Yes, people don't think like machines in day to day life.
Do you think critical thinking skills are getting worse in the West?
Yes. The culture screams that feeling is more important than thinking. Something else we can blame on the 1960s.
How do you think we got to this point? Surely it had to have started before the 60s.
We could go back to early 19th century Romanticism perhaps. A reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The YouTube channnel Philosophy Overdose has a series of six lectures by Isaiah Berlin on Romanticism recorded in 1965. Berlin is wonderfully erudite and sports a nice line in fedoras. Well worth a listen if you have several hours to spare.
I'll try to look him up.
The fedoras sold me ;-)
If you think critical thinking skills have dropped dramatically recently, this Belgium professor has a theory.
It's been widely reported that >80% of recent scientific papers report results that can't be duplicated. Yet, it seems that no one seems concerned in the scientific community. Why?
bmiller,
It's been widely reported that >80% of recent scientific papers report results that can't be duplicated. Yet, it seems that no one seems concerned in the scientific community. Why?
Publishing bias. Experiments with novel or unexpected outcomes are much more likely to be published than those that report expected outcomes. Unusual outcomes are much more likely to be the result of coincidence or random outliers that usual outcomes.
Isaiah doesn't like Rousseau very much.
Have you got to J.G.Hamann yet? :-)
OK. I'll listen to him next.
Thanks for the tip.
Berlin sees Hamann as the grandfather of the counter enlightenment. Lecture 3.
Sorry. Yes, I did listen to that lecture. Since I listened to it rather than read it, seeing Hamann's name in print didn't ring a bell and I thought you were talking about a different lecturer.
I hadn't heard of Hamann before so that was interesting. Also the notion about the strain of German Pietists that had lost their faith, but not their fire. I have recently finished reading Enthusiasm by Ronald Knox about the historical emotion-charged movements within Christendom and he covered the Pietists and their influence on Wesley and therefore Methodism.
And David Bentley Hart doesn't care much for Berlin. In a 2005 First Things book review he mentions Hamann, saying,
Today, however, his [Hamann's] importance is scarcely a rumor even to the very literate, and the best known book about him in English is a ghastly, feeble, and imbecile squib by one of the twentieth century’s most indefatigably fraudulent intellectuals, Isaiah Berlin.
No idea where DBH sits on the Enlightenment/Romanticism axis.
DBH is a bit stingy on the compliments. No?
I'm inclined to agree. I'm encountering more "anti-theism" these days. When pressed about serious problems with a rigorous Materialism, some secularists retreat to the safe haven of "I'm not making a truth claim. Atheism is just disbelief in God."
But this seens to amount to making your central tenet a negative, then saying you're not required to prove a negative. More of a dodge than an argument.
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