6/1/2015—It is beginning to dawn on people that this nonreligion thing is going to be difficult. Hence Molly Worthen’s piece in the New York Times yesterday entitled Wanted: A Theology of Atheism. The idea is to get away from the “ill-tempered nihilists” image, says Worthen.
Well, actually no. The goal is to get away from the “good without God” self-confidence. The need is not, as Worthen believes, for “a confident humanist moral philosophy.” It is the opposite. Finally, nonbelievers must come to see how bereft humanism is. Humanism is just as implausible as theism. That should be the starting point. Then, maybe we could get somewhere.
Showing posts with label Hallowed Secularism and Humanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hallowed Secularism and Humanism. Show all posts
Monday, June 1, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
Why Does ISIS Have Any Support?
2/13/2015—After all, everything about ISIS is repulsive to decent people. And that has nothing to do with the nature of one’s religion. Its action are horrifying to Muslims too.
And yet it does attract thousands of Western youths. Why?
I believe the reason is the emptiness of Western life—the bankruptcy of our ideals. The exhaustion of our tradition.
Two hints of this from the New York Review of Books. Sarah Birke in How ISIS Rules attributes the growth of the group to the absence of “convincing ideologies” in the West. And Mark Lilla in France on Fire points out that Republican ideology collapsed in French schools in the 1970’s and nothing really took its place.
What do we believe in? Conservative and libertarian thought is at heart a corrosive individualism. Capitalism is greed. Technology is an addiction. And liberalism no longer believes in its proffered truths.
Worst of all, we Americans have failed to build a political culture of affection and community. We hate each other. We mistrust each other. Why should young people find our way of life enticing?
And yet it does attract thousands of Western youths. Why?
I believe the reason is the emptiness of Western life—the bankruptcy of our ideals. The exhaustion of our tradition.
Two hints of this from the New York Review of Books. Sarah Birke in How ISIS Rules attributes the growth of the group to the absence of “convincing ideologies” in the West. And Mark Lilla in France on Fire points out that Republican ideology collapsed in French schools in the 1970’s and nothing really took its place.
What do we believe in? Conservative and libertarian thought is at heart a corrosive individualism. Capitalism is greed. Technology is an addiction. And liberalism no longer believes in its proffered truths.
Worst of all, we Americans have failed to build a political culture of affection and community. We hate each other. We mistrust each other. Why should young people find our way of life enticing?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Inauguration Day
1/20/2009—Among the other firsts for President Barack Obama is that he may be the first President to have been raised in a non-religious household. [I’m not sure this is so since Americans in the early 19th century were not as clear about these things as we are today. Religion was a fact of social life and so the formally non-religious were probably rare. The actually non-religious may have been common.]
This is the tack the American Humanist Association is taking with regard to Obama. He is said to be “living proof that family values without religion build character.” This is all in support of the rather touching slogan of the Association: “being good without a god since 1941”.
The Association even reproduces texts from The Audacity of Hope to make its point. But the text really illustrates the problem, rather than celebrating irreligion: “Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, [my mother] worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. …Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature… .”
Obama understands this was harder without organized religion, a point the Humanist Association doesn’t seem to get. On the other hand, few Sunday schools instill a sense of wonder.
What you also see here is that Obama’s Christianity may not go very deep, or may be a kind of secular Christianity. Life is transitory, but there is no sense in this quote of what might come after--a key question, of course.
The Humanists also trumpet another portion of Obama’s book—his reference to pluralism. Obama clearly fears “the dangers of sectarianism”. “[W]e are no longer just a Christian nation” but a nation of many religions and nonbelievers.
In many ways, President Obama is a figure for a new America. I think of him as the first Hallowed Secularist. He is really not a humanist, for he is too close to religion for that. But he is no more a follower of organized religion than was Lincoln. I’m glad he is our new President and I wish him luck.
This is the tack the American Humanist Association is taking with regard to Obama. He is said to be “living proof that family values without religion build character.” This is all in support of the rather touching slogan of the Association: “being good without a god since 1941”.
The Association even reproduces texts from The Audacity of Hope to make its point. But the text really illustrates the problem, rather than celebrating irreligion: “Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, [my mother] worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. …Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature… .”
Obama understands this was harder without organized religion, a point the Humanist Association doesn’t seem to get. On the other hand, few Sunday schools instill a sense of wonder.
What you also see here is that Obama’s Christianity may not go very deep, or may be a kind of secular Christianity. Life is transitory, but there is no sense in this quote of what might come after--a key question, of course.
The Humanists also trumpet another portion of Obama’s book—his reference to pluralism. Obama clearly fears “the dangers of sectarianism”. “[W]e are no longer just a Christian nation” but a nation of many religions and nonbelievers.
In many ways, President Obama is a figure for a new America. I think of him as the first Hallowed Secularist. He is really not a humanist, for he is too close to religion for that. But he is no more a follower of organized religion than was Lincoln. I’m glad he is our new President and I wish him luck.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
The HumanLight Holiday
12/24/2008—Yesterday, Brad Linder of NPR did a story about HumanLight, the secular holiday that coincides with the winter solstice period. According to the story, a number of humanist groups celebrate the holiday in a family-friendly way, with songs, stories and even candle lighting. The story showcased one such celebration, in the Philadelphia area last weekend.
According to the story, HumanLight was founded eight years ago to highlight reason and human achievement. Clearly, however, it also is a way for non-religious families to participate in the Christmas season.
According to Joe Fox, President of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, with whom I spoke after listening to the program, there is some controversy about HumanLight within the secular community because it is so religious in tone and feel.
HumanLight seems to perfectly represent the struggle in secularism over its connection to religion. My book Hallowed Secularism argues that secularism needs religion in order to be healthy and to serve a flourishing humanity. It is not surprising that parents would want their children to have a little magic during the holiday season. HumanLight follows the pattern that Hallowed Secularism predicts.
On the other hand, secularists here make the same mistake they are always making—over-praising human reason. Reason, after all, gave us Cold War mutually assured destruction and the calculated Vietnam War. Who would think you could separate human beings into two different parts—feeling and reasoning? Reason here really just means no supernatural world and its use that way is misleading.
Why celebrate human beings with all our faults? Better to take a leaf from Christianity and celebrate a holiday called “New Beginnings” that would emphasize the capacity of reality to allow for something new. That is the message of Christmas, perfectly captured in President Obama’s title—obviously Church inspired—The Audacity of Hope. In the darkness of human power—that of Rome—in a stable among the poor, reality responds with an event wholly unpredictable that brings a new grace to the world. Don’t praise us. Praise reality.
In the story, there was one moment that did not serve to overinflate the human. At the celebration, the children watched pictures of galaxies. The wonder of it brought them to silence. More of that. Less of us.
According to the story, HumanLight was founded eight years ago to highlight reason and human achievement. Clearly, however, it also is a way for non-religious families to participate in the Christmas season.
According to Joe Fox, President of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, with whom I spoke after listening to the program, there is some controversy about HumanLight within the secular community because it is so religious in tone and feel.
HumanLight seems to perfectly represent the struggle in secularism over its connection to religion. My book Hallowed Secularism argues that secularism needs religion in order to be healthy and to serve a flourishing humanity. It is not surprising that parents would want their children to have a little magic during the holiday season. HumanLight follows the pattern that Hallowed Secularism predicts.
On the other hand, secularists here make the same mistake they are always making—over-praising human reason. Reason, after all, gave us Cold War mutually assured destruction and the calculated Vietnam War. Who would think you could separate human beings into two different parts—feeling and reasoning? Reason here really just means no supernatural world and its use that way is misleading.
Why celebrate human beings with all our faults? Better to take a leaf from Christianity and celebrate a holiday called “New Beginnings” that would emphasize the capacity of reality to allow for something new. That is the message of Christmas, perfectly captured in President Obama’s title—obviously Church inspired—The Audacity of Hope. In the darkness of human power—that of Rome—in a stable among the poor, reality responds with an event wholly unpredictable that brings a new grace to the world. Don’t praise us. Praise reality.
In the story, there was one moment that did not serve to overinflate the human. At the celebration, the children watched pictures of galaxies. The wonder of it brought them to silence. More of that. Less of us.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The Fight Over Christmas
11/13/2008--Washington D.C.
The ads brought the following response from American Family Association President, Tim Wildmon, “It’s a stupid ad. …How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.” The AFA has its own “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas” campaign going.
As a nonbeliever, I think Mr. Wildmon missed a great opportunity. Forgetting the Bible for a minute—for after all, the Bible does not speak at all clearly on most issues that confront us—the humanists would probably agree with him that goodness is an objective standard not dependent on human will. Once upon a time, nonbelievers confronted the implications of relativism, but my impression is that today’s humanists do not. Even the tone of the proposed ad suggests there is such a thing as goodness.
Belief in objective right and wrong is not exactly the same as belief in God, but C.S. Lewis, for one, considered the former commitment to be the one that really defines the common core of religious belief—including forms of philosophy we do not usually consider religious.
Mr. Wildmon should have responded by asking the reporter to go back to the humanists. “Tell them I think it is right to kill people,” he should have said, and “ask them whether, if I think that is good, it is good? If the answer is no, ask them what standard other than human will could exist in a world without God?”I think there is an answer to that question, but I’m not sure the humanists want to debate the matter.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Humanism and Religion
1023/2007--Humanism began in the Bible, with the question, “What is man that though art mindful of him?” Psalm 8 sees the tension that humanism must always struggle with. Man is not impressive. Certainly man is not enough for God to care about. He lives only a little while and he does great evil while he is alive. He does not love himself or his fellow men. The widow and the orphan are not protected, as commanded by God’s law.
Yet for all that, man is glorious. The Psalm continues:
Yet thou has made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with honor.
Thou has given him over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet… .
You cannot do better than that in stating the question of man. The Bible understood long before it was objectively true that human beings would totally dominate their world. Humans would have the capacity to destroy everything. Today, when the issue of global warming is raised, some religious believers retreat to a strange doubt that human beings could have the capacity to do so much harm. Often I have heard it said, the Earth will abide. Puny man could not be such a threat.
But the Psalmist understood man’s power very well. The Psalm asks the question, why did God give such power to an imperfect creature like man?
This is where humanism should begin. There just is no reason for humanism to reject the Bible as its starting point. As Psalm 8 demonstrates, the Bible is a humanist document. The Bible is a celebration of man’s capacities, although that celebration is mixed with a fear of man. But how could any honest humanism feel differently?
Yet for all that, man is glorious. The Psalm continues:
Yet thou has made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with honor.
Thou has given him over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet… .
You cannot do better than that in stating the question of man. The Bible understood long before it was objectively true that human beings would totally dominate their world. Humans would have the capacity to destroy everything. Today, when the issue of global warming is raised, some religious believers retreat to a strange doubt that human beings could have the capacity to do so much harm. Often I have heard it said, the Earth will abide. Puny man could not be such a threat.
But the Psalmist understood man’s power very well. The Psalm asks the question, why did God give such power to an imperfect creature like man?
This is where humanism should begin. There just is no reason for humanism to reject the Bible as its starting point. As Psalm 8 demonstrates, the Bible is a humanist document. The Bible is a celebration of man’s capacities, although that celebration is mixed with a fear of man. But how could any honest humanism feel differently?
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Hallowed Secularism and Humanism
10/18/2007--Hallowed Secularism acknowledges the power of humanism. It just goes beyond it. Here is a secion from the book on the power of secularism.
Jesus said, “By their fruits will you know them.” By that measure, humanism has done very well in recent years. Pope Benedict has been lavish in his acknowledgment of the importance of individual rights in general and religious liberty in particular. Our Religions as a whole have praised religious liberty. But, it is fair to say that such rights have been the accomplishment of humanists, rather than of Our Religions. While the roots of the human rights tradition were laid in the Bible, and while it is fair to point out that this tradition grew originally only in national soil prepared by the Church, nevertheless, our liberty has not been the gift of the Church, as it should have been. It has been the gift of the humanist tradition.
Humanism has freed humanity from the tyranny of superstition and from the illegitimate power of clerics. We need only look at the Muslim world, which has lacked a humanist tradition in the modern era, to see the importance of humanism in this regard. Some of this humanist accomplishment has been described in the books of the New Atheism. Religion has a great deal to answer for. Religion has been a stumbling block.
Humanism has shown us in various ways that Our Religions are human creations, rather than traditions given by God. Humanists from the Protestant tradition essentially created the fields of source criticism and sociology from which much of our knowledge of religion comes. Again humanism has taught us what Our Religions would prefer we not know.
Humanism has also emphasized the integration of man against all claims of dualism. Man is not a war of spirit and body. Man is both spirit and body. Or, rather, man’s body is spiritual and his spirit is embodied.
Humanism also has taught us that men are responsible for their own actions. It is not enough that a leader tells us that God spoke to him and commanded an invasion of a foreign country. We are to work out our destiny on our own in the here and now.
As John Dewey hoped in A Common Faith, this attitude that man must handle his problems on his own, probably has helped bring about a surge of human effort around the world to alleviate poverty, cure disease, bring peace and so forth. It is also true that the world economic system is bringing increasing numbers of people out of the terrible poverty that afflicts so many people in the world. The system of representative government, market economics and judicial review has spread around the world and, if it has not solved all the problems of the world, it has provided a lot of people with stability in governance and the possibility of prosperity. There is increasing commitment to collective human action to confront world-wide problems like global warming and as soon as the United States ceases to obstruct the effort, even more will likely be done.
Human capacities are increasing. There seems to be an understanding of how to avoid the crippling economic disasters of the not-so-distant past, when the entire world could spin into depression, thus threatening and ultimately undermining world peace.
There are many problems, even crises, facing humanity. But some of the most significant have been greatly exacerbated by religion. Specifically, the struggle between the State of Israel and the Palestinian People and the general threat of terrorism both have important religious aspects. Humanism certainly cannot be as much blamed for these problems as religion should be.
There is a sense that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right that this is a world come of age. We are more rational, less warlike, more prosperous and more reasonable than humanity has probably ever been. And to a great extent, it has been humanism in its many guises that deserves the greatest share of the credit.
Jesus said, “By their fruits will you know them.” By that measure, humanism has done very well in recent years. Pope Benedict has been lavish in his acknowledgment of the importance of individual rights in general and religious liberty in particular. Our Religions as a whole have praised religious liberty. But, it is fair to say that such rights have been the accomplishment of humanists, rather than of Our Religions. While the roots of the human rights tradition were laid in the Bible, and while it is fair to point out that this tradition grew originally only in national soil prepared by the Church, nevertheless, our liberty has not been the gift of the Church, as it should have been. It has been the gift of the humanist tradition.
Humanism has freed humanity from the tyranny of superstition and from the illegitimate power of clerics. We need only look at the Muslim world, which has lacked a humanist tradition in the modern era, to see the importance of humanism in this regard. Some of this humanist accomplishment has been described in the books of the New Atheism. Religion has a great deal to answer for. Religion has been a stumbling block.
Humanism has shown us in various ways that Our Religions are human creations, rather than traditions given by God. Humanists from the Protestant tradition essentially created the fields of source criticism and sociology from which much of our knowledge of religion comes. Again humanism has taught us what Our Religions would prefer we not know.
Humanism has also emphasized the integration of man against all claims of dualism. Man is not a war of spirit and body. Man is both spirit and body. Or, rather, man’s body is spiritual and his spirit is embodied.
Humanism also has taught us that men are responsible for their own actions. It is not enough that a leader tells us that God spoke to him and commanded an invasion of a foreign country. We are to work out our destiny on our own in the here and now.
As John Dewey hoped in A Common Faith, this attitude that man must handle his problems on his own, probably has helped bring about a surge of human effort around the world to alleviate poverty, cure disease, bring peace and so forth. It is also true that the world economic system is bringing increasing numbers of people out of the terrible poverty that afflicts so many people in the world. The system of representative government, market economics and judicial review has spread around the world and, if it has not solved all the problems of the world, it has provided a lot of people with stability in governance and the possibility of prosperity. There is increasing commitment to collective human action to confront world-wide problems like global warming and as soon as the United States ceases to obstruct the effort, even more will likely be done.
Human capacities are increasing. There seems to be an understanding of how to avoid the crippling economic disasters of the not-so-distant past, when the entire world could spin into depression, thus threatening and ultimately undermining world peace.
There are many problems, even crises, facing humanity. But some of the most significant have been greatly exacerbated by religion. Specifically, the struggle between the State of Israel and the Palestinian People and the general threat of terrorism both have important religious aspects. Humanism certainly cannot be as much blamed for these problems as religion should be.
There is a sense that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right that this is a world come of age. We are more rational, less warlike, more prosperous and more reasonable than humanity has probably ever been. And to a great extent, it has been humanism in its many guises that deserves the greatest share of the credit.
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