I’ve realized I was an atheist since I was a kid. But within the past decade I grew tired of “defining” my personal philosophy in terms of one (of many) supernatural belief system I rejected, and looked around to see if my philosophy could be phrased in a manner I considered more “positive”. It turned out that humanism pretty well encapsulates my views on most matters, so for several years I have been comfortable considering myself a Humanist. (Note the capital aitch, as opposed to small-h “humanistic”.)
Now, I’ve always understood that Humanists were a definite minority, but I didn’t know quite how small of a minority until last night when I was at a meeting with the executive director of the AHA, and he informed me that the membership of the AHA was a staggering — 7,800! 7,800 out of 300,000,000! That number is so small as to approach insignificance. Heck, they’d be outnumbered by a good-sized local Rotary club for crying out loud, or a single mega-church.
So my question for you is, why are there so few American Humanists? And, I guess, is this a “good” or “bad” thing?
Do you mean small H humanists, or just large H Humanists? Because it would be a rather narrow definition to conclude that only members of the AHA espoused the ideals of humanism:
That’s the first statement you see when you go to the AHA website. In addition you will also see an open letter to Senator Brownback about religion as well as an article about the evolutionary psychology of religion. It seems to me that Humanism is just as defined by the terms of supernaturalism as atheism is.
Y’know, after hearing all the local Bible bangers rail on about the evils of secular humanism, its tenets sound NOTHING like what I’d imagine. Where’s the call for lots of meaningless sex between strangers. The abandonment of all morality? The worship of the Great Horned Hairy One? This does NOT sound like “secular humanism” as described by the religious right!
I’m a humanist technocrat libertarian. But only in small letters. My theory is that we have to become agile in order to fight against the larger system. Not sure how, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to use the Internet.
I’m working on a theory of descriptive certification.
I’d guess that few who feel themselves to be secular humanists feel the need to be a joiner of like minded others. After all, you can be an atheist, an agnostic, a pantheist, a Wiccan or a believer in Christ and hold those valves too.
I dunno, as others have mentioned, I would not give too much weight to the relative size of a specific organization with the name “Humanist” on the title. I would hazard the guess that as with many such entities, the number of people who follow the principles quoted in posts #2 and 3 of this thread is manyfold that of the card-carrying membership.
And if you throw in the folks who apply those values for the purposes of practical day-to-day life but on the side make an allowance for some level of non-oppressive expression of spirituality, you’re talking not-insignificant numbers of the population that effectively live mostly by “humanistic” values. Just that they will not identify as “humanist” because one of the values of this POV is NOT that you MUST form a “community” of mutual supporters, quite unlike most religions, where the expectation is indeed that you will form an identifiable community of believers.
(I’ll leave to others the inevitable furor over whether the incorporation of spirituality into the person’s values/belief set should disqualify it from being described as “humanistic” on the basis of an “all or nothing” proposition…)
Is humanism understood to mean the same thing as atheism? I ask because my first exposure to the word was from reading about the Renaissance. In that context I took it to mean uplifting of humanity from the medieval depths of self loathing, and splitting one’s time between avoiding the Devil and cringing before God. But I didn’t get the sense that it was an outright rejection of religion.
Nonsecular humanists: Dante, Cardinal Bessarion, Erasmus, etc? The list goes on.
Humanism as a ‘religion’ gets a shrug from me. Sounds like a neologism for ‘decent people who happen to be atheist but don’t like the word but want to join a club like the various theists do.’ If you want to join a book club and volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, go ahead.
Well, one “benefit” of an secular humanist organization is the possibility of their acting as an advocate for non-faith-based policies. I would have thought that more than .0026 percent of Americans might be interested in making a nominal contribution towards that. Believers certainly exert considerable effort at influencing policy in ways I consider abhorrent.
And tho I am not generally a “joiner” by nature, I have found Humanism to be rather “lonely.” When confronted by such an overwhelming number of believers and churchgoers, it is nice to know you are not quite as marginalized as you may have felt. But if only 7800 folk stand behind that slick publication, one’s thoughts bend Potemkin-ward.
What is the difference between this (from the site):
*** X ** is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity. *
If X =“politically liberal atheist and hard agnostic”? If the answer is , as I suspect, " a label" then I would say there are millions of Americans who share your philosophy. Americans just aren’t joiners - even traditional organizations like Democratic or Republican Party, the Moose or Masonic Lodge, Bowling Leagues etc.
I tend to agree with this. If you don’t have a common denominator that you believe* in*, you’re just a cross-section of people with lots of interests. I think people are more interested in reading books on the subject than hanging out at a hall discussing it. They have other social outlets.
