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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion
Subject: Re: Humanism, Catholicism, and Walter Lippmann
Message-ID: <1802@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 29-Sep-85 02:11:38 EDT
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Posted: Sun Sep 29 02:11:38 1985
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> The term "secular humanism" is a redundancy. "Secular" means "not overtly
> or specifically religious". "Humanism" is "a philosophy that asserts the
> dignity and worth of man and his capacity for self-realization through reason
> and that often rejects *supernaturalism*" (my emphasis). It's a sure bet that
> anything that rejects supernaturalism (i.e. spirits, gods, phenomena not
> explainable by physical laws) is not overtly or specifically religious. The
> subject of this debate, then, is just "humanism". [CARL DEITRICK]

Important point:  what is "supernaturalism" if not the "wishful thinking"
that anything we can't explain MUST be rooted in some other realm *forever*
beyond our comprehension.  By any other name, the religionists would find
something to tar the belief with.  "Humanism" is said to imply (by them)
the belief in humanity as a god or gods.  If it's called "scientism" (meaning
the use of reason and logic in determining and analyzing phenomena), it is
labelled "making a religion out of science".  This sounds good, but expand
this statement to what it really means and it says "treating as sacrosanct
the notion that thorough careful analytical procedures are sounder than
whimsical imaginary notions without rigorous proof behind them".

> 	"Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king,
> 	they have to find some other ground for their moral choices
> 	than the revelation of his will. It follows necessarily that 
> 	they must find the tests of righteousness wholly within human 
> 	experience. The difference between good and evil must be a 
> 	difference which men themselves recognize and understand.
> 	Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the
> 	intelligible consequence of it. It follows, too, that virtue 
> 	cannot be commanded; it must be willed out of personal conviction
> 	and desire. Such a morality may properly be called humanism, for
> 	it is centered not in superhuman but in human nature. When men
> 	can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become
> 	humanists. They must live by the premise that whatever is righteous
> 	is inherently desirable because experience will demonstrate its
> 	desirability. They must live, therefore, in the belief that the 
> 	duty of man is not to make his will conform to the will of God
> 	but to the surest knowledge of the conditions of human happiness."
>			-Walter Lippman

The mistake that many religionists make is that they claim that statements like
the one above imply some sort of heinous "moral relativism".  In fact, it
does, simply because it admits that there cannot be an absolute morality
(absolute morality being a contradiction in the absence of a deity).  But
they imply that this portends an individual "do whatever I feel like"
morality.  This is hardly the case by any stretch of the imagination.  The
moral relativism this implies is that of us in relation to the rest of the
universe.  It is a recognition that what we personally want, or what we
feel is "good", is not "good" in some absolute sense, but good only in
that it serves us as people.  And the ultimate service to us as people is
NOT the immediate gratification of personal wants (as religionists would claim
that this implies), but the recognition that we share a world with other
people who ALSO have personal wants and needs.  That in order to continue
livving i tthis worldwith others, we must recognize their existence, their
wants, their needs, their possible anger at our doing to them what we wouldn't
want them to do to us.  (Sound familiar?)

> Humanism is not designed to eliminate God from anything. It is an alternative
> to organized religion for people who (like me) can't take seriously the whole
> panoply of an anthropomorphic God, saints, angels, redemption from sin and 
> guilt by a bloody ritual in an ancient desert, purgatory, hell, original sin,
> heaven, Satan, devils, and the army of Christ. Seen from a distance, those
> things makes no more sense than the gods of Greek or Norse mythology. 
> Humanism follows after one loses the capacity to believe. It does not cause
> that loss.

Bra-vo!  Though Paul Dubuc would have it that only morality with force behind
it is one that assumes a god in charge, I think it is a simple exercise to
show 1) that this is not true, 2) that as long as you can't prove the existence
of that god, you lose the moral grip over those who don't believe (and rightly
so).  Is the solution to go back to the "old values", indoctrinating people
not to question the existence of god and "his" morality?  To assume a god
you can't prove and force everyone to believe in it in order to get that 
"force" behind your morality?  Or, alternatively, we could build a
morality based on reason, based on imposing only the minimum restrictions
necessary to allow both maximal personal freedom and minimal interference
in people's lives?  (As opposed to maximal restrictions that show the "power"
and "force" behind the morality, that prevent people from doing things that
are wrong for such stupid reasons as "your doing this might convince others
to do it, and since it's wrong you don't want to allow that".)

> ... [I] learned the three basic lessons of the Catholic Church:
> 	1) The individual is worthless. You have duties and responsibilities
> 	   but no rights or privileges.
> 	2) You're going to hell and there's nothing you can do about it. It
> 	   is not possible to live in a way that will get you to heaven.
> 	3) Unless you're going to make babies, sex is a sin. Period.
> 
> The real threat is a not a philosophy that emphasizes the dignity and worth of
> people, but rather a church that would teach this kind of poison.  When faced 
> with principles like this, it's no wonder people reject organized religion.
> Humanism is a welcome refuge after enduring that lunacy.

Again, bra-vo!  Granted, you have developed a harsh position about a
particular religion from experience that may or may not apply to other
religions equally.  You have described a potent poison affecting the human
mind.  Whether or not the degree is accurate, there is certainly a poisoning
going on, and the effect of a slow poison over a long period of time (say,
a person's childhood, when such "poison" is most effective, or say, the
entirety of the last two thousand years or so) may be even worse.  A fast
acting poison would probably kill you quickly.  A slow poison debilitates
the victim (the mind) over an extended period of time.

What is the antidote?  Encourage teaching of reasoning, science, and
independent thought to children, so that they will be best able to judge
for themselves.  But wait:  aren't all those things now being labelled
as the very "secular humanism" that thse people are trying to eliminate?
-- 
"iY AHORA, INFORMACION INTERESANTE ACERCA DE... LA LLAMA!"
	Rich Rosen    ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr


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