Misunderstandings about Humanism

From my readings of Epstein, "Good without God"

Humanism: Our goal is to empower and protect as many humans as possible with the progression of time through rationalization, discussion and concerted action.

Who are humanists? Many if not most of us are humanists. If you are a deist and you strive to do good for other human beings, then you too are a humanist. If you are religious and strive to do good not to reap afterlife rewards, then you too are a humanist. Even the religiously adamant (those who take that their God’s word is objective morality) who have to utilize their rationality in order to interpret and apply God’s word to best serve the issues of the day are humanists in action.

Humanism admits to not having all the answers. Some questions of morality are tricky and will remain so. And we feel that anyone who takes an absolute stand on tricky moral issues may be prone to hasty generalisations. Secondly, we seek to overcome such tricky issues with discussion and concerted actions with the overall goal of human flourishing. We may make mistakes along the way but we will always strive to get better.

This leads us to a related charge that humanism is relativistic. We indeed are not. Our end goal and methods will not be compromised. We also acknowledge that there are fundamental tenets of human flourishing that will not change with time and are in common among systems of morality throughout human experience.

Is humanism species-specific? No. We cannot be truly morally and indeed even biologically flourishing humans if we abuse and neglect our environmental and other biological (who like us feel pain and have the need and desire to flourish).

Humanism is not antagonistic with religion. We are not anti-religious. We are simply a-religious. Our stand is that religious systems have no more an objective morality than one that humans can decide jointly and uphold together. (To assert that God’s laws of morality are objectively superior to a system that we can create on our own, we need to prove the existence of God. The second problem then arises, which God?) Ultimately, we care about humans. God in the concept of good is to us secondary. (Plato’s Euthypro answers this: if that which the God/s love is because it is good, then it is good on its own without it being influenced by God/s loving it) Ultimately, we do not wish to waste/spend time arguing on who is more right in doing good, we seek to work with religious people who wish to promote human flourishing.

We do not believe in forms of the “noble lie” or advocate its use to influence people to involuntarily do good or do good for religious rewards. We seek to produce moral individuals through experiential education.