How was your Doomsday? Over that Apocalyptic hangover yet?

But really, we can see that this was a mythic event, the basic part, “radical change of the world”, believed (at least in the past) by people who were taught it by their parents, not because there was any basis in reality. On top of that, more fantasy was piled on it (cataclysmic solar flare, collision with planet Niburu or other planet-busting object, some special galactic alignment, encounter with a black hole, even that some could be rescued by extraterrestrial aliens) that yet others believed and promulgated.

We, meaning humanity, need to take the lesson to stop believing in stories that are not grounded in evidence, in demonstrable cause-and-effect, in science and history. If we do this, we could actually fulfill a version of the original Mayan “End of the Cycle” prophecy, by making significant change in eradicating wars, renew progress against contagious diseases, elevate and equalize humanity, and even stop edging out so many other species that contribute to the beauty of our planet.

I -not my website- have been down for a long time. I’m not going to say I’m really up yet, but I’m more functional now, let’s say “trending up”. I’ll be posting here more, and advertising my posts on FB, and more active in discussions on other blogs.

Humanism is often criticized by theists with a claim that Humanism has no basis for an absolute morality. The fact is that Humanism has the same basis for morality that theisms do: the “Golden Rule”, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. (I actually believe the “Platinum Rule” is “do unto others as they would have done unto them”, since don’t you want others to treat you with understanding of how you wish to be treated, not merely how they wish to be treated?) The actual complaint is when moral judgments outside this framework of morality are not upheld by Humanists.

The fact is that theists have no absolute standard of morality, since the claimed source of any moral requirement outside the framework is temporal, dependent upon the situations in which the requirements were “decreed”. For instance, the Judeo-Christian god, who was attributed to say “Thou shalt no kill” also said, “Kill them all.” This theism has a shifting, situational morality, as much as it criticizes the “situational ethics” of Humanism (as the critics claim). The same condition can be demonstrated with any theism.

If everyone takes the time to understand others, and opens her and his heart to identification with others, our society shall become more and more moral. In this way, the need of Humanity of a moral society shall be met by the members of Humanity.

[later updates of this post shall include links to other Humanist sources confirming or discussing this morality.]

[update: link to wikipedia articles on the "Golden Rule", "Morality", and "Morality outside Religion"]

I have defined Humanism as the faith that the needs of the members of Humanity have been, are, and shall be, met by Humanity itself, by its members. In this article, I’d like to explore that claim. I will try to list various needs that some other faiths claim are met by an agency other than humanity, and show how they are met by humanity, in fact.

Following the hierarchy of needs as posed by Abraham Maslow, let’s consider food. Some people claim that deity or nature feeds us, but the fact is that while our sources of food originate in nature (for the most part), we must collect, cultivate, or hunt the food, and then process it. We are predators, not recipients. If it weren’t for the development of tillage, our population explosion could not have been started, and if it weren’t for the Green Revolution, there should be endemic starvation at this time. Nature has not produced more abundantly to meet the growing needs of a burgeoning human population, and there are apparently no divine deliveries of victuals.

Moving on to “homeostasis”, which is keeping a steady environment, and basically comes down to clothing and shelter, it is too obvious that we produce our own clothes and build our own homes. Again, while the sources of our materials come from nature, we must, again, collect and process them. Clothing has been cheap after the human-produced Industrial Revolution. Before that, creation and maintenance of clothing was labor intensive, and the wardrobes of most people were limited.

Nature features caves, but there is no practical way for all of humanity to use them for shelter. Only in limited scope have these been able to be inhabited. They are usually formed by water action on soluble minerals, and this creates too humid an environment than is healthy for most of us. Living without shelter, under the trees, only works in very stable, warm climes and is not practical for large numbers of people.

Up the ladder to security, we find, that, starting with developing our own shelter, it is humanity that provides what security we can enjoy. There are too many natural disasters, and horrors perpetrated by one religious, or otherwise irrational, group upon another, for there to be any credible argument for divine protection. Cases that seem to involve that are just misinterpreted through religious programming.

It is well established in philosophy that Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply