Free course: Introducing Humanism

 Welcome to Introducing Humanism: Non-religious approaches to life.

During this course, we'll provide you with a deeper understanding of the humanist approach to life and how humanists tackle life’s big questions. We’ll explore some of the tensions and dilemmas contained within the humanist worldview, as well as the arguments against it, and the responses humanists give to those arguments. You’ll find contributions from academics, humanist campaigners, celebrants, pastoral carers, and members of the public to widen your awareness of what it means to be one of the millions of humanists living around the world today. The course will also allow you the opportunity to reflect on life’s bigger questions for yourself.

We’ll begin with an introduction to humanist beliefs, values, and goals, before investigating the humanist understanding of human nature. This should help to ground the humanist responses to many of the questions covered later in the course.

In Part 2, we’ll explore a humanist approach to knowledge about the world and the consequences for a humanist understanding of reality. We’ll follow this by tackling the question of how we ought to live, approaching it with three distinct but connected focuses: ourselves, our relationships with others, and society and the planet as a whole (Parts 3-5). Finally, in Part 6, we will draw together what we have learned throughout the course in an attempt to reflect upon what conclusions we can reach about humanism.

We hope you enjoy the course!

Kind regards

Luke Donnellan

Director of Understanding Humanism

https://courses.understandinghumanism.org.uk/courses/introducing-humanism/

Andrew Copson's FiveBooks humanism reading list

What is ‘humanism?’ Is it just another word for atheism?

It’s not just another word for atheism. The word ‘humanism’, like all words with long histories, has had lots of meanings at different times in different places. In English, it started being used in the 19th century. Since then, it’s had two uses. One is a historical one, to refer back to the culture and scholarship of the Renaissance. We usually call that ‘Renaissance humanism’.


The second use of the word has been to refer to a non-religious worldview: a set of beliefs and values that together constitute a certain approach to life. The precise content of those beliefs and values is up for debate and up for negotiation—just like any idea in the history of ideas. But, broadly speaking, humanists are people who don’t look outside of reality for moral guidance or ways to understand the universe. They try to understand the world that we live in by the use of reason, evidence, and experience all bundled together in the scientific method.

Humanists are people who think that morality is not some unnatural thing that comes from outside, but something that’s in us, having its basis in biology and then built on by culture. Morality doesn’t come from outside, from tablets of stone, but is inside us. It’s generated by humanity itself. When we think about questions like right and wrong, we don’t need to look for rules and commandments and authorities; we need to think for ourselves, about the consequences of our actions, and have a this-world, contextual approach to morality... (continues)

Middle ground

"It was not a punishment but a privilege to be perched midway between microcosm and macrocosm, between the fleeting moment and fathomless eternity. Small enough to stand in awe of our infinite cosmos, yet large enough to enjoy the little things; conscious enough to contemplate our own mortality, and yet long-lived enough to feel a tender appreciation for a flower’s ephemeral existence—truly, we found ourselves inhabiting a magical middle ground."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/dMsYwSS

Superman with a Plan

Deists' vision of a god who's left the building was decidedly not Einstein's god...

"...pantheism is often confused with more traditional creeds that accept some kind of Creator. The easiest mistake to make is to conflate pantheism with Deism. Deism rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment as a kind of comforting compromise that made Christian faith compatible with the more critical modern mentality. Easily mocked ideas like miracles, divine revelation, and the literal truth of the Bible were dismissed in deference to the discoveries of science. But the basic belief persisted that a Creator God fashioned our universe with a purpose and a plan. From the Deist perspective, the orderly laws of physical existence and the miraculous organization of living beings provided incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence and His goodness.134 You don’t hear the word Deism much these days, but the idea lives on among its intellectual descendants: creationism and intelligent design.

Although Einstein was often accused of atheism, it doesn’t seem like anyone thought of him as a Deist during his own lifetime. But over the last couple of decades, this has become the dominant narrative defining his spirituality. One biographer has suggested that Einstein “settled into a deism” in later life and embraced a “middle-age deistic faith.”135 Time magazine, celebrating Einstein as its “Person of the Century,” hailed him as “a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God’s handiwork.”136 And Einstein has even been (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in God; I have a very deep faith.… There’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe… and to me that explains my faith in a Creator and a faith in God.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/0l7smwE

Humanist

🧠💛 What is a humanist?
A humanist is a non-religious person who believes this is the one life we have — and that we should use it to make the world a kinder, fairer place.
We base our decisions on reason, empathy, and a concern for humanity, other living beings, and our shared planet. 🌍

https://www.threads.com/@humanists_uk/post/DKADBg0NVCw?xmt=AQF0h-T92yn88OIz6blZm2ufRxVAs4uoz8R1xfx30cUXjg

Spinoza's god

"But as Einstein once said, “mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all,” and Spinoza likewise had no intention of stopping at skepticism.21 Although he was denounced by the orthodox as “an atheist, a scoffer at religion,” Spinoza’s dream was not to denigrate the divine but rather to demonstrate that it was disseminated everywhere.22 And in his subsequent works, the immanent divine became Spinoza’s central theme. He argued that a single inscrutable Substance was the substrate of all things—everything around us and everything within, matter and mind alike.23 For Spinoza, this Substance was “conceived through itself” and consisted of “infinite attributes,” all of which were simply expressions of an “eternal and infinite essence.”24 We could call it whatever we wanted—Substance, Nature, or even God—but as far as Spinoza was concerned, “it is the same, or not very different, to assert that all things emanate necessarily from God’s nature and that the universe is God.”25 From this seemingly simple assertion, he concluded that “all things are united through Nature, and they are united into one, namely, God.”26

Spinoza’s contemporaries were convinced that this made him an atheist..."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/eZtQYsn

Look up for wonder & awe

"In emphasizing awe, Einstein was parting ways with most past religious teachers, but he still had plenty of predecessors. Socrates said some twenty-five hundred years ago that “wonder is the mark of the philosopher.”6 Schopenhauer saw “the sense of the sublime” as a sure sign of a higher mind.7 And one of Lao Tzu’s last lessons in the Tao Te Ching is “Let not your consciousness of life become shallow, and never allow yourself to become weary of existence.”8

Aligning himself with all these first-rate philosophers, Einstein maintained that mere existence was marvelous. “Every thinking person,” he felt, “must be filled with wonder and awe just by looking up at the stars.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox : https://a.co/6Tqi73c