Winterton Curtis's humanism

 Returned my old landlord’s book to the library, with a couple of inserted post-its to amuse and enlighten some hypothetical future borrower. Dr. C's pithy characterization of “the humanistic philosophy of life” remains the best I’ve seen. 

 

Why he says he’s not an atheist

Losing Faith in Atheism

Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.

We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.

As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.

In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.

If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?

…

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/losing-faith-in-atheism

Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?

In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announcedthat its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with Catholic clergy and consultingwith other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.

While Claude might have a mind (of sorts) that can process information, it cannot meditate, fast, prostrate itself in prayer, sing hymns in a congregation or participate in other aspects of the physical life of religion. And this makes all the difference: According to the scientific literature, it’s the practice of religion — not merely the believing in it — that brings about its characteristic benefits.

There is robust data, for example, linking religion to greater health and well-being. But that link is not strong for people who merely identify themselves as believers. It’s only when people also practice a faith — attend weekly services, pray or meditate at home — that religion’s benefits become pronounced: The more people “do” religion, the happier and healthier they tend to be...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/opinion/ai-religion-morality.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

We who “do” humanism are pretty happy & healthy too, btw.

The universe inside us

…Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”

He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”

For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/us/artemis-landing-splashdown-moon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A Light That’s Both Historical and Eternal’

Against atheism https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/opinion/jesus-christianity-atheism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Best books on humanism

"Humanist beliefs are almost like the common sense of large parts of the Western world today"
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/humanism/

Marcus: just be good

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

Humanism and the Great Conversation

From David Brooks's farewell column:

...Trump is that rare creature, a philistine who understands the power of culture. He put professional wrestlers onstage at the last Republican convention for a reason: to lift up a certain masculine ideal. He's taken over the Kennedy Center for a reason: to tell a certain national narrative. Unfortunately, the culture he champions, because it is built upon domination, is a dehumanizing culture.

True humanism, by contrast, is the antidote to nihilism. Humanism is anything that upholds the dignity of each person. Antigone trying to bury her brother to preserve the family honor, Lincoln rebinding the nation in his second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King Jr. writing that letter from the Birmingham jail — those are examples of humanism. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing "Fast Car" at the Grammys — that's humanism. These are examples of people trying to inspire moral motivations, pursue justice and move people to become better versions of themselves.

Humanism comes in many flavors: secular humanism, Christian humanism, Jewish humanism and so on. It is any endeavor that deepens our understanding of the human heart, any effort to realize eternal spiritual values in our own time and circumstances, any gesture that makes other people feel seen, heard and respected. Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.

If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.

 

One of the most exciting things in American life today is that a humanistic renaissance is already happening on university campuses. Trump has been terrible for the universities, but also perversely wonderful. Amid all the destruction, he's provoked university leaders into doing some rethinking. Maybe things have gotten too preprofessional; maybe colleges have become too monoculturally progressive; maybe universities have spent so much effort serving the private interests of students that they have unwittingly neglected the public good. I'm now seeing changes on campuses across America, from community colleges to state schools to the Ivies. The changes are coming in four buckets: First, a profusion of courses and programs that try to nurture character development and moral formation. Second, courses and programs on citizenship training and civic thought. Third, programs to help people learn to reason across difference. Fourth, courses that give students practical advice on how to lead a flourishing life...

 

nyt

20-something’s exploring

…she looked around and over time noticed that so many people her age, twenty-somethings, seemed newly open to exploring belief in God.

"We are leagues away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s," Ms. Ash wrote in her book, noting that many people she interviewed had been shaped by the social rupture of the pandemic and the isolation brought on by screen addiction, which left them searching for a sense of wonder and community.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/style/lamorna-ash-book-religious-conversion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Boldly going w/humanism

"Star Trek was explicitly crafted by its creator, Roddenberry, into a humanist manifesto; the stories Trek told were humanist parables, putting forth the core philosophies to which he was devoted: equality, reason, integrity, fairness, opportunity, community. I was soaking them up before I even really understood what they were. I didn't know it way back in 1972, but Star Trek had already made a humanist of me. It just took me a while to discover that there was a word for it."

— Star Trek and Humanism: Living by the Star Trek Ethos in a Troubled World by Scott Robinson
https://a.co/jkRipSG

Near-death survivors

…at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies

https://www.threads.com/@nytopinion/post/DTNRrQADoot?xmt=AQF0Nqe0m6AmYsOWfEUG0DOxZGZyM_SIlJJMCFFB7kCDd6Rbzo_I3N__cwkw8clQJEn2pSLr&slof=1