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Start your day right. Here's the eminent cosmologist and humanist, Carl Sagan, on finding meaning in life. He is sorely, sorely missed. pic.twitter.com/OBg7KfNd2b

— Humanists UK (@Humanists_UK) April 9, 2022

Or as G.B. Shaw said, "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

Guess we should've read this too

But I don't know...

"Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)" by Robin Le Poidevin.

https://a.co/gOQUpja

Journeys to Humanism - TheHumanist.com

This issue explores a variety of paths that people travel to find their way to humanism. The path for each person is different, and yet, they share a desire to find meaning and an ethical and rational means of addressing the challenges in people's lives and communities. From heartwarming narratives of growth, to more difficult journeys, in these essays the authors open up about coming to humanism.

What's your journey?

https://thehumanist.com/magazine/spring-2022/features/journeys-to-humanism

Bright memories

 St. Charles, Missouri. The funeral yesterday afternoon, at the venue we last visited over thirteen years ago to say goodbye to my dad, was dignified and comforting. The rain stopped just before the service began, the sun broke through, and it was a bright day after all. Grammy Dot was by explicit choice, the presiding methodist minister related, a "bright" light for us all.  

The minister tells me he was a philosophy student years ago of my old classmates and friends Mark, David, and Del at Truman State University. Small world after all...  (continues)

Questions Apr 12

AC 3-4; LBH (rec.) -113. Presentation: Javan... 

1. What's a caliphate?

2. What American philosopher advised Ataturk on his secular reforms in Turkey?

3. What Islamic tradition taught a social morality of toleration? 

4. What 1948 Declaration is a peak of secularist achievement and the antithesis of theocracy? 

5. J.S. Mill encouraged his readers to value not just experience but also what? 

6. What was John Rawls's way to test the fairness of the social contract? 

DQ

• Is there a serious possibility that something like an unofficial Christian caliphate might ever ascend to power in America?
• If pragmatism is anti-authoritarian, should Dewey have had anything to do with Ataturk?
• Is human nature more like a machine or a tree? Or both? Or neither? 48
• "There is no compulsion in religion," says the Quran, but is conformism in human nature a de facto form of compulsion? 49
• Can we be sure that a veil-of-ignorance contract would support secularism? 51
• If a veil of ignorance could be technologically simulated by some future application of neuroscience, should it be? 

Darwin in Rio

 On this day in 1832, Charles Darwin (books by this author), traveling aboard the HMS Beagle, landed on the shores of Rio de Janeiro as part of a five-year trip. His Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, which emerged as a result of his journey on the Beagle, remains one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He attended Edinburgh University as a young man to become a doctor, but discovered quickly that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood or suffering. He decided to become a clergyman in the countryside instead so that he could more fully pursue his interest in natural history.

Before he could complete his religious studies he was approached by the Captain of the HMS Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, who sought an unpaid companion for the trip. Darwin agreed, seeing opportunity to catalog animals and plants on the journey. Later Darwin discovered that he almost missed his chance in the history books, detailing the ordeal in one of his letters:

“Afterwards, on becoming very intimate with Fitz-Roy, I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected, on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater, and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”

Darwin and Fitzroy landed at port in Rio in April of 1832 and stayed until June. At the start of the trip on land Darwin recorded the midday temperature in the shade as a sweltering 104 degrees Fahrenheit. He took ill at one point but was cured overnight by “cinnamon and port wine.”

In one day he collected 68 different species of beetles. One of the most memorable moments of the stop came when he came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar to be eaten alive by the grubs after hatching. This event single-handedly challenged Darwin’s belief in God; he wrote to fellow naturalist Asa Gray, “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

Darwin himself sampled many of the animals he encountered on the islands that he visited. He ate armadillos, iguanas, giant tortoises, agouti rodents (“the best meat I ever tasted”), a puma with “veal-like” meat, and a large bird called a rhea which Darwin had been looking for desperately before realizing that he had been dining on it.

Darwin finally reached the famous Galapagos Islands three years later, in 1835. Then, in 1859, he published his seminal book On the Origin of Species. Those looking through the prolific library of Darwin at the time of the theory’s development will encounter endless marginalia detailing his thought process. On the final page of his copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which argued for an archaic view of evolution, Darwin scribbled a single line: “If this were true, adios theory.” WA

Questions April 5-7

 NO CLASS APR 5, finish reading Law... Begin Compson. NOTE: The Little Book of Humanism is recommended. It's only available at this point in a kindle edition. Hope you can make it to see our faculty candidate Gregory Slack discussing "The Value of Philosophy," Tuesday afternoon, Peck Hall 318 at 3:30 PM. If you do, ask him for me what he thinks of Bertrand Russell's take on the value of philosophy. The philosophic mind, wrote Lord Russell in the concluding chapter of The Problems of Philosophy,

will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole...Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Thinking of oneself as a citizen of the universe, a true cosmopolitan, is (I've once again witnessed first-hand) one of the genuine consolations of philosophy -- particularly in times of personal loss and grief at the passing of a beloved fellow citizen. That value is priceless.

==

SL 6-8

1. What would be a caricature of humanist moral & religious education?

2. A humanist approach does not involve telling children what?

3. What's P4C?

4. People who sheltered Jews from the Nazis tended to have been brought up how?

5. A meaningful life, says Law, must be what?

6. Having what is not sufficient to render life meaningful?

7. How does the Euthyphro Dilemma apply to the question of meaning?

8. How does Law say humanist funerals have impacted religious funerals in Britain?

DQ

• Will there ever come a time when attempts to control what people think will be universally scorned and repudiated?
• What do you think would happen if P4C were introduced to all children?
• What do you think of faith schools? 115-16
• How do you answer the questions on 119?
• Can you fail in your major life goals and still have lived meaningfully?
• Is meaning a family-resemblance concept in the Wittgensteinian sense? Does that trivialize it?
• Are sacrificial acts on the part of non-believers more impressive and admirable? 129
• Is philosophy better than religion at encouraging young people to think? 131
• Do you agree with Douglas Adams? 133
• Would you prefer a humanist wedding or funeral? What would your survivors think of it?

==

AC 1-2

1. Who coined "secularism"?

2. What three parts of secularism does Bauberot identify?

3. What three aspects of social equality of belief does Carling discuss?

4. What usurpation was commonplace in the time of Ambrose? 

5. How did Aquinas differ with Aristotle with respect to lex humana and lex divina?

6. What forms of righteousness did Luther distinguish?

7. What was Roger Williams' vision of freedom in Rhode Island? 

8. Who did John Locke say ought not to be tolerated?

9. All important Enlightenment thinkers derived the legitimacy of government from what?

10. What lavish festival in Notre Dame cathedral was organized in 1793? 

11. What recent French controversy has called that nation's commitment to equality into question? 

12. What did Jefferson tell the Danbury Baptists about a wall? 

DQ

• What meaning does secularist convey to you that atheist or humanist do not?
• Does the separation of church and state somehow discriminate against religious people?
• Do you prefer the American or the French conception of secularism? 28-9