Problematic

https://www.threads.net/@secularstudents/post/C2F7jSmuFaR/

Good question

"What unfolds when intentional spaces are cultivated to explore the essence of humanity?" That's just one of many questions that course instructor and Humanist Chaplain at Tufts University Anthony Cruz Pantojas asks students in a new course exploring the utility and significance of humanism. https://thehumanist.com/news/secularism/a-course-on-humanism-for-everyday-life

https://www.threads.net/@americanhumanist/post/C2GIguQAxGR/

How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith | The New Yorker

A poet whose religiosity (which "begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end") is complicated, possibly incoherent, but still fascinating from a humanist perspective. His story would have made the cut for James's Gifford Lectures.

"...During his years at Poetry, Wiman came to feel alienated from contemporary poetry and what he regarded as its self-obsessed confessionalism. Before he learned he had cancer, he'd been planning to resign from the magazine—he and Chapman, in thrall to the mythology of another pair of poet partners, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, living and writing in pastoral bliss in New Hampshire, hoped to leave Chicago for Tennessee and make Fairfield into their own Eagle Pond Farm. But Wiman's cancer treatments can cost more than a million dollars a year; handcuffed by health care, they stayed put. Then, in 2010, Wiman was invited to give a lecture at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, on the campus of the Yale Divinity School. He was so taken by his conversations with the students, the way they talked so straightforwardly about their faith and their fears and what he considers life's ultimate concerns, that when he got home he wrote a letter to Yale angling for a job.

Wiman became a senior lecturer in religion and literature, and Chapman became a lecturer in English. He is now the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts. One Friday morning this fall, at nine-thirty on the nose, he arrived in a seminar room on the Sterling Quadrangle for his course "Poetry and Faith" holding up a stack of handouts like Perseus holding the head of Medusa. He'd woken that morning full of fever and pain and nausea—something that still happens to him every few weeks, most often from colds and viruses his weakened immune system can't fight off—and had considered cancelling the class, but he wanted to clear up something he'd said the previous week, about Philip Larkin's "Aubade." Wiman had told his students that the poem spoke the truth to him as a Christian, which shocked some of them, since it famously describes religion as "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die."

For Wiman, the poem's theological power comes from its confrontation with "a kind of absolute nothingness." His handout contained a few quotations clarifying the point. The first was from the German theologian H. J. Iwand: "Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists!" The second was from a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer not long before he was murdered by the Nazis: "We cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur" (as if there were no God). Before Wiman could finish with the handout, a student tried to slip in late. Wiman reminded his class of the punishment for tardiness—memorizing a sonnet—then turned to that week's readings, which were about love..."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/a-poets-faith

Humanism is a meliorism

"… Humanism is a philosophy, not a religion, so it has no dogma—but it does have a creed: Humanism believes in the equality of all humans and celebrates the rich diversity of experiences between us. Humanism believes our actions are best informed by reason and critical thinking. And above all, Humanism believes in meliorism—that the world can be made better by human effort. That we can alleviate the suffering of our fellow man, and work toward human flourishing for all.

Thomas Paine penned his own Humanist creed in his work Age of Reason: "I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."

And Humanism comes with thousands of years of philosophical texts: Ideas first espoused by the Greek philosophers Cicero and Epicurious, as well as the Chinese philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism, were later resuscitated by Renaissance Humanists like Petrarch, Desiderius Erasmus, and Michel de Montaigne. During the Enlightenment, Humanist writers like Voltaire and the Marquis de Condorcet brought those ideals into our states and governments, and modern writers like Steven Pinker continue the work, all gospel that humans have some agency against the ails of the world.
Throughout history, we took those ideals and made them manifest. As Sarah Bakewell points out in her book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope: "It was thanks to humanistic beliefs in reason and meliorism that Voltaire argued for tolerance of different religions, Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges argued for including women and non-European races in the French Revolutionary idea of human liberation, and their fellow Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham argued for what would now be called LGBTQ+ rights."

It was Humanism's insistence on equality that demanded an end to slavery. It created orphanages, hospitals, social work, and women's suffrage. It implored us to devise spaces for disabled persons. It was Humanism's belief in meliorism that inspired human rights movements and liberal democracies. The progress we have made comes from Humanism's central belief that all human beings are equals and that we have an equal right to human flourishing.
Whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to this goal. "I am a humanist," the philosopher Kurt Vonnegut once said, "which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead."
…

-Elle Griffin

https://open.substack.com/pub/ellegriffin/p/humanism-as-the-future-of-religion?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

A Hopeful ["surprisingly upbeat"] Reminder: You’re Going to Die. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Fifty years on, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" remains an essential, surprisingly upbeat guide to our final act on Earth.

...Only by confronting our own mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified. "To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem," Becker wrote... nyt

HUMANIST VOICES

"It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label.

Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:

Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.

Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.

Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.

We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.

From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public..."

--"Humanism: A Beginner's Guide (updated edition) (Beginner's Guides)" by Peter Cave: https://a.co/1cKWQjT

Thank goodness

I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir "I've Been Thinking", which begins with the near-death experience that generated my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.

"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.

One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?

Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."

Continues: https://a.co/982hZQy