Secular humanism and ethical culture

How to live a good life, fourth video: secular humanism and ethical culture. M. Pigliucci

https://substack.com/@figsinwintertime/note/c-128929918?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

What the hell?

"…Perhaps the biggest shift comes from the most religious Americans overall. Among the people who attend religious services at least once a month, Trump went from getting 59% support in 2020 to 64% in 2024. Roughly two out of three Americans who are regular church-goers were willing to vote for a right-wing zealot who constantly pays them lip service. It makes you wonder what the hell they're hearing in so many of these spaces— is it a message to help the poor or a promise to punish every person who's considered different? 

Many churches now appear to be nothing more than arms of the Republican Party..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/friendlyatheist/p/new-data-reveal-how-religion-and?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Materialist spirit

"I call myself a spiritual materialist. By "materialist," I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. At the same time, like many of us, I have "spiritual" experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That's part of my view of spirituality."

— The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature by Alan Lightman
https://a.co/7ZfKc4r

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/

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The course includes several videos, including:

 

Summary of Part One:

1. A humanist understanding of human nature recognises that we are animals; we were not created, nor was this universe made for us, but we are the result of natural, purposeless, physical and biological processes.
2. Humanists believe that we are material and mortal creatures, and that there are many good reasons to be sceptical of any notion of an afterlife.
3. There are ways that human beings stand out from the rest of the natural world – things we can celebrate about being human – for example, our capacities for communication, imagination, creativity, empathy, and problem solving.
4. Self-consciousness provides us with an ability to ask questions and understand the world around us, an opportunity to become the authors of our own lives, and the potential to be moral beings.
5. Our capacity to share our ideas with one another is what has enabled us to develop knowledge and culture, and to create many things that enrich our lives.
6. A humanist believes all our human capacities are natural.
7. These distinctive human capabilities bring a responsibility to consider how we should live.

Sandi Toksvig – Humanism and the human being – Summary

...

• Richard Dawkins’ Spectrum of Theistic Probability
• Atheists, agnostics, and humanists
• Why atheist don’t believe
• Russell’s teapot, a thought experiment on the burden of proof
• The problem of suffering
• Crash Course Philosophy: a series of videos including arguments for and against the existence of god (see videos 9, 10, 11, and 13)
• Video: The Free Will Defence: A Good God vs The Problem of Evil (BBC Radio 4)
• The evil god challenge

Summary Part Two:

1. Our beliefs can be mistaken; we should therefore be prepared to adopt a sceptical approach to knowledge and subject our beliefs to rational, critical scrutiny in order to give them the best chance of being true
2. Humanists will typically trust the evidence of their senses; they will be wary of claims made on the basis of faith or revelation
3. Different beliefs can fit the same evidence; when presented with more than one hypothesis that fits the evidence, it is often safest to go with the simplest; we should always consider whether our beliefs might be motivated by something other than the evidence
4. Reasonableness can come in degrees; beliefs that are neither proved nor disproved can still be more or less reasonable than each other
5. There is no non-circular justification for trusting reason; however, nor is there a good reason for assuming that reason is unreliable
6. Humanists will reject a relativist approach to truth; facts about the world are independent of our beliefs about them
7. Humanists believe that science provides the best and most reliable method of answering questions about the world
8. Science has enabled us to make great progress in our understanding about the world; we should be wary of jumping to supernatural explanations for questions we can’t yet answer
9. There might be questions that science cannot answer but that does not mean we must turn to religious answers to such questions
10. A humanist will believe they have good reason to doubt the existence of any deity; humanists will be atheists, agnostics, or both
11. Humanists believe we can be comfortable living with uncertainty; curiosity can provide many pleasures

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