From Andrew Copson lecture video explaining Humanism at the Ancestors Trail 2014

Humanism explained in five minutes:

Reality, Morality, Meaning

No Meaning OF Life…

The phrase is sometimes used in the sense of a deeper hidden meaning – something like the hidden meaning of an epigram, or of a poem…but the wisdom of poets and philosophers has taught us that the phrase can be understood in a different way; that the meaning of life may not be something hidden and perhaps discoverable but, rather, something with which we ourselves can endow our lives.

Karl Popper

Tragedy

The human condition is one of vulnerability…Our fate may be terrible and…there may be no consolation…To recognize fragility is to accept that we are vulnerable to circumstances…These are grounds for sober realism, but not for despair.  The ideal to which we can aspire is not a remote nonhuman ideal.  It is one which is formed from our experience of what human beings are capable of at their best.  It is an ideal that comes from within our own humanity.

Richard Norman

The Pursuit of Happiness

When I say that pleasure is the goal of living I do not mean the pleasures of libertines…I mean the pleasure that consists of freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation; not the product of one drinking party after another or sex with women and men or seafood and other delicacies.  On the contrary, the pleasure that is the result of clear thinking…

Epicurus

Personal development

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.  There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.

John Stuart Mill

Making Connections

Of all the ingredients of a happy life, friendship is the greatest.

Epicurus

Only Connect!

E M Forster

Remember your humanity and forget the rest!

Bertrand Russell

Why, when you go to the Grand Canyon and you see the strata of geological time laid out before you, why is there a feeling that brings you close to tears?  Or looking at images from the Hubble telescope…The human mind is big enough, and imaginative enough, to be poetically moved by the whole sweep of geological ages represented by the rocks that you are standing among.  That’s why you feel in awe.  (Giant Redwoods, First human fossils)

Richard Dawkins

Optimism

You are what you make of yourselves.  Aim high, aim for the stars, and you may yet clear the rooftops.  You will need courage, tenacity, motivation and a good sense of humour on the rout.  Quality of character, happiness, fulfilment of potential and of human needs can be improved through changed values, through redirection of individual life, by a process of personal change, and personal evolution.

Jeaneanne Fowler

Purpose

Humanism covers my main belief…my belief in the individual, and in his duty to create, and to understand and to contact other individuals.  A duty that may be and ought to be a delight.  The human race, to which he belongs, may not survive, but that should not deter him…wherever our race comes from, wherever it is going to, whatever his own fissures and weaknesses, he himself is here, is now, he must understand, create, contact.

E M Forster