Humanism

Humanism is about what it is to be Human and how to live the best we can...

Chapter 2

Is Humanism a Religion?

If Humanism is about how to live well it sounds like something you might get in a church and also its an -ism like Buddhism and Hinduism so is it a religion?

That's a very good question and the answer depends what you mean by religion. So many people in the world belong to one or other religion that any understanding of what it is to be human will have to account for religion, what it is and what it does for humans.

When did religion begin then?

Another excellent question, its always best to begin at the beginning and in this case we are talking about the very beginning of humankind. Anthropologists are people who study the history and workings of mankind scientifically and if they find evidence of a ritual burial, a funeral, which today is usually a religious activity, they take this as perhaps the most important indication of whether the early hominids (man like creatures) were human or not. First there were creatures who simply left their dead where they died as animals do and then new groups are found who bury their dead, or wrap them up, or put their remains in a special place and this tells us a lot about those people?

What does it mean?

It means that those people, because we can now think of them as people rather than "animals", those people are wondering what happens after death and they are doing something special with their dead as a result of that wondering. Later in history for example, the Romans believed that the dead were ferried across a mythical river, the Styx to a land of the dead and they placed coins over the eyes of the dead that they might pay the ferryman to take them to their rightful place. For a whole tribe of people to repeatedly follow a ritual also tells us that they could talk and share the story that determines their burial ritual, whatever their particular story and ritual may be. Stories passed on from person to person, especially stories that are about how to live and what might happen when we die are called culture and no animals, as far as we can tell, have a culture anywhere near as complex as ours if at all. So evidence of burial tells us about early man's speech, culture, imagination, concepts of life, the passage of time and death and to have such things you need a very big brain and that is why evidence of burial is the marker of when we became human.

So much knowledge just from an ancient burial, its fantastic!

Yes and there's more! Sometimes we find objects buried with our ancestors remains, often functional things like a hunting knife but sometimes the objects are purely decorative, a piece of jewellery or adornment or else we see that the functional objects are made with just a bit more than their function requires, a little decoration of the handle perhaps. This is evidence of another uniquely human trait - Art! Perhaps the most famous thing about our ancient (sometimes) cave dwelling forebears is their cave paintings and if their ritual burials tell us something about their thoughts on death then the ancient cave paintings give us literally the most vivid picture of ancient humans' life. I said they "sometimes" lived in caves because these paintings were sometimes on the walls of caves that were or could have been lived in, but sometimes they are deep inside caves far too deep and dark and dangerous to have been homes. What possessed these people to equip themselves with light (no torches or even candles) and painting materials and to venture into these dark and secret places? They must have been doing far more than decorating the living room wall with pictures. Well, just as the funerals tell us that they were wondering what happens after death, so cave paintings are thought to show the wondering of early man about the meaning of life. these are the two big questions which perhaps every human asks at some point in their growing up, "What is the Meaning of Life?" and " What happens after we Die?" You could say that Religion, any Religion, is the attempt to answer these two questions and by that definition then humanism is also a religion but as we shall see, the answer that humanism arrives at is very different to most religions and in the end you will have to judge for yourself whether you call it a religion or not, its only a word and not the thing itself.

posted by: Frewin at 06:16 | link | comments (4) |
religion

Chapter One

What is Humanism?

Humanism is about what it is like to be human and how to live as well as we can as human beings.

Is Humanism a movement, does it have an organisation?

There are lots of Humanist organisations, local national and international but there are many more people in the world who are humanist yet who don't belong to a Humanist group and may not even know that they are humanist. Humanism is a big bunch of ideas, a philosophy and you can have those ideas without having the label for them. In fact humanist ideas are so common that they are all around us and looking for Humanism is like walking in a forest and "not being able to see the wood for the trees!" When we talk about humanist ideas we can use a small "h" and when we talk about organised Humanism its a capital "H".

When did Humanism or humanist ideas begin?

Because humanist thinking is so central to human life, whether you call it humanism or not, the ideas have probably been around as long as human beings themselves but Ancient Greek philosophers were the first people to write down the ideas we now consider as Humanism.

Why do we need to think about "what it is to be human" - surely everyone knows that?

Everybody knows what it feels like to be them but even that changes, as you get older you feel differently about things. If you are lucky enough to live in a country that enjoys peace, you will not know what it is like to be a human being caught up in a war. If you are a man, you will not know form your own experience, what it is like to be a woman. If you are rich, you may have little idea what it is like to be a poor human being, if you are healthy most of the time, you  won't know what it is like to be permanently sick. So our personal view of what it is to be human is not enough, we need to get a bigger picture if we are to live well.

When you say "live as well as we can as human beings", you mean be Happy, right?

Happiness is great but its not the only goal and it only lasts a certain time anyway - you have to come down a bit otherwise you you wont feel the high another time. There are lots of other goals worth striving for (and achieving them is a source of happiness anyway) - health, wisdom, knowledge, understanding, belonging, friendship and then there are the freedoms, freedom from fear, from hunger, from pain and disease. Most people are pursuing several or even all these goals simultaneously, some of them directly involve other people like Friendship and some mean being involved indirectly for example a scientist working to find a cure for a disease which he or she will never suffer from themselves. Their work involves gathering knowledge, putting it to use, dealing with people who suffer with the disease, with colleagues perhaps around the world and their work may take a lifetime or more.Of course they will be very happy if they make the breakthrough and find the cure in their lifetime but even if they don't and must "hand the baton on" to their successors, it doesn't mean that they won't have achieved many of the above goals in the course of their life's work. Passing on the baton is what happens in a Relay Race which of course, is a team event and that's a pretty good metaphor for the humanist view of life, we're born, we do the best we can while we live as part of a team and try to leave the world a little better than we found it before we die.

posted by: Frewin at 08:02 | link | comments (2) |
definition