AN INTRODUCTION TO HUMANISM

Humanisim is an ethical and rationalist wordview, which discounts belief in the supernatural, and recognizes that morality is founded on human nature and experience alone. It is a positive lifestance, emcompassing, but much more than, the negative position of atheism (which is a simply absence of belief in god(s)).

These are the beginnings of some of my thoughts on Humanist ideas. They are not "official doctrine" (there's no such thing in Humanism) or, necessarily, those of other humanists.

Rationalism

Rationalism is systematic thought. A rationalist applies scepticism and logic to any situation which we want to understand and doesn't accept answers simply on the basis of authority, tradition or feeling. An understanding of the world we live in requires evidence which is consistant and testable. Whenever testable evidence is lacking, any purported answers to a problem become guesswork. Guesses may be good (that is, they may have a good probability of being right), if they are logical and consistant with what evidence does exist, or they may be bad, if they are illogical and inconsistant with known evidence. When there is insufficient evidence to make a reasonable guess or hypothesis, the only valid reaction is to admit that we don't know, not to assume an unsupported answer.

God(s) and the supernatural

God(s) and the supernatural are unsupprted answers. The existence of God is not only unproven, but probably unprovable, as even many theists accept (they claim faith as an alternative to evidence). Every attempt I've seen to prove the existance of God is logically flawed or relies on evidence which doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Death

In the Humanist view, death is the end. We have no souls to live on after us, and there is no supernatural heaven or hell for us to go to after we die. Death isn't frightening, although dying can be. When we're dead, we are just as we were for the fifteen billion years of existance before we lived. We have no consciousness, no feelings and no existence, so we cannot be hurt, and cannot have regrets or miss loved ones. The transcience of our existence doesn't devalue life; it makes it all the more precious. We have only this one chance to get things right, and to find happiness.

The pain and heartache of death isn't felt by those who are dead, but by those who are left behind. Yet it is also in them that we live on. We exist beyond our own bodies in the differences we make to the world and people around us. What we say and do shapes peoples' minds, physically, in the sense that our words and actions are stored in the synaptic patterns we mold into their brains. We shape the world in more obvious physical ways in the things we create, the children we create, and in the creations of those whom we have affected. Most of us make a very tiny difference in the grand scheme of things, but amongst a population of six billion, we are very tiny people. Could  we be any grander, proportionately speaking, in the eyes of God?