RE: Humanism
August 26, 2015 at 3:51 am
(This post was last modified: August 26, 2015 at 4:03 am by Fake Messiah.)
For me humanism is perhaps best defined by some of it's famous members like Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan - it is a belief that humans can achieve great things if they commit to science and rationality to create almost scientific utopia like "Star Trek" with a glittering, hopeful future full of worldwide peace and cooperation, scientific achievement, and universal discovery.
Indeed in Star Trek humans have perhaps overthrown what is perhaps truly the biggest "religion" - money, or at least from their standpoint it seems like religion. Because with abundant energy they have replicators that give them what ever they ask and therefore people have unimaginative freedom, they don't own anything to anyone, but use all their time to better themselves and society they live in.
And it is an interesting notion to think that if there is no money there probably would not be religions, because I think the patriarchs really would not care what people believe in if they didn't profit from it.
Of course theist do jump to proclaim everything as religion even atheism.
Indeed in Star Trek humans have perhaps overthrown what is perhaps truly the biggest "religion" - money, or at least from their standpoint it seems like religion. Because with abundant energy they have replicators that give them what ever they ask and therefore people have unimaginative freedom, they don't own anything to anyone, but use all their time to better themselves and society they live in.
And it is an interesting notion to think that if there is no money there probably would not be religions, because I think the patriarchs really would not care what people believe in if they didn't profit from it.
Of course theist do jump to proclaim everything as religion even atheism.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
