Humanism

[Ben Davis]

I don't mind owning up to some degree of faith. We Secular Humanists have a decidedly optimistic outlook based on the assumption that not only are we capable of doing great things but that we WILL do great things. We can make an evidence-based argument for that based on the track record of our species - particularly the meteoritic rise of knowledge and technology of the past few centuries and the ever increasing rate of that rise - but it's certainly not a slam dunk. Our optimism is colored by emotional bias to some degree. So what? What's the consequences if we're wrong? Where's the harm of striving towards excellence and having faith that we will achieve it? Far better than sloughing through life, whining whoa is me and we suck IMO.

I agree but I don't like to call it 'faith' because of the automatic association that people will make with religious definitions of the word. To me, there's a big difference between unsupported faith in the power of a supernatural entity to provide progress on our behalf and supported confidence in the power of people to make our own progress. I'd go as far to suggest that any human progress that religions claim has been made by their supernatural entity can be explained, more coherently & elegantly, by claims of human agency. We know that humans can do good & bad things; we have evidence of that. We also know that most people will do good things rather than bad. We can see an upward trend, over time, in civilised development. Consequently, humanistic confidence is well justified and arguably the most appropriate ideology for fulfilling human potential. 'Confidence', yes; 'earned trust', yes; 'faith', no.

Religions have been co-opting human effort for so long, in order to prop up their definition of 'faith', that the word has become practically meaningless. It's about time people took credit for what they've accomplished, both good & bad, so that we can properly accept the collective responsibilities generated by our intellect. Words like 'faith' are counter-productive to that end.