(April 2, 2021 at 10:03 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Essentially humanism is the stance that we can't appeal to divine authority or ideological or religious dogma to resolve moral issues.
emphasis added
Humanism, in the sense you're using it, is an ideology. If we are using the definition of ideology offered first by Google:
Quote:ideology
/ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi/
noun
noun: ideology; plural noun: ideologies
1.
a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
"the ideology of democracy"
Quote:Humanism espouses democracy, freedom, progress and the equal worth and dignity of everyone and advocates for policies that will help us thrive, including protecting the world we live in. A lot of atheists are basically humanists even if they don't label themselves that way or know what humanism is.
It's also an awfully lot like a dogma, in the sense quoted below, from Wikipedia:
Quote:Dogma in the broad sense is any belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Roman Catholicism, Judaism, or Protestantism,[1] as well as the positions of a philosopher or of a philosophical school such as Stoicism. It may also be found in political belief systems, such as communism, progressivism, liberalism and conservatism.[2][3]
Since it isn't the kind of thing we can prove scientifically (it's ought, not is) then it's something we hold to without proof. I suppose if you hold to it tentatively, rather than "unquestioningly," then you're not being dogmatic about it.
I happen to think it's quite a good ideology. But I don't want to make it seem superior by claiming that other people have a set of tenets about how the world should be and they have an ideology, whereas I have a set of tenets about how the world should be but mine is somehow NOT ideology.
We can claim that our ideology is best, but not that it somehow rises above the ideological.