RE: Heartless Humanism?
January 2, 2014 at 11:47 am
(This post was last modified: January 2, 2014 at 11:47 am by theyear12013.)
(January 2, 2014 at 2:15 am)mralstoner Wrote: Most of the atheists on this forum (and the internet) are rabid anti-authority individualists, and these people welcome anarchy. So you won't find much recognition of this problem here. But smarter people know that individualism is a recipe for civilisational suicide. It is only cohesive groups that survive in a competitive world.
How humanism overcomes cultural variation, I don't know. Humanism will probably have to factionalise and offer the masses a more supportive and articulate community with a more specific culture/lifestyle.
So there's a long way to go before humanism becomes a flourishing movement. But it's not as gloomy as Rex thinks it is.
Absolutely agree. Humanism also needs a foundational epic story. It already has future oriented epics such as Star Trek + Star Wars etc, but it lacks an epic that incorporates the latest science on evolution into a founding story for all of humanity and civilization. Many people I meet who first toy with atheism revert to their birth religion because it gives them a thousand year old story that ties them to their family and nation. But when you tell them that human civilization is 10,000 years old and we have 500,000 years of homo sapien, it is a much more epic and inspiring idea than their particular national manifestation. And I have successfully reached people this way. It would be great if there were more books, movies, youtube videos that told the story of human evolution as an epic story with relateable drama incorporated into it.
