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Many humanists take the position that humanism is much more than atheism. This is a contentious statement and must be challenged, especially as it applies to people, i.e. to humanists and atheists.
2009-06-08
Many humanists take the position that humanism is much more than atheism. This is a contentious statement and must be challenged, especially as it applies to people, i.e. to humanists and atheists.
In my opinion, humanism is NOT "much more than atheism", it is just atheism viewed from the point of view of morals. Once you get rid of theistic morality, what you have left is humanism.
I recognize that one can define atheism very narrowly, and humanism much more widely (I do not), and this would make humanism more than atheism. However this approach must NOT be applied to human beings. People who self-define as atheists are generally humanists. They just choose a different word for it. And people who self-define as humanists are generally atheists. On the level of individuals, there is no substantive difference. And please, spare me those tired old stories about Stalin (or Pol Pot, or whoever) being an atheist but not a humanist, because such stories are not relevant. There is no evidence to support the thesis that atrocities committed by these persons were a result of their atheism or of the atheism of the state they controlled. There are many ways in which our innate human moral sense can be perverted, and atheism is NOT one of them. Theism, on the other hand, can and often does pervert that moral sense.
Statements such as "A humanist is an atheist with heart" -- or even worse, "A humanist is an atheist with morals" -- are offensive because they imply that somehow atheists have less heart or less morals than others, unless they "add" humanism to the mix. It would be more accurate to say that "A humanist is a closet atheist who is too cowardly to come out." Of course that would be unfair to those humanists who willingly call themselves atheists, but it does describe the behaviour of many humanists. At its worst, this anti-atheist attitude among humanists amounts to moral pretentiousness which emulates the moral arrogance of religious believers who think that one cannot be moral without belief in god. (And arguments of the type Stalin-was-atheist-but-not-humanist are also religious propaganda with no relevance to the moral stature of atheists.) Anti-atheist humanists merely replace god-belief with humanism and maintain the same prejudice.
Thus, the big problem with humanism is that many humanists seem to accept the very dubious religious idea that one needs to add some supplementary "-ism" to one's innate human moral sense (a product of our biological and cultural evolution) in order to be ethically responsible. I reject this idea completely. It may be true that atheism is no warranty, by itself, of a peaceful and orderly society. But exactly the same thing can be said of humanism. Abandoning theism as a basis of morality is a step in the right direction. But there are never any guarantees.
Humanist Canada has affiliated with Atheist Alliance International, and that is a very good thing because it undercuts the humanists-are-better mentality which I criticize.
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