Transcript Secular Humanism - Presbyterian Church of The Master

SECULAR HUMANISM
Mary Poplin
Presbyterian Church of the Master 3 of 4
April 26, 2015
• Radical individual freedom
• truth changes to human meanings
• No sin
• Political power determines what’s true, good,
beautiful
• Second commandment w/o First
• Psychology as self-fulfillment
• Education and media change beliefs via language
• Counters Jesus as Divine
Principles of Secular Humanism
NEW PLAUSIBILITY STRUCTURE
“EXCLUSIVE HUMANISM”
Our neighbors inhabit a world in which they are no
longer bothered by the God-Question because they
are exclusive humanists, a way of being-in-the-world
that offers significance without transcendence. They
don’t feel anything is missing. Religious belief is just
one option among others.
IN 1500s IN THE WEST IT WAS VIRTUALLY
IMPOSSIBLE
NOT TO BELIEVE IN GOD
In 2000s many in the West find this not
only easy but even inescapable
FOUR GLOBAL WORLDVIEWS
Material Naturalism
Secular Humanism **
Pantheism
Monotheism (Judeo-Christianity)
OFFICIAL HISTORY IN WEST
• 1934 Dewey Lectures Yale – A Common Faith
• 1941 U of Chicago – Humanist Fellowship
• 1952 – Amsterdam – Intl Humanist and Ethical Union
• Secular Humanist Manifestos – 1933, 1973, 2000
• Secular Humanist Declaration of 1980
• Amsterdam Declaration of 2002
MAN MAKES HIMSELF
AND HIS WORLD
Albin Polasek
If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is
indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only
afterward will he be something, and he himself will
have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human
nature, since there is no God to conceive it. . . . Man is
nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the
first principle of existentialism. . . . Man is at the start a
plan which is aware of itself . . . nothing exists prior to
this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what
he will have planned to be. . . . When we say that a
man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean
that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that
he is responsible for all men.
Jean Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism
VARIETIES OF SECULAR HUMANISM
SECULAR HUMANISM IN
SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
• Deconstructivism
• Cultural/Gender Studies
• Romanticism
• Psychoanalysis
• Marxism, Communism
• Reader Response
• Critical Theories
• Behaviorism
• Existentialism/Nihilism
• Humanistic Psychology
• Postmodernism
• Cognitive Psychology
• Political Secularisms
• Positive Psychology
RADICAL INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
Secular Humanism
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural—
that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into
my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the
sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my
prison crumbled and fell. . . . I was no longer a servant, a
serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide
world—not even in infinite space. I was free—free to think,
to express my thoughts—free to live to my own ideal—free
to live for myself and those I loved . . . free from devils,
ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were
no prohibited places. . . . I was free. I stood erect and
fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
Robert Ingersoll, “Why I Am an Agnostic”
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which
affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to
give meaning and shape to their own lives.
It stands for the building of a more humane society through an
ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of
reason and free inquiry through human capabilities.
It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of
reality.
International Humanist and Ethical Union
SECULAR HUMANISM AS A RELIGION
For if we understand religion to be values of
ultimate concern, the 20th century saw two worldthreatening examples—Nazism in Germany, and
communism in the Soviet Union—of the
emergence of secular religions, or what might be
called replacement religions, each violently intent
on eliminating its society’s traditional religious
faiths (in effect, its competitor faiths), and each,
when in power, ruthlessly indifferent to human
dignity and basic human rights.
Jean Bethke Elshtain
[We hold] a keen commitment to individualism . . .
emancipating individuals from illicit controls of
every type. . . . As secular humanists, we belong
first to ourselves. We are our own gatekeepers
when it comes to mediating the demands any
communities might place on us—even
communities we freely choose to join.
Tom Flynn, Council for Secular Humanism
CONUNDRUMS OF CONFLICTING
FREEDOMS
Freedom is a term that inspires respect, even reverence. In
the abstract, everyone admires it. . . . [However,] an
expansion of one person’s freedom often means a
contraction of other people’s freedom: if we recognize and
protect the freedom of the pornographer to market
pornographic materials, we simultaneously reduce the
freedom of people to live and raise their children in a
pornographic-free community.
-Steven Smith
TOLERANCE AS A TWO WAY STREET
Tolerance must accept the fact of
overlapping consensus.
John Rawls
PROBLEMS OF TOLERANCE
One who advocates tolerance ought to be prepared to
defend that suspect virtue not only against the familiar
modern criticism which holds that tolerance is too insipid
or unambitious a goal for a “liberal” society, but also
against the opposite and older (but, I think more
formidable) objection which insists that tolerance is a
political or psychological or even logical impossibility.
It is precisely our theistic heritage and commitments that
make tolerance an achievable virtue.
Steven Smith
TRUTH VERSUS
The human construction of
meanings
Conundrums Of Secular Humanism
Finding Consensus in
Human Dialogue
Problem of
Secular
Worldviews
No moral plumbline
No permanent ethical boundaries
Human Reasoning Alone
Ignores Laws of Nature
HOW DO THEY FIND
MORAL tRUTH OR CONSENSUS
IN HUMAN DIALOGUE ?
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
• Communicative Rationality
• Ideal Speech Situation
• Religious invited to table
• Speech must be secular
• Secular cannot critique/exclude the religious
• Egalitarian Constitutional Patriotism vs
Technocracy
TROUBLING QUESTIONS
• Who decides and is invited to Arthur’s mystical
round table?
• How are we to negotiate the consensus?
• Who performs Arthur’s function?
• How often are moral norms renegotiated?
• How are they enforced?
• By whom?
HOW ARE SECULAR NORMS DECIDED?
• The whims and strength of those elite in
political power at any given moment
- totalitarian, democracy, technocracy
• The influence of the secular media
• Democratic votes of electorate, bell curve
• Legislatures, courts and executive orders
The existence or nonexistence of
consensus has no obvious relevance to
the question of . . . justification. . . . The
standard example is pertinent here: if a
global consensus through much of the
world’s history regarded slavery as
acceptable, was the consensus correct?
Steven Smith
WHAT HAPPENS TO QUESTION OF WHAT IS
TRUE OR BETTER?
Two divergent theories may be compared on the common
ground, . . . And one may be judged better than the other.
By better we mean that it has greater empirical content,
more heuristic capacity, and so on. . . . Two religious
systems may be compared by their cultural consequences,
and here too one may be judged better than the other. By
“better” we mean that it recognizes and respects more
fundamental rights, satisfies more expectation, allows for
more efficient, transparent, democratic institution and so
on.
Marcello Pera, Italian Philosopher and Senator
SIN
MISSING THE MARK OF HUMAN
FLOURISHING
“so that it will go well for you”
When I give my view that there are no supernatural
dimensions . . . I attract pitying looks and anxious
questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find
meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere
and gross materialist, with no expectation of life to
come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring
about? . . . Since you don’t believe in our god,
what stops you from stealing and lying and raping
and killing to your heart’s content? The answer to
the latter question is self-respect and the desire for
the respect of others.
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
CHRISTIANS NOT NECESSARILY BETTER
PEOPLE THAN SECULARISTS –
THE ONLY THING YOU CAN SAY IS A PERSON
WHO BECOMES A CHRISTIAN WILL BE BETTER
THAN HE/SHE WAS BEFORE.
In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, an allegory on
the coming of totalitarian terror, one of the protagonists
comments acerbically on the naïve reactions in a time
of crisis of those he calls the “humanists,” people who
see themselves as living in a reasonable world in
which everything is up for negotiation. . . . Camus’s
“humanists” are unwilling to peer into the heart of
darkness. They have banished the word evil from their
vocabularies. Evil refers to something so
unreasonable, after all! Therefore, it cannot really
exist.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
That is why the little decisions you and I make every
day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good
act today is the capture of a strategic point from
which, a few months later, you may be able to go on
to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently
trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a
ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the
enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
-CS Lewis
SECULAR HUMANISM AS
CHRISTIAN ETHICS WITHOUT
GOD’S LAWS OR POWER
2ND COMMANDMENT W/O 1ST
ZUCKERMAN
ARE SOCIETIES W/O GOD BETTER?
Denmark, 1960
Denmark, 2000 13% pop incr
• 100, 000 crimes
• 500,000 crimes
• 300,000 on welfare
• 900,000 on welfare
• 1970 Divorce 18%
• 2002 Divorce 37%
GOOD WORKS
• One half health care in Africa from Christian organizations
• One quarter of AIDS care worldwide – Catholics
• Ghana example 1500s
• Religious and conservatives give more proportion of their
earnings to charity than liberals
PRINCIPLES OF SECULAR VERSUS
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
SECULAR PSYCHOLOGY AS SELF WORSHIP
“The modern self is characterized by such things as
freedom and autonomy, by strong will, and by the
presumptions that the self is self-created by the will,
operating freely in the construction. The self is assumed to
be strong, capable, and above all coherent; it is also
largely conscious and heavily indebted to reason or at
least reasonableness.
In recent years the presumed goal or ideal is the self of
self-actualization or self-fulfillment.”
Paul Vitz
SECULAR PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES
• In touch with human desires.
• Describe as socially acceptable
• Talk to self to change/accept
• Forgive self
• Magnify one’s goodness or rightness
• Self Actualization
MAJOR PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
• Humans have good and bad desires
• Confess the wrong to God who forgives and cleanses
• Strengthen or weaken desire through confession,
prayer and action
• Forgive unconditionally and immediately
• Good desires undergird destiny and character
• Recognize value of suffering
IF WE CONFESS OUR SINS, GOD IS
FAITHFUL AND JUST TO FORGIVE US
OUR SINS AND TO CLEANSE US
FROM ALL UNRIGHTEOUSNESS.
1 John 1:9
To be a Christian means to
forgive the inexcusable,
because God has forgiven
the inexcusable in you.
C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis,
“Essay on Forgiveness”
SECULAR INTERPRETATION OF
RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA
FORGIVENESS BY GOD
FORGIVENESS OF OTHERS
AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING
IN LATE LIFE
EXAMPLE
KRAUSE AND ELLISON (2003)
KRAUSE AND ELLISON
“Older people who feel they are forgiven by God are
approximately two and a half times more likely to feel that
transgressors should be forgiven unconditionally than
older people who do not feel they are forgiven by God.”
KRAUSE AND ELLISON
Finally, as noted earlier, official church doctrine
advocates forgiving others and seeking forgiveness from
God. Yet, we know relatively little about how these
theological issues are brought into practice in daily life.
TWO INTRIGUING LEADS ARE PROVIDED IN
THE LITERATURE…
First, a recent study … suggests that small formal groups in
the church, such as prayer groups and Bible study groups,
may promote the forgiveness of others. Second, research
indicates that the general psychosocial climate of the
congregation may have an important influence on the thought
and behavior of church members
If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness. 1John 1:9
WHO IS IT WHO FORGIVES US?
UNIVERSITY, MEDIA
AND GOVERNMENT CHANGE
OUR BELIEFS & VALUES
The social construction of morality
Making the strange seem familiar
I tried to give a secular humanist vision of the birth
of a great world religion. For this, apparently I
should be tried. . . . The forces of inhumanity are on
the march.
“Battle lines are being drawn in India today,” one of
my characters remarks. “Secular versus religious,
the light versus the dark. Better you choose which
side your are on.”
Salmon Rushdie
USES OF LANGUAGE - ANNE HENDERSHOTT
In major cultural transitions, words often change
their meaning as new norms evolve and old cultural
constraints loosen. . . . Those involved in the
politics of deviance foster subtle changes in the
language as part of a larger campaign to alter
perceptions. An effective media campaign—one
that pushes for standards of behavior based on
individual desires rather than moral categories—
begins the redefinition with a linguistic assault.
The man who preys on boys becomes
someone seeking only “intergenerational
intimacy,” and the promiscuous teenager is
redefined as simply “sexually adventurous.
Words like “crazy” and “deeply disturbed”
once were connected to suicide. Today they
have been replaced with words like “dignity”
and “autonomy” while those who oppose . . .
are stigmatized as “zealots.”
Anne Hendershott, Sociologist
POLITICAL USES OF RELIGION
“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in
the Roman world, were all considered
• by the people as equally true,
• by the philosophers as equally false and
• by the magistrates as equally useful.”
Edward Gibbons, Eighteenth Century Historian
HISTORIAN WILL DURANT
The Movement of liberation rises to an exuberant
worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing
disillusionment with every dogma and every idea.
Conduct, deprived of its religious supports,
deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself,
shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to
conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end
a society and its religion tend to fall together, like
body and soul, in a harmonious death.
SECULAR HUMANISM AS THE DESIRE AND
BELIEF THAT HUMAN BEINGS CAN
ADEQUATELY MEET SOME VERSION OF
CHRIST’S SECOND COMMANDMENT
WITHOUT THE FIRST
COUNTERING JESUS AS DIVINE
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really
foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m
ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I
don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing
we must not say. A man who was merely a man and
said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great
moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the
level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or
else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your
choice.
C. S. Lewis
Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or
else a madman or something worse. You can shut
Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him
as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him
Lord and God.
But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense
about His being a great human teacher. He has not
left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C. S. Lewis
• Radical individual freedom
• truth = human constructions that change over time,
culture, gender, race, nation, history
• No sin
• Political power determines what’s true, good, beautiful
• Second commandment w/o First
• Psychology as self-fulfillment
• Education and media change beliefs - language
• Counters Jesus as Divine
Principles of Secular Humanism
Christian Thought as Higher Rationality
Judeo-Christian Thought as Higher Rationality
IF WE CONFESS OUR SINS, GOD IS
FAITHFUL AND JUST TO FORGIVE US
OUR SINS AND TO CLEANSE US
FROM ALL UNRIGHTEOUSNESS.
1 John 1:9