[lit-ideas] Re: Shadows, Fog, and Money

  • From: Eric Yost <Mr.Eric.Yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:59:47 -0400

It's been intriguing, in a sense, because there does seem to be a
difference between a "humanist" and an "atheist".  Maybe more the sense
  that a Humanist believes in People and in the concept of how if we
don't care  enough to take  care of Our World, no one else will swoop
down and do it for  us...

_____

Maybe because I am so deeply embroiled in the core humanist
value--humans as the measure of all things--I don't see humanism as
a big deal. I mean, a big deal in the sense that the scouts would debate
it or the religious right would get all knicker-twisted about it.

Humanism seems merely to be the proper balance to scientific materialism
or naive materialism. I don't think humanists "believe in People," per
se; rather I think humanists think people matter and that people are
sometimes capable of achieving transcendence without priestly mediation.
The insistence that people matter is more adequately expressed by
humanism than by those who see us dangling at the whim of Jonathan
Edwards' angry god or Monod's dice game of genetics.

Look how it plays out in popular culture: the humanists are the
optimists who believe we can get our collective act together; the
anti-humanist Christian/Islamic sects are the killjoys eagerly awaiting
the Rapture or the return of the Mahdi.

Eric


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