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Secular Humanist aphorisms, copied from Free Inquiry periodical:
*Express an affirmative attitude toward others and ourselves.
* Compliment people if they do well; be polite, honest, and considerate.
* Focus on the best in individuals, not their faults or shortcomings.
* Applaud people's achievements, appreciate their creativity, respect their uniqueness.
* Learn to forgive and forget, to heal and respect, to modify and improve.
* Learn to make exceptions, be flexible.
* Be willing to change your mind and to admit when you are wrong.
* Try to help others if you can; be pleased if they succeed.
* Abandon jealousy, hatred, cynicism, revenge, or greed.
* Enjoy life, lessen your complaints, point out life's beauty or value, not its imperfections.
* Instead of bemoaning your fate or blaming others, pitch in and try to improve the situation.
* Seek to better the human condition, be constructive.
* Recognize that no one is perfect.
* Accept people for what they are, including their idiosyncrasies.
* Respect innovation, individuality, creativity, honest dissent.
* Have the courage of your convictions; do not be afraid to express them.
* Exude a cheerful, optimistic, affirmative attitude, especially where conditions warrant it.
* Focus on potential good, not possible evil, honor not betrayal, collegiality not hatred, justice not injustice.
* Hold people accountable if they have been immoral; protect those they harm; ask for reparations if they are due be merciful and understanding.
* Compromise differences, negotiate solutions.
* Avoid violence or force and seek a peaceful resolution of differences.
* Try to find common ground, shared moral principles, and values upon which we can stand and unite.
I can do all those things and still believe that we as a species generally are well and truly screwed and in for a world of hurt.
This is however a most excellent list of concrete principles to live by that will tend to elevate people who come in contact with you. Draw out the best in others. Or as my wife and I do, remember the best of people who are no longer with us and let go of the dross. If the apocalypse comes, help others to survive, at least until they beat you senseless and take your food, lol.
Yep. Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning for the win.
What is more ordinary than children pretending or fantasizing around jobs and families? My wife has told me that when she was a toddler she had mentally picked out the towels that would be hanging in the bathroom she would share with her future husband. But if she had grown up in a family that ardently believed in reincarnation and she shared any of these thoughts or fantasies with the adults, they would probably tend to ask questions or make assumptions that suggest these things are not an imagined future but a remembered past. Children want to please their caregivers and so would helpfully agree. in short order they'd likely believe it themselves.
No assumptions. Let the data speak for itself. I was on a website trying to get experiences with astral projection. People where claiming they really left their bodies and opposed to having a lucid dream. I asked several people to have someone place a note outside their bedroom door and see if they could read it. They all ignored me. LOL
The Dinar scam came thru my work so I went on one of those websites asking questions and was banned within days. The scam also came with websites encouraging this behavior with the "any day now". Some of my coworkers spent tens of thousands of dollars buying Dinar believing it would be worth 10,000X what they paid. This went on for years until they started retiring which they are probably still believing. These Dinar gurus also told these people to take their money out of the market in 2009.
Edit: oh yeah, I forgot they were introduced to the scam by a guy at church telling them they were "special and only special people should be told about this blessed opportunity". So, these two guys come into work (both of them spent 50,000) and told the blessed people about the opportunity. They pulled in about five people and one of them was a male coworker I was friendly with. He asked me about it because he knows I am into finance and I started laughing at him. He didn't buy any, had the other guys asked me I would have told them the same. I wasn't one of the "special people" so I minded my business. I learned my lesson being harassed by saying our employee sponsored defined contribution accounts (401K/Tsp) was available without the 10% early withdraw penalty in the year we turn 55 provided there was a separation of service. I must have contradicted one of the "good ole boys" and we can't have a young woman doing that. They were actually angry with me.
Last edited by L8Gr8Apost8; 11-04-2023 at 01:02 PM..
Well ... I scored 100% on the humanist test you posted, yet I have very little faith in humanity in general to survive much longer at least in the sense of "life as we have known it since about the end of WW2". I see super hard times ahead. Because most of humanity is not humanist, largely, lol.
Yes, theoretically humans have everything it takes to get along, help each other, practice empathy and compassion, find common ground, and so on ... yet it very much isn't happening. Quite the opposite. The world is largely turning fascist. It is highly ideologically polarized and tribal. People are intellectually lazy and privileged and selfish, and things are NOT headed in a better direction. And religious people often (not always) are in the forefront of these trends.
In fact I think some historian from 50 years in the future would regard us here in 2023 as already in WW3 ... we just aren't aware of it in the same way that people didn't realize they had already lit the powder keg of WW1 after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or that WW2 was pretty much inevitable after Hitler came to power. In both cases the shooting war hadn't gotten underway but it was a fait accompli.
So as a 100% humanist how do I have "faith in humanity", or at least redefine it to mean something other than what I apparently think it means?
I agree with you, Mordant. The world seems to be on downward spiral that I'm not sure it can recover from. And what do you think has caused this, as outlined in your second paragraph? Social media? (I'm not joking) Disinformation campaigns? Rampant capitalism? Greed of the "elites"? Religious take-over?
The OP's list of humanism goals is wonderful. It actually reminds me of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Recall that he too was against the religious leaders of his day.
I agree with you, Mordant. The world seems to be on downward spiral that I'm not sure it can recover from. And what do you think has caused this, as outlined in your second paragraph? Social media? (I'm not joking) Disinformation campaigns? Rampant capitalism? Greed of the "elites"? Religious take-over?
Well you can make an argument for all those causes and more, so I tend to drop WAY back and think of more foundational reasons. And to me the reason that underlies all those reasons is lack of empathy for others. Social media blunts empathy and objectifies everyone involved, teaches and promotes superficiality ... all things that should deeply offend any sense of empathy. Disinformation dehumanizes people. Rampant capitalism treats people as fungible commodities and "resources". Income disparity is basically the elites taking more than what they need at the expense of others about whom they care not a whit.
This is one reason that religion coming along and claiming to offer various virtue upgrades is seductive, because if you ask me what we do about this at scale in a way that we'd start to see inexorable improvements in public policy, fewer wars, better cooperation, less tribalism and polarization, I admittedly "got nothing" (just the same as I think the religious "got nothing"). I can certainly work on myself in these areas -- and I do -- I can suggest various changes to public education and politics and religion which, if implemented with the real urgency that it deserves, could start to make some real improvements. But I see zero will for such things and lots of entrenched forces working against them.
For example I think children should be taught cooperation, sharing, collaboration, negotiation, empathy, and tolerance .. but then little Sally comes home and begs her Dad to be nice to her new gay friend Teddy and he forbids her to have anything to do with the little "prevert". Maybe he also objects to the lessons of history that Sally is learning, which suggest that maybe the US is not all sweetness and light and has some serious harms to account for in its past, and he thinks that's not "patriotic" or that it's "subversive".
Of course even if this succeeded it'd take a few generations for more humane people to gain the levers of power and start undoing all the damage to civil society, the environment, etc, but it's already past time for that. So that's also a problem.
How exactly do we "got this"? And faith in what? The only kind of faith a humanist recognizes is the opposite of religious faith -- it is the justified confidence that X will happen if we do Y. But Y should have been done generations ago.
Now X will still happen if we do Y (fill in the blanks however you want ... if for example we accept people for who they are, one of the items listed earlier, that will make a more tolerant and empathetic world, I'm not saying it won't). The thing is we are not on some inexorable march to utopia here, we will be teaching people Y to get result X in the context of constrained circumstances and serious want, if I'm even half right. We might have a 16th century standard of living to contend with because we already screwed the pooch.
Optimism. Love it. I can see light at the end of a lot of tunnels, but not much sign that we are heading that way, yet ..a few signs. Fact is, I have seen threat of terminal horrors before and we are still here. I just think that despair gets us nowhere and we just have to keep on pushing even when it looks like we are losing ground. I'm not going to go into details, but I can imagine (if not expect) seeing some real problems crash and burn and high time. But they won't happen if we give up and let them get away with it.
No spoilers. And the bit I do is try to send out a message; we need to learn discernment, in place of gullibility. And be willing and able to make it stick when there are those who want to manipulate us for their own ends.
No spoilers. As the Buddha (supposedly) said 'Work it out for yourselves'.
No assumptions. Let the data speak for itself. I was on a website trying to get experiences with astral projection. People where claiming they really left their bodies and opposed to having a lucid dream. I asked several people to have someone place a note outside their bedroom door and see if they could read it. They all ignored me. LOL
<snipped>
Probably figured it was a trick question, since only about 1% of people can read in their dreams. There are two parts of the brain, Broca's area and Warnicke's area, that need to communicate in order to read something, and in 99%+ of people, they shut down during sleep.
I looked this up and read more on it after watching the TV series "Evil", which is about an atheist psychologist who is working with a Catholic priest to determine whether odd occurrences are from demonic forces or psychological in origin.
The psychologist keeps waking up to a demon-like creature in her bed, taunting her with reminders of things she has said and done. She solves the mystery by taping a piece of paper to her ceiling that says, "Can you read this?" The next time she has the "visitation", she looks at the ceiling, and she cannot read the words, and then she knows she is dreaming.
So back to your demand, you are asking people to do something in a dream that a human being cannot do in a dream, and they probably know that and figured you were just jerking their chain.
I did once look to have a specific dream, and I got more than I asked for. After my mother had been dead about six months, I mentioned to a close friend with whom I discuss woo issues that I had not had one dream about her. The friend suggested that before I go to sleep at night, I say out loud, "Mom, I miss you and I would like to hear from you" or some such. So that's what I did that night.
I woke up about an hour later after a very vivid dream in which my mother, looking as she did maybe in her 50s (she died at 91) was in my face in her living room looking very annoyed and saying, "What are you bothering me for? Keep living your life." Then she turned away and walked up the stairs to the second floor and disappeared.
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Optimism. Love it. I can see light at the end of a lot of tunnels, but not much sign that we are heading that way, yet ..a few signs. Fact is, I have seen threat of terminal horrors before and we are still here. I just think that despair gets us nowhere and we just have to keep on pushing even when it looks like we are losing ground. I'm not going to go into details, but I can imagine (if not expect) seeing some real problems crash and burn and high time. But they won't happen if we give up and let them get away with it.
