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Religious Humanism [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-08
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion, art, science, food, and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Today’s topic is religious humanism.
During the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the idea of religious humanism grew out of the liberal Christian churches. Religious humanists consider a deity (God, with a capital G, reflecting the influence of the Abrahamic religions) to be a human expression of ideals rather than as a distinct supernatural entity.
By 1933, philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, Unitarian minister Raymond Bragg, and others drafted a Humanist Manifesto which was signed by thirty-three Unitarian ministers and philosopher John Dewey. According to this manifesto:
“The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs.”
The manifesto lists fifteen affirmations and concludes:
“So stand the theses of religious humanism. Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.”
In 1941, the religious humanists formed the American Humanist Association. This association seeks to bring about a society in which being good without god is an accepted way of life.
In 1963, Sherwin Wine, often called the atheist rabbi, founded Birmingham Temple in suburban Detroit for Jewish freethinkers. This marks the beginning of Humanistic Judaism. Stephen Prothero, in his book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter, writes:
“For Humanistic Jews, Judaism is first and last about ethics—doing ‘good without God.’”
Concerning religious humanism, Vern Bullough, in an entry in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, writes:
“A large number of self-identifying humanists refer to themselves as religious. In the United States many members of the Unitarian Universalist Church, as well as other churches, identify themselves as religious humanists.”
How do you feel about religious humanism?
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