Revisiting secular humanism

I recently received notification of a reply to a topic I posted about secular humanism, so rather than redirecting people back to it for discussion, I thought I would post the reply (which was a quotation) and my thoughts on the quote here.

"Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it." Tom Flynn

Since this quote was left w/o comment, I’ll just freestyle on it a little…

Without a mutual understanding of what one is referring to as 'the religious impulse', whether one finds any merit in the first half of the quote is to some degree arbitrary and circumstantial.

However, the second half offers a clue. It equates being "non-religious" with what one might describe as "sober rationalism" or "sober realism". This leads *me* to suspect something, that the quote is rooted in the assumption that 'religious impulse' means little more than 'blindly believing things in contradiction to otherwise reasonable sounding evidence' (which is all the credit some folks, even deeply 'religious' ones, give to experiences like faith) or 'wanting to believe in that which permits us to deny what we cannot accept' (death for example, or that there is no justice for some).

I wholeheartedly disagree. I do recognize that there are people who behave in such a fashion, and who use their religion as a cloak or screen their experiences or to justify and allow beliefs which may otherwise be deemed strange or out of touch with reality. But that is not, to me, the 'religious impulse'.

(CONTINUE...)

Every bit of evidence from the earliest signs of the emergence of human creativity and culture shows that the 'religious impulse' is an integral aspect of our nature. In this I am referring to the drive to understand our own nature, including our origins, our purpose, and our place in the universe. This includes the sum of all of our experiences, those which can be rationalized or rationally understood, and those which cannot. It’s the root of being human.

As for the latter half of the quote, I don’t find ‘truth’ to be ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ or otherwise. It simply is. But that doesn’t preclude compassion. For example, let’s say a mother has lost a child to an illness. According the formulation that seems to be suggested in the quote, the ‘warm’ or ‘soft’ lie is to believe that little junior is Heaven with the angels, and the ‘cold truth’ is that he is worm food. This dichotomy and debate obscures the reality of a grieving mother who needs a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on, and a friend to lean on.

It also highlights the need to appreciate the unique and irreplaceable nature of all phenomena, including the singular existence of each sentient being. No configuration of the ever-present moment in any life can be rewound or replaced. Once it is done, it is done. To that extent I would agree with the ‘standard’ secular humanist position (if there is such a thing). But that observation is the beginning for me, not the end. It’s one thing to intellectually assent to that position, it is another to take it heart, to sincerely and deeply make the realization of that fact into an awakening. For me it is also accompanied by other observations, such as the interdependence (dependent co-arising) of all phenomena (regardless of their 'position' on time and space). In turn these observations suggest that in fact what we refer to as ‘meaning’ is just a shorthand or model of the real thing, a formula or description of the nature of the relationships between phenomena, whereas actual meaning *is* (are) the relationship(s) themselves (objects depend on relationships, relationships depend on objects is the very brief version). Meaning is constantly arising and integral as the substance of existence. Hence, the answer to that ‘ultimate’ search to understand our own nature is present in/is every moment.

I cannot say how many ‘secular humanists’ would or would not agree with this, or how the Buddha used it to describe the delusion of a sense of separate intrinsic existence as the root of our suffering, but then, that’s why I’ve written before that according to the generally accepted use of the label, I probably wouldn’t qualify.