HUMANISM: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Based on a 1986 lecture to the A.H.A. Chapter in Boulder.
Revised 1991 and 1992.

READINGS

Letter from RME to the Denver Post:

“Returning from a fourteen month, 21 nation trip abroad I was saddened to find the fundamentalist/humanist battle raging here as it is abroad. The labels the combatants give themselves differ but the central issue is the same. Fundamentalists in Turkey call themselves Moslems; in China, Marxists; in Japan, Buddhists; and in Australia – as here – Christians. Their adversaries often claim the same labels for themselves. What distinguishes them is their definitions of truth. “Fundamentalists” insist that truth was given once and for all. “Humanists” insist that, like our ancestors, we struggle toward ever better approximations of truth. “Humanists” use scientific method to test truth claims. “Fundamentalists” quote a verse from the Bible.

It is easier to see this abroad than at home. The Cultural Revolution in China provides an instructive illustration. The fundamentalist Maoists tested everything by the Sayings of Chairman Mao and answered every argument by chanting verses from the little red book. Those who sought to apply scientific tests were at first ridiculed, then slandered, then subjected to psychological brainwashing, then deprived of jobs and positions, exiled and finally in many cases actually killed. The dreary sequence nearly destroyed the most populous nation on earth. It has begun here and threatens to convert the most powerful nation, my own, into a paranoid bully.
This “battle for the mind” is far more significant and ominous than most Americans of good will realize. History should have taught us that judging people by criteria of ideological purity will destroy all that is best in our democratic, pluralistic, and humanistic (small “h”) society. The real “enemy” is not other people, whether we label them “Fundamentalists” or “Humanists”. The real enemy is the very human tendency to look for easy answers and to strike out irrationally against those who disagree. “

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QUOTE FROM ARTICLE IN WORLD BUDDHIST FELLOWSHIP REVIEW
“While the prophet founders of religions declare that the community is world-wide and make no distinctions between the Jew and the Gentile, the Greek and the Barbarian, the traders in religion declare that the greatness of one’s own creed and group is the end and coercion and violence are the ways to it. They develop group loyalties at the expense of world loyalty. Such a bellicose condition is the only one in which life becomes worthwhile for a larger number of people. There is not much to choose between these religions, which exalt belief,

INTRODUCTION

What I do not want to do this evening is not deliver a travelogue. What I will try to do is to do a little swamp draining: to try to extract some firm ground out of the muddy waters that surround this whole question o religion and Humanism drawing from my observations over 14 months of travel in 21 countries.

First let me define a few terms: Words are imperfect carriers of ideas at best, but they’re all we have. I know there are other ways of using these words but since I don’t believe there are correct and incorrect definitions, only useful or counterproductive labels for ideas, I feel free to use words somewhat idiosyncratically as long as I’ve stated before hand my meaning.

First let’s take the term Religion: By “religion”, I mean “A way of being in the world . Religions include rituals, institutions and beliefs. Religious beliefs include Epistemological beliefs, Cosmological beliefs and Ethical beliefs. A religion can stress its institutions or its rituals or its beliefs. There’s obviously no requirement in Nature that religious beliefs be consistent. In fact most religions are outrageously inconsistent – but then so are most human beings. We who are afflicted with a compulsion to consistency are perhaps more to be pitied than praised.

1. SECULAR HUMANISM

I call my religion, my way of being in the world Secular Humanism. To many people that sounds very peculiar because they are used to defining religion in terms of belief in a supernatural power. Most people associate religion with belief in “God” and rank religions by the sophistication of their notions about the supposed creator and sustainer of the universe and his supposed purposes. This seems to me a futile exercise. For me the most important aspect of any religious belief system is its Ethics not its epistemology or its Cosmology. I really don’t care much whether a person believes in no God, one God, one God in three persons or a thousand gods. I think that the great mistake made by the American Humanist Association is to emphasize the non-theistic nature of our commonly held beliefs. That is part of our cosmology but it is not part of the cosmology of all the people who have and do call themselves Humanists through the ages. As you probably know, Pope John the XXIII considered himself a Christian Humanist. If you look in the Encyclopedia Americana you will find that the article under Humanism is devoted almost entirely to Catholic Humanism. The Library of Congress catalog lists under the term Humanism the works of the Renaissance scholars 99% of whom were Theists. Despite this the affirmation distributed by the American Humanist association states:

Humanism is free from any belief in the supernatural and is dedicated to the search for meaning and values for individuals on this earth through reliance on intelligence and the scientific method, democracy and social sympathy. Humanism contends that human beings are a part of nature, that they have emerged as a result of continuous evolutionary process and that all their values — religious, ethical, political and social–have their source in human experience and are the product of their culture. Humanism asserts that persons are responsible for the realization of their aspirations and that they have within themselves the power of achieving them.”

That is a pretty good summary of some of the beliefs of members of the American Humanist Association. It is not an accurate summary of the beliefs common to all who call themselves Humanists. It is not our secular, that is this- worldly orientation that allows us to call ourselves Humanists. It is the statement that comes first in the affirmation, the statement I left out:

“Humanism affirms the inherent dignity and worth of every human being “,

The American Humanist Association, insofar as it tries to limit the term Humanist to non-theistic or secular Humanist is, I think, contributing to the confusion. It is behaving as though Cosmology were the most important aspect of religion rather than Ethics. If that were the case I would call myself a Humanistic Agnostic. In European languages, Humanistic has always meant the tendency to give value to the individual human being simply because he or she is human. Anti Humanism is the tendency to consider Human beings in their natural state as things to be used or creatures of sin and worthy of eternal torture by a just God. Thus, it seems to me , Humanism should be defined as the philosophy/religion that makes the well being of the individual person its paramount value. Humanism can be theistic or non-theistic. Theism can be humanistic or non-humanistic. Non-theism can also be humanistic or non-humanistic. Which term you use as the noun and which term you use as the adjective should indicate which aspect of religious belief you consider most important. If belief or disbelief in a deity is the most important issue for you but you also believe in the inherent dignity and value of the human person then you should call yourself a Humanistic Theist or a Humanistic Atheist or a Humanistic Agnostic or a Humanistic Agnostic.

If however you, like me, consider the issue of deity secondary, then call yourself a Secular Humanist or a Theistic Humanist. If you want to get more specific than “Secular Humanist” call yourself an agnostic Humanist or an atheist Humanist or an Agnostic Humanist. If you want to get more specific than just calling yourself a Theistic Humanist then call yourself a Christian Humanist or a Buddhist Humanist or an Muslim Humanist. But it seems to me that simply calling yourself a Humanist is a semantic sin. It leads to confusion, not to communication.

But, in the final analysis it’s not ideas that are or are not humanistic, it is people who are or are not humanistic. And in my travels I met many people who considered themselves Humanists – Theistic and Secular.

For example: On December 9, 1985, I left my wife in Basil and took the train to Geneva, headquarters of the World Council of Churches and the European Headquarters of the United Nations and the World Conference on Religion and Peace. At the U.N. I picked up a book NEW GENESIS BY ROBERT MULLER a former Assistant General Secretary of the U.N. In it he writes:

“I have a Christ in my office. My colleague next door has a statue of Shiva. U Thant had a Buddha in his room. Each of us…has his own way of expressing faith in the human race and destiny. We…are all agreed..that life must be revered everywhere, that the human person is the supreme care of all our efforts…Pope John Paul II said that we were the stonecutters and artisans of a cathedral which we might never see in its finished beauty…Little by little, a planetary prayer book is thus being composed by an increasingly united humanity seeking its oneness, its happiness, its consciousness, its peace, its justice and its full participation in the###„ continuous process of creation and the miracle of life….”

Now if that sounds strange coming from a devout Catholic it is not because it’s uncommon, but because most Secular Humanists have not kept up with what is happening in Catholicism around the world. We tend to focus on the archaic and reactionary rather than seeing the big picture. We don’t realize that a Humanistic revolution is occurring within the religions of the world. The Fundamentalist Rightists are right. Humanism rather than Anti-Humanism has become the majority position within the hierarchy of the world’s religions. Not Secular Humanism as Tim LaHane claims, but Humanism nonetheless. Probably it is too soon to say that Humanistic Christianity has become Christian Humanism but I feel that is the case -and that Humanistic Buddhism is on the way to becoming Buddhist Humanism. An Anglican priest I met in Irakleon Crete and later visited in his home in Australia insisted that it was the work of God but I think it is something far more mysterious: The evolutionary drive inherent in intelligent life to survive. More and more human beings have come to the awareness enunciated by Pogo thirty years ago

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The result of this line of reasoning is that I tend to picture religions in terms of two dimensions:
One, the epistemological dimension runs from Intuitionism to Dogmatism to Latitudinarianism to the Scientific Method.
The other the affective dimension runs from Necrophilia to Biophilia.
Necrophilia means death loving and Biophilious means life loving. I’m using the terms the way Eric Fromm used them in The Heart of Man not the way Kraft Ebling used them in his description of sexual deviance.

Here’s my map for locating various religious belief systems.
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A TWO DIMENSIONAL TYPOLOGY OF RELIGIONS
BY ROBERT M. EDDY, M.DIV.
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Having established this framework, I’m ready to think about my experiences among the various religious groups I encountered in my earth circling 14 month journey. It enables me to answer with a few lines on a piece of paper some questions that, without this paradigm would take thousands of words to frame. With the help of this new Paradigm, I see that what I was observing in all the often bizarre confusion of beliefs, rituals and ethics, was stills from a very long documentary film on Religion. But stills are meaningless unless you have at least a storyboard to know where they fit in. This is my storyboard. I think that at last I understand comparative religious history. It would be nice if some University would provide me with a fellowship to develop the outline. But that’s unlikely.

2. RELIGIONS AND RELIGION

It seems to me that there are really only three or four sources of different religious traditions on this planet. Two can be identified with cities: Jerusalem and Athens. The other three: the now nameless religion of the Great Mother- which I will call Astarte-ism, Hinduism and Taoism, are probably older than any city. Buddhism and Christianity and Islam, today’s dominant religions, were even in their earliest forms fusions of earlier religions. In fact, every religion is built on the foundations of earlier religions. Sometimes the transition from the old to the new is so slow that one can hardly perceive the differences. This was obviously true in Nepal, where the local Buddhism is merely one of the numerous Hindu sects and in Tibet, where the gods of the Bon religion have become demons or Bodhisattva of tibetan Buddhism. But one could see it also in the Spanish and Italian Churches how the Ashtart-ian gods and goddesses of the Hellenistic civilization were transformed into Saints and Demons by Catholic worshipers. It is even visible in in Iona, Scotland the birthplace of Keltic Christianity where the forms used for the gods of the Druids and those of the Christians are almost identical. The conflict between northern and southern european Christianity has more to do with the differences between the underlying religions than the ostensible theological arguments that fill the history books. In Japan the fusion between earlier and later religions is clear. It has been said that a Japanese is Shinto at birth, Christian at marriage and Buddhist at death because each of these transition points of life is celebrated by different clergy – and the Japanese find this not strange at all. And in Thailand, where practically every young man is expected to spend part of his life learning how to be a Buddhist monk and where there are more Buddhist Watts per square block than Churches in Italy, in Thailand the King must be crowned by a Hindu priest.

But this is not a travelog – for that I need slides. This is supposed be a brief look at world religions and especially the growing religion called Secular Humanism – or Humanistic Secularism if you prefer. Last week the Denver Post published the letter which I read earlier. To my amazement three strangers took the trouble to find my phone number and call to tell me how enthusiastically they agreed with my sentiments. That’s never happened before. As the newly elected president of Humanist of Colorado I’m constantly amazed at the interest in Secular Humanism, even as it mis-defined by the Fundamentalists. Perhaps we are benefiting by the quality – or lack of quality – of our enemies. Or it may be that the Fundamentalists are right in one respect. That the world is moving toward secularism. If that is so I hope it is a bibliophiles/scientific secularism toward which American is moving, because I have become aware that there is a necrophilious creedal form of Secularism that I want to denounce as vigorously as I can. But I think that what is happening is that most Americans and Europeans are moving from a rather necrophilious – creedal Christianity toward a biophilious – latitudinarian Christianity. The rituals and institutions will change very slowly but beliefs can change very rapidly and they are changing.

I’m sure you have had experiences of working with Christians here in Boulder who shared your ethical, though not your “theological” beliefs. The same is happening around the world. Quite fortuitously we came upon the museum built in the birthplace of John Calvin. If ever there were a Christian villain in my book it’s John Calvin – and not just because he burned Michael Servetius. The curator of the museum is a marvelously erudite pastor of the french Reformed church who informed me after a friendly half hour of conversation that he had just finished fasting in sympathy with the Jesuit priest who is a member of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. That fast was observed by thousands of clergy of all denominations all over Europe. It’s purpose was to bring the American government to cease, or at least lessen, its support of those making war against the Nicaraguan people.

Four years ago when we were in Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury gravely offended the government of Margaret Thatcher by holding a memorial service in honor of all the fallen in the Falklands war – Argentine as well as British- thus abandoning the historic role of the Established church as the sanctifier of the status quo. This trip we heard a Humanist leader ruefully complain, “the trouble is that all the good Humanist causes are led by Christians.”

We stayed one night in the Christian Guest house in Bangkok and found that many of the missionaries who use it for R & R shared our “humanist” ethics and spent very little of their time “preaching the¸ gospel.” Needless to say these were not the new evangelists, the “dealers in religion” who are funded by the TelePreachers you see on American Television.

I visited the World Council of Churches offices in Geneva and talked with Rev. Tosh Ari, a Japanese Christian. I asked him if Ecumenism was faltering; if the Churches were drifting apart. He said that Ecumenism had been redefined to seek not just increased fellowship of all those who call themselves Christians but a greater sense of oneness among all the religious communities of the world to somehow increase everybody’s awareness of our membership in one species, living on one fragile planet with one precarious future.

What I believe is happening is that the Christian community is becoming more latitudinarian and more biophilious – or if you prefer, humanistic. I do not mean to say that there are not elements in the traditional churches which are still necrophilious and dogmatic but I think the trend is clear. But at the same time the power and the authority of those churches over their members is diminishing rapidly. The question my Humanistic Christian friends are asking is whether or not there is another religion growing up which is neither biophilious nor latitudinarian: a doctrinaire necrophilious secularism. We Humanists should be asking that question as well.

Somehow it was symbolic that Tosh Ari took me out the back door of the World Council of Churches Headquarters to the front door of the headquarters of the World Conference on Religion and Peace to meet his friend and my next contact, another Japanese: this time a member of Rissho Kossi Kai. Rissho Kossi Kai is a highly developed example of latitudinarian, biophilious buddhism. In may I visited the headquarters of the R.K. K. You’ve probably heard of them, they’re the U.U.A.’s rich Japanese cousins. They have about 6,000,000 members in Japan and are about H E R E on my chart.

Rissho Kossi Kai is based on a latitudinarian interpretation of The Lotus Sutra, a collection of Sermons ascribed to Buddha but dating from about 600 years after his death. They interpret the four Nobel Truths of Buddhism to mean:
1 The Inevitability of Suffering,
2.The Inescapability of Causality,
3.The Necessity of daily Religious Practice and
4 The Assurance of Extinction of the Ego.
They teach that
“All things and phenomena in this world constantly change”,
“all things in the universe exist in interrelationship”s, and
“the ultimate freedom is to be rid of greed,
aggression and self delusion.”
They believe that
“The Eternal Buddha…is actually the great life-force, the source of energy that permeates all beings.”

The Rissho Kossi Kai are not embarrassed by ceremony or by chanting words they may not understand or give assent to in their literal interpretation. Their worship services look suspiciously like Roman Catholic devotions – saying the Rosary for example -but here is how they explain this apparent inconsistency:
“For Human Beings, it is perhaps most natural to symbolize in a human form the life-energy of the universe because we can hold such an image clearly in our minds…. Through an image of the man who preached the teachings , we are moved and we can reflect on the depth of the teaching…For this reason, Rissho Kosei-kai members express reverence before an image of the Eternal Buddha.
Unlike many forms of Buddhism, they teach that a person can reach Nirvana only by practicing the Bodhisattva way – that is by giving unconditional service to all sentient beings. They do this both individually in what they call Hosa Groups, in the community through public service projects and globally by providing funds for service institutions like Hospitals and organizations like the World Conference on Religion and Peace. Since the Japanese are now among the richest people in the world the 6,000,000 Rissho Kossi Kai are making an significant positive impact.

Does Latitudinarian/ Biophilious Buddhism offer a better alternative than Latitudinarian / Biophilious Christianity as a world religion? I think it does. The sacredness of all sentient life – is at the heart of Buddhist teachings. It has no “eternal” hell, only torment resulting from the free choice of evil ways. It has no “saints” and “demons”, only people more or less advanced in the path of enlightenment. It has no single sacred text but thousands of Sutras enunciating the interpretations of devotees through history. Only in Tibet, so far as I know, has Buddhist clergy exercised direct political power. The Church State separation we cherish has been the usual pattern during most its history. But the thing that impresses me the most is that silence, contemplation, tranquility is the goal a Buddhist seeks rather than the dangerous Christian goal of the holy preacher, proclaiming the word, and suffering in service of humanity.

3.0 SECULAR HUMANISM AS A WORLD RELIGION

Traditionally the Bethlehem of non-theistic Humanism is Athens. “Man is the Measure” has been our battle cry against those who claimed that God or the Gods are the measure from the beginning. Together with this emphasis has been the notion that “you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Those words are attributed to a much later anti-establishment martyr, but they describe the attitude of Socrates of Athens who died at least 400 years before Jesus spoke. Those words underlay the program of Epicurus who gathered his followers in what we would today call communes, to learn that we need not fear punishment during life or after death because, if there are gods, they couldn’t care less about human foibles and because when we die, our constituent atoms are recycled and our sense of self and memories disappear forever. Other Greek schools favored different versions of what was truth, but they shared the notion that Truth was not given once and for all but was discovered by Human beings. Most of the Greek “Schools of Philosophy” were , whoever, closer to our esoteric cults than the polished pristine intellectual debating societies we usually think of. They often became stultified but as long as they were allowed to co-exist in a city/state the search for an ever better approximation of the truth continued. But when the State sought to counter the forces of deterioration by imposing conformity of belief, the necrophilious tendencies within the religious/philosophical traditions grew like weeds. Under Alexander and his immediate successors a large degree of religious and Intellectual freedom was allowed. The famous story of the Maccabees can be seen as an attempt of an enlightened king to force the Fundamentalists of Judea to allow persons of other beliefs – secular humanists for example- to worship freely. But then as today, for the worshiper of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the Jealous God, pluralism was ” the abomination of desolation.”

I believe that Ideological diversity is one of the hallmarks of civilization – and a drive toward ideological homogeneity one indication that a civilization is becoming necrophilious.

Non Theistic Humanism in Great Britain was from the beginning identified with the struggle to dis-establish the Church of England; to remove the civil disabilities placed on “unbelievers.” That long struggle protected British Humanists from the temptation to repeat the Puritan pattern which was to create a society where they, the Puritans, had the freedom to practice their religion and to deny that freedom to everybody else. Creating a pluralistic society was not easy and it seems that maintaining it is even more difficult. It seems that many Americans have not learned that the only way to insure freedom to practice one religion is to protect the freedom of all to practice any religion and the only way to protect the freedom of every person to practice his or her own religion is to maintain an unbreechable wall between the powers of church and state.

Unfortunately non-theistic Humanism in other traditions does not have that history of disestablishmentarianism. The first time I visited England I felt a certain self righteousness when I saw the depredations on the cathedrals by the Puritans. Iconoclasm has always revolted me. The devotion of an illiterate craftsman in creating a pieta or a Madonna is to be honored however that devotion has been abused by the “traders in religion.” But when I saw what had been done by the “enlightened” armies of the French revolution I felt guilty. For these were the armies that were supposedly to bring enlightenment; who worshiped the goddess “reason”. But what came out of that great dream of the French rationalists was “The Terror” and before long the military dictatorship of Napoleon. We must be candid and say that the professors of non-Theistic Humanism have some skeletons in their closets too: IF we claim as ancestors all those who proclaimed their abandonment of superstition and claimed the crown of rationalism.

The people who wear the mantle of that great Humanist, Carl Marx are, or until recently have been, committed to ideological homogeneity and when they have obtained political power have sought to reserve political power to those who hold their own beliefs. Thus we have the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – meaning the dictatorship of those who conform to the creed of Communism. We have seen within the communist party of China the kind of Ideological warfare that characterized the Christian Church when it obtained control of the Roman Empire. In the name of the “Greatest Good for the Greatest Number” and “freedom from superstition” one saw the most blatant violation of what I would consider basic humanist principles. The “Cultural Revolution” in China bore disturbing resemblances to the Puritan revolution in 16th Century Geneva or 17th Century England. We cannot deny that Marxists are, historically one branch of non-theistic (or secular) Humanism but to my view they have failed to realize that one cannot create a society which maximizes the well being of the masses if one does not grant basic intellectual freedom and human rights to the individual.

I had read in an excellent book on Japan that the University establishment was almost entirely Marxist. I asked my friend Yoshi, a professor of Sociology about that and he said, “Yes, it was true until Cambodia”. The horror of that nightmare of Marxist Fundamentalism bred on young impressionistic Khmer nationalists by a rationalist French Professor, shook the Japanese professors out of their ivory towers. We too should heed the lesson. It is not true, as the Fundamentalists claim, that the abandonment of Christian Dogmatism leads to such horrors. But it is also true that the replacement of one dogmatism with another will not bring about a humanistic society.

Non-theist Humanists of the world, and they are growing in numbers and in proportion, are coming to realize that freeing people from superstition is not enough. Somehow we must also help, persuade, encourage, facilitate, promote, support, those institutions and activities which express biophilia, the love of life, for one cannot love life and seek the death and destruction of any portion of humanity.

Fortunately the outcome is not dependent on we few non-theistic Humanists.

I thank whatever gods may be – even if their collective name is only “lady luck”, that the leaders of humanity’s great religious communities are beginning to speak with one voice against the Dogmatic/Necrophilious leaders of the “Principalities and Powers”, the Reagans and Gorbochofs, who seem prepared to incinerate and radiate planet Earth in order to preserve their nation’s military industrial complexes.