Humanism

Humanism is about what it is to be Human and how to live the best we can...

Chapter 3 finished

The disadvantage of writng a book in blog posts is that if you multiply edit one post you still only get one announcement so that's why I am making this post!
Chapter 3 is finished!

posted by: Frewin at 18:37 | link | comments |

Chapter 3

The Evolution of Spirituality!

Neither Humanism nor the "great" or "organised" Religions of the world have always been  around, they have evolved as man has, over a period of time. In fact compared to the several million year evolution of man from ape, these "organised" religions have only been around a few thousand years yet the spiritual evidence of cave and rock paintings goes back 30-40,000 years. The term "great" is used to distinguish the modern "organised" religions such as Christianity or Buddhism from all the un-named tribal religions that went before and still exist in many parts of the world.  It doesn't mean they are necessarily greater except perhaps in the numbers of followers.
As we saw in the last chapter, Humanism offers another answer to the great questions of life and death that all religions tackle, it is also part of this history of spiritual evolution. The roots of Humanist thinking go way back beyond written records and it could be argued that the ultimate form of Humanism is the final destination for the evolution of spirituality

You talk about the evolution of man from the apes but some people don't accept the theory of evolution, what about that?

It's true that some people don't believe in that theory and those people would probably not agree with the idea of religion evolving either and their argument is part of the story but first let's consider what Humanists do believe rather than what others don't!

OK, so how did spirituality evolve?

1 Inventing God

Let's go back to those cave dwellers. They lived in a pretty dangerous and scary world, wild animals, the night, storms and even the seasons were hazardous - if you didn't get enough food in Winter, you died! Almost everything must have seemed more powerful than human beings. It look time to get a little mastery over life, a little safety. We didn't even start off by discovering weapons for hunting, we were scavengers of carcases killed by others as we moved out of the forests an onto the plains. Later, when we had discovered fire that could keep us safe at night, we developed a weapon more deadly than any spear or club, we learned to talk! If you can talk you can share knowledge and memories about animals and their ways, you can plan the hunt. You can talk about where the best fruit and seeds and nuts and roots are and teach your children how to survive. Imagine too, huddled round a camp fire, how the first wonderings about life and death and the meaning of it all and how it came about must have begun. You could see how life animated another person and how death took away that what? Animals too had life but they lived and moved in a different way, in fact each creature had its own... what? A river moved in a lifelike way with different moods and plants and trees all had their own, well, their own what? Life force? Spirit? The word spirit comes from the Latin word for breath although it probably goes back to Greek and even earlier languages in turn. If you think about it, breath is the first thing that enters our body when we are born and the last breath is the last moment of life so what better word for that which animates our lives from start to finish. there are other words which can have the same meaning - anima from the same root as animal and animate or animation. Soul is another yet here is a problem, these words or rather the ideas they represent are so old, so important, so central to how we talk about life that they have gathered many meanings for many people and we must careful how we use them. Humanists believe that breath is the only thing that enters the body a moment after birth whilst many religions believe in an immortal soul with an existence separate from the body and this is called Dualism - the Body/Soul split. Some religions even believe that the soul is born again into body after body on a protracted spiritual journey. A dualistic view of the soul can also be called Supernatural and god(s) and souls form the supernatural world whilst the body exists in the natural world. The natural world is a matter of fact whilst the supernatural world is all about belief.
Our ancestors saw spirits in everything, the spirit of the wolf, the great Redwood tree, the Moon and the Sun, especially the Sun. We who live indoors can forget how important the Sun was to early man, how it warmed your body each morning and how its shortening presence led to winter and hunger and how welcome its return was in the lengthening days of spring. Whenever early man imagined, made up, stories to explain the world, the Sun Spirit is usually a big part of those stories. Those early explanations of the world where everything has a spirit, the tree, the animal, the Sun, we call Animism  and as anima means the same as spirit we could have called them "Spiritism" but Animism sounds better so Animism it is! Now, here's an experiment for you to do, make up a very short story about the Sun Spirit, just a few sentences will do...

Let's see. "The Sun Spirit enjoyed spring time when he shone on the people longer each day, letting them stay up longer and work at their tasks of hunting and gathering. They grew happier and plumper each day and the Sun Spirit rejoiced to see their happiness."

Good, that's enough already! Let's look at what you did there, what you told us about the Sun Spirit. Firstly, in your story. he is a he! He has feelings, happiness, enjoyment! Lastly, he operates to a plan "spring time when he shone on the people longer each day". All in all the Sun Spirit sounds like a person, like a human being albeit a super powerful one. There are stories where the Sun Spirit could be an object, a flame, a great pearl or whatever, but in so many stories we see the tendency of spirits to be like human beings or super-humans - Gods even. Every tribe had its own creation story about how the world was made including themselves - the human beings and  whoever the God was that made them,  if he was of the "super-human" variety, then you could say that he made humans in his own image but we can also see that that the reverse is true, humans made the gods in their own image!

So religion came about in a large part because of human fearfulness?

Yes but its more than just fear - its a constant drive to make sense of the world, to find out how things work, what the cause and effect are and to most humans, even today, its very hard to look at this wonderful world and not see it has having been created by somebody for some purpose. Most of what we humans do has a purpose, if we don't constantly work, we don't eat and its easy to think that everything else in the world is equally purposeful. We find it hard to accept the idea that the world just is, that it doesn't have a purpose, wasn't made for a purpose however, all that is really just our trying to project our way of seeing things onto the world. We project ourselves onto the gods we imagine in order to explain and make safe and purposeful the world we live in. "The gods made the world and us in it and if we do right by them they will do right by us - if only we can understand their purposes and needs and do the right thing by them - everything will be alright!" That is how worship came about.

2 The emergence of Churches.

It took a long time for humans to evolve from chimpanzee to the way they are today, for their brains to grow significantly bigger, the speech centre to  develop in the brain, to learn to walk upright and for human culture to blossom as a consequence of all that brain change. It took a couple of million years during which time humans expanded across the earth but didn't really move past their hunter gatherer ways. The next big phase of human existence would last only a few hundred thousand years and that was our purely Agricultural phase. It would be followed by an Urban revolution, only ten thousand years, an Industrial revolution  only  some one hundred and fifty years ago and lastly , only  a couple of decades in the making,  an Information revolution.  Each of these stages of  human development has profoundly changed the lives of human beings and their world,  spirituality  has also gone on evolving alongside these other changes.

How did agriculture come about and how did it change our spiritual life?

The creation story in the first book of the Christian bible, The Book of Genesis in The Old Testament, can be interpreted as a story about the human evolution from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculturalist. It is a lament for a lost way of life, a paradise lost and its all the fault of the woman. Just imagine, in hunter-gatherer society, the men do the hunting. They are slightly bigger and stronger than women and off they go on the hunt and when they "bring home the bacon", there's a big feast and the men earn the right to lay around for a few days before going off on the next hunt. Women on the other hand, must work every day, it takes a lot of effort to gather enough food to survive by picking nuts, berries, roots, leaves and seeds and then there are the children to be looked after. But as they picked their food bit by bit, women also gathered an immense knowledge of plants and how they grew and eventually they realised that instead of gathering plants where they grew in nature, they could plant the seeds where they wanted them to grow, in a patch where they would be easy to harvest at the appropriate season. Of course now they would need to guard their crop, form animals or birds who could also have an easier feast on this artificial concentration, perhaps even from other humans. So it was no longer possible to wander freely over great distances, the crops had to be tended. The whole way of life changed, gone the hunt and the rest periods, man was condemned to "work by the sweat of his brow" and it was women's fault. If only they hadn't figured out how to do it - "eaten from the tree of knowledge"!
Although modern Humanists don't accept the Garden of Eden story as a literal truth about the first humans, it is a spiritual and artistic account of one of the most important shifts in human existence. Unfortunately, some Christians do believe the Garden of Eden story together with much or all of the rest of the Bible as literally, God given truth and they see in this story the source of what they call "original sin", something fundamental and inevitable about the "bad" side of human nature. We shall return to this idea later but for now let's just rest with the idea of how rational and important events can be depicted and celebrated in poetic and artistic ways.

Even before the shift to agriculture, there would have been certain people in each tribe who specialised in certain activities and were supported by the rest of the tribe to pursue their speciality. The best spear maker perhaps, a wise healer, a story-teller, a painter, a shaman or "witch-doctor". These activities became important as long as there was enough food to go round and whilst some of these specialists dealt in practical skills, we can see that some were dealing with spiritual matters, intangible things, philosophical, priestly matters.

With agriculture, surpluses gradually grew and this led to the possibility of trade and more significantly, to towns! Towns grew up at the cross-roads between places, they became the market-place where surplus's could be exchanged and specialists gather to sell their wares for a share of the surplus produce. If the spiritual leader of a tribe was important, then the possibilities for power of the new town-based priests was even greater. Likewise, alongside the priests, where there had been tribal leaders, now there were Kings. Royal Houses and Religious Houses, hand in hand, the hallmarks of urban civilisation and both of them demanded their taxes from their subjects. I mention houses and that too is  one of the major changes with urban living - people live in houses and generally this means one family, one house. In many agricultural societies, often a large family group of several generations and many brothers and sisters and their children, a so called "extended" family, all lived together in a compound with lots of huts, the family as tribe. The one set of parents and their children living separately in one house or a "nuclear" family is one of the biggest changes of the urban revolution. Once separated from the tribal extended family, people found it easier to move to another town or even another country carrying their ideas and their particular culture with them. In extended families, children grow up with the benefit of lots of adults to help them develop but in the nuclear family, there are just two parents and all the family interactions and emotions are concentrated into a tiny world for better or worse. There is this concentrated emotion and connection on the one hand and being isolated from other people outside the immediate family on the other and this must surely affect the way the human spirit develops. Similarly, as human "civilisation" evolved, so did religion. The Animism of the early hunter-gatherers was replaced by Pantheism, the thunder spirit became Mars for the Romans or Thor for the Scandinavians - both gods of war and each part of a group of gods who, like humans, had developed specialisms. You could pray to one god for success in war, another for luck with love and another for a safe harvest. Different cultures had different religions with different sets of gods and if those cultures clashed in a war, then it was also seen as a test of their gods effectiveness. The "most powerful gods" should win out and if they didn't, then perhaps the others gods were better or was it just that your own gods were displeased and punishing you. Should you change gods? The next step was the idea of a single God or Monotheism, a god so powerful there could be no confusion, no doubt, he would see everything, know everything, be all powerful. This is the God of Judaism and Islam (as religions they come from the same root), the fierce Old Testament God.

This God, whilst still or perhaps even more than ever is seen in man's image, albeit so majestic as to be un-knowable,  is a  scary god, so fierce is he and  there is a need to interpret his wishes, to find an ambassador, a go-between, a prophet, a Messiah. Jesus and Mohammed never claimed to be more than human prophets, the idea of Jesus as the Son of God is a later invention of human church leaders and politicians. The role of Jesus  was to bring a new interpretation of God's will and Muslims see Mohammed as returning religion to the way it was in the days of Adam and  Abraham because it had been corrupted and Jesus too was a reformer, overturning the money making activities that surrounded the Temple. Jesus also softened the Old Testament view of God demanding "an eye for an eye" and instead preached of "turning the other and God's Love. cheek". This is a softening of the all powerful God, a humanising of him and his values. In India some 500 years earlier, Prince Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, a religion very much to do with how to operate as a human being, how to let go of destructive tendencies and promote harmonious living - to free humans from their suffering. The Buddha is not a god but a human and his teaching is all about humanity.

The problem with most religions is that they are dispensed by churches and what ever might be divine in their inspiration is all too easily corrupted by the (mostly) men who run the "franchises". This is why the Protestant Reformation occurred, in protest at the wealth of the Roman Catholic church, wealth derived from a priesthood interposing between people and God and charging for the privilege. The same impulse to return the church to an earlier form as mapped out by Jesus, the same reforming impulse as the inception of Islam. These "great" religions are constantly fragmented into sects by men with different ideas about how to carry out god's work and Christianity in particular has been very successful at spreading to new peoples by incorporating just enough of local religious festivals and symbols to ease the absorption of the converts. This is all the work and inspiration of men, of church men. They might cite passages from the bible or other ancient teachings whose interpretation guides them, but that is just what it is - an interpretation by men, not the explicit word of God.

3 The final evolution

The Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution have really just intensified the effects of the Urban Revolution. Cities have become even bigger and that means that in the midst of millions of people, individuals can become lonely and isolated. People move about following their work to an even greater extent, we say we live in a global village but many people don't know where to really call home. Everything is bigger including the disputes between neighbours which are now wars between countries. Food and goods are moved around the world and people eat fruit they have no idea about the country the origin of or who grew and picked the fruit and whether that person was paid decently for their labour. Nowadays we can make new friends on the internet who live the other side of the world yet we may not know much about the people who live next door. Our world has changed so much and so fast, increasingly fast, that it is no wonder some people feel lost and troubled of spirit. The "great" religions are there for people and whilst still strong in places, in other places people turn for comfort to material things, an insatiable hunger for the latest thing, for more, better. People are mostly safe from the things that threatened early man but there are things that every human must face eventually, illness, old age and death and no amount of material wealth can avoid these three things. Money might ease some illnesses, make old age more comfortable but we all face death in the end.

We saw in the last chapter that religion offers an answer to the questions what is the meaning of life and what happens after death and as many people "lose faith" in the churches dispensing of religion and find that there are limits to the appeal of Materialism, there is a need for a new way of answering those important questions. At the same time, our scientific understanding both of the world around us and of ourselves has grown enormously. Darwin pointed to where we came from, geology explained the history of the planet we live on, astronomy has shown us the vastness of the universe that world is situated in. Neuroscience and psychology have started to map out the inner space of our minds and the behaviour it engenders. In the Twentieth Century, this Rationalism led to a vigorous emergence of Humanist societies - so called Modern Humanism. Is the time ready for the human race to face the truth about the meaning of life and man's place in the scheme of things? What if we accept that there is no purpose to the world, it just is? What if there is no god or gods who made it and no afterlife or reincarnation, just this one chance at life for each of us? Have we evolved enough to accept that position and take responsibility for ourselves and our planet without a father-figure looking over our shoulder?

The universe and life are scary and as we have evolved, we have developed many spiritual solutions to help us cope with the journey, Humanism is perhaps the ultimate evolved position.

To be continued....

posted by: Frewin at 06:48 | link | comments |
evolution of humanism

Chapter 2

Is Humanism a Religion?

If Humanism is about how to live well it sounds like something you might get in a church and also its an -ism like Buddhism and Hinduism so is it a religion?

That's a very good question and the answer depends what you mean by religion. So many people in the world belong to one or other religion that any understanding of what it is to be human will have to account for religion, what it is and what it does for humans.

When did religion begin then?

Another excellent question, its always best to begin at the beginning and in this case we are talking about the very beginning of humankind. Anthropologists are people who study the history and workings of mankind scientifically and if they find evidence of a ritual burial, a funeral, which today is usually a religious activity, they take this as perhaps the most important indication of whether the early hominids (man like creatures) were human or not. First there were creatures who simply left their dead where they died as animals do and then new groups are found who bury their dead, or wrap them up, or put their remains in a special place and this tells us a lot about those people?

What does it mean?

It means that those people, because we can now think of them as people rather than "animals", those people are wondering what happens after death and they are doing something special with their dead as a result of that wondering. Later in history for example, the Romans believed that the dead were ferried across a mythical river, the Styx to a land of the dead and they placed coins over the eyes of the dead that they might pay the ferryman to take them to their rightful place. For a whole tribe of people to repeatedly follow a ritual also tells us that they could talk and share the story that determines their burial ritual, whatever their particular story and ritual may be. Stories passed on from person to person, especially stories that are about how to live and what might happen when we die are called culture and no animals, as far as we can tell, have a culture anywhere near as complex as ours if at all. So evidence of burial tells us about early man's speech, culture, imagination, concepts of life, the passage of time and death and to have such things you need a very big brain and that is why evidence of burial is the marker of when we became human.

So much knowledge just from an ancient burial, its fantastic!

Yes and there's more! Sometimes we find objects buried with our ancestors remains, often functional things like a hunting knife but sometimes the objects are purely decorative, a piece of jewellery or adornment or else we see that the functional objects are made with just a bit more than their function requires, a little decoration of the handle perhaps. This is evidence of another uniquely human trait - Art! Perhaps the most famous thing about our ancient (sometimes) cave dwelling forebears is their cave paintings and if their ritual burials tell us something about their thoughts on death then the ancient cave paintings give us literally the most vivid picture of ancient humans' life. I said they "sometimes" lived in caves because these paintings were sometimes on the walls of caves that were or could have been lived in, but sometimes they are deep inside caves far too deep and dark and dangerous to have been homes. What possessed these people to equip themselves with light (no torches or even candles) and painting materials and to venture into these dark and secret places? They must have been doing far more than decorating the living room wall with pictures. Well, just as the funerals tell us that they were wondering what happens after death, so cave paintings are thought to show the wondering of early man about the meaning of life. these are the two big questions which perhaps every human asks at some point in their growing up, "What is the Meaning of Life?" and " What happens after we Die?" You could say that Religion, any Religion, is the attempt to answer these two questions and by that definition then humanism is also a religion but as we shall see, the answer that humanism arrives at is very different to most religions and in the end you will have to judge for yourself whether you call it a religion or not, its only a word and not the thing itself.

posted by: Frewin at 04:16 | link | comments (4) |
religion

Chapter One

What is Humanism?

Humanism is about what it is like to be human and how to live as well as we can as human beings.

Is Humanism a movement, does it have an organisation?

There are lots of Humanist organisations, local national and international but there are many more people in the world who are humanist yet who don't belong to a Humanist group and may not even know that they are humanist. Humanism is a big bunch of ideas, a philosophy and you can have those ideas without having the label for them. In fact humanist ideas are so common that they are all around us and looking for Humanism is like walking in a forest and "not being able to see the wood for the trees!" When we talk about humanist ideas we can use a small "h" and when we talk about organised Humanism its a capital "H".

When did Humanism or humanist ideas begin?

Because humanist thinking is so central to human life, whether you call it humanism or not, the ideas have probably been around as long as human beings themselves but Ancient Greek philosophers were the first people to write down the ideas we now consider as Humanism.

Why do we need to think about "what it is to be human" - surely everyone knows that?

Everybody knows what it feels like to be them but even that changes, as you get older you feel differently about things. If you are lucky enough to live in a country that enjoys peace, you will not know what it is like to be a human being caught up in a war. If you are a man, you will not know form your own experience, what it is like to be a woman. If you are rich, you may have little idea what it is like to be a poor human being, if you are healthy most of the time, you  won't know what it is like to be permanently sick. So our personal view of what it is to be human is not enough, we need to get a bigger picture if we are to live well.

When you say "live as well as we can as human beings", you mean be Happy, right?

Happiness is great but its not the only goal and it only lasts a certain time anyway - you have to come down a bit otherwise you you wont feel the high another time. There are lots of other goals worth striving for (and achieving them is a source of happiness anyway) - health, wisdom, knowledge, understanding, belonging, friendship and then there are the freedoms, freedom from fear, from hunger, from pain and disease. Most people are pursuing several or even all these goals simultaneously, some of them directly involve other people like Friendship and some mean being involved indirectly for example a scientist working to find a cure for a disease which he or she will never suffer from themselves. Their work involves gathering knowledge, putting it to use, dealing with people who suffer with the disease, with colleagues perhaps around the world and their work may take a lifetime or more.Of course they will be very happy if they make the breakthrough and find the cure in their lifetime but even if they don't and must "hand the baton on" to their successors, it doesn't mean that they won't have achieved many of the above goals in the course of their life's work. Passing on the baton is what happens in a Relay Race which of course, is a team event and that's a pretty good metaphor for the humanist view of life, we're born, we do the best we can while we live as part of a team and try to leave the world a little better than we found it before we die.

posted by: Frewin at 06:02 | link | comments (2) |
definition