Yes, I’m a Humanist
Some of my writings
How Many Americans Are Secular?
A Secular View of God
From 2001 to 2006 I posted with the username "Natural" on the Creationism & Evolution forum at Beliefnet.com. Here are a few of my original writings.
First off, what does being a Humanist mean? Humanists, like myself, believe that we fallible humans have the sole responsibility to figure out the world around us. It's that simple. While many religious people believe that life's big questions were answered in the past by others claiming to receive supernatural guidance, Humanists don't have confidence in those claims for a variety of reasons.
Humanists have a diversity of views on different subjects, but the core belief is the necessity of human beings to figure out how things actually work, where everything came from, what actions are helpful versus harmful, and what things are meaningful to our lives. For the Humanist, human rights forms the basis of morality and it is our responsibility to figure out right from wrong and do our part in promoting a more moral society.
While most religious people believe that the world today can be directly influenced by supernatural powers as the result of prayer, rituals or other techniques, Humanists don't find these claims convincing. On the contrary, we are convinced that human beings have the sole responsibility to control and change the world around us. If something in the natural world needs fixing or improving, we must do it ourselves.
Most Humanists rely heavily on the scientific method as used by the scientific community to figure out the natural world. It's a fallible process run by groups of fallible humans, but overtime it has proven itself to be the most successful tool we have to increase the accuracy of our understanding of life on planet earth.
Since there are many big questions that science hasn't and may never be able to answer, Humanists have different opinions on subjects such as the existence or possible nature of god, an afterlife and other highly interesting but so far entirely unverifiable subjects.
That's basically it in a nutshell if you use a "big tent" meaning of Humanism. Different groups of people sometimes combine another term with humanism to create a more detailed and specific meaning, such as secular humanism, modern humanism and even religious humanism. Other people who use a different primary label about themselves, such as agnostic, atheist, or followers of some type of religion, will also sometimes describe their views as being aligned with or largely in agreement with those of Humanists.
In fact, I would argue that the worldview of Humanism is accepted by a far larger number of people than those who would actually say something like, "Yes, I'm a Humanist."
As for my personal brand of Humanism, I’m what you might call a believer in the elephant in the dark room. When we speak of that something that has always existed, that allows for all the complexity in our world to exist and evolve, when we speak of having a sense of relationship to that something, and when we ponder the possibility of there being an afterlife, we are doing what we humans have been doing for thousands of years: feeling in that proverbial dark room and trying to understand what we find. I for one believe that there really is something there. Exactly what, well, that's the big question isn't it?
Over on the left you can find the 19 chapters of my book "A Secular View of God" that go over some of my views on these subjects, as well as some of my writings from Beliefnet.com. I'll probably post more stuff as time goes by. Hope you enjoy it!
(Last updated January 9, 2012.)