Secular Humanism’s Whitewashing of Our Relationship to Nature
Animality, people’s progress, and the humanist manifesto
The secular humanist manifesto is a remarkable document.
Imagine a religion based not on loyalty-testing submission to theological fantasies, but on the most straightforward representations of reality, on the observations that science works, that people flourish when they cooperate, that the modern promotion of secular interests has been socially and technologically progressive.
That’s secular humanism, and you could even consult science-fictional conjectures of how far we might progress in the distant future due to humanistic principles. That would be human-made progress, the kind we’ve already seen in history, projected to compound for centuries or even millennia.
The first humanist manifesto, written in 1933, spoke optimistically about humanism as a socialist religion. That was updated in 1973 to reflect the sobering realities of WWII and the Cold War, and a shorter version of the manifesto appeared in 2003.
As commonsensical and encouraging as most of these manifestos may seem to nontheists, there’s a tension in them that bothers me. The tension is perhaps clearest in the third manifesto.
