R-Booting Humanism: Politics and Religion
Doug Said: The main difference, it appears to me, is the difference in emphasis. You don’t want to be confrontational to (moderate) religionists, but do want to be confrontational to political conservatives.
I (and CFI generally) take the reverse tack: we are happy to ally ourselves to non-theocratic conservatives (under certain circumstances), but aren’t as interested in opening up dialogues with religious moderates.
This is how I see it too, Doug. The problem I guess is that we have different ultimate goals. My ultimate goal is to work with people the best as possible to create a more humanistic society. There are religious people and non-religious people with whom I share this goal, and with whom I share many of the methods of obtaining this goal. I however have found very little in common with the goals (and/or means) of certain kinds of political adherents (mainly the conservative authoritarians and neo-liberals among us) who may be religious (the fundementalists) or secular. Give me a liberally religious non-capitalistic progressive over an atheistic captitalistic conservative anytime! Once we have a more humanistic society, we can then deal with supernaturalism.
Doug: But IMO if there is any “bedrock” position to humanism it must be the rejection of the supernatural, by which we mean deities and the afterlife in particular.
No. That is the bedrock of naturalism, not humanism.
Barry
