Humanism

Humanism refers to philosophical stances which emphasize the individual and social potential of human beings and their agency as the starting point of philosophical inquiry into moral values, concerns and practices. Religious humanism integrates humanist ethical philosophy with religious beliefs and rituals which center on human needs, interests, and abilities. Secular humanism refers to non-religious worldviews which promote reason, ethics, and justice while specifically rejecting religious dogma as a primary basis for decision-making.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

See also:

Ethical movement ~ Freethought ~ Humanities ~ Secular humanism ~ Unitarian Universalism ~ List of Humanists

Quotes

Effort happens. Thought happens. And it is up to us humanists to help — to expend our sweat, our effort and our thought. Then there will be hope for the world. ~ Isaac Asimov

The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility. ~ Lionel Trilling

If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not? ~ Clemens Vonnegut

• We’re not the chosen of any god. We only have each other.
  • Neal Asher, Shell Game (2009) in Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (eds.) The New Space Opera 2 (mass market paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-156236-5), p. 269

• As indicated by our very name, we humanists celebrate humanity, want humanity to survive, and recognize that if humanity does survive, it will be by its own efforts. Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us. Miracles don't happen. Sweat happens. Effort happens. Thought happens. And it is up to us humanists to help — to expend our sweat, our effort and our thought. Then there will be hope for the world.
  • Isaac Asimov, in Humanist magazine (September/October 1989)

• Discipline, so far as it exists, is not of the humanistic or the religious type, but of the kind that one gets in training for a vocation or a specialty. The standards of a genuinely liberal education, as they have been understood, more or less from the time of Aristotle, are being progressively undermined by the utilitarians and the sentimentalists.
  • Irving Babbitt, in "What I Believe" (1930); published in, Irving Babbitt : Representative Writings (1981), p. 16

• The only true man is one who practices ‘humanism.’ (…) this is the only way to success in life.
  • Haidakhan Babaji, The Teachings of Babaji (29 October 1983)

• The idea that defines all humanism is that the world is not a given world, foreign to man, one to which he has to force himself to yield without. It is the world willed by man, insofar as his will expresses his genuine reality.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Philosophical Library. 1948. p. 17. ISBN 978-0-8065-0160-4. 

• The history of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such knowledge that a new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop.
  • Mircea Eliade, in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (1969), p. 3

• A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
  • E. M. Forster, in "George and Gide" in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)‎‎

• The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.
  • Lionel Trilling, in his "Introduction" to The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949)

• The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness that after the heavens fall justice will not ever be done again.
  • Lionel Trilling, in his "Introduction" to The Portable Matthew Arnold (1949)

• Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
  I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
  I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
  • Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

• I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
  I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.
  So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, "He's up in Heaven now." Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)