Humanism

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

Humanism is an ambiguous term widely applied to various philosophies, world views or practices which focus on human values and concerns. The most commonly cited variety, often called secular humanism in the United States, refers to a non-religious worldview which espouses reason, ethics, justice, generally attaching primary importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters, specifically rejecting religious dogma as a basis of morality and decision-making. Religious humanism is an integration of (secular) humanist ethical philosophy with religious rituals or beliefs which center on human needs, interests, and abilities.

See also:

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

Quotes

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

• 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. 

• 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)