Humanism and Secular Humanism

I discovered "humanism" in college and was very excited to find a book at the college bookstore called In Defense of Secular Humanism by Paul Kurtz. It was exactly what I had been looking for in being, essentially, atheism plus. Plus what? Plus a positive message beyond saying "I don't believe in..." The back cover had a quote from the book that exemplified this, under the caption The Meaning of Life:

Human life has meaning on its own terms. There is no need to look outside it for success or salvation. Life is pregnant with opportunities and possibilities. We are responsible for our destiny.

That sounded pretty good to me. With chapters like "Is Secular Humanism a Positive Alternative?" and "Does Humanism Have an Ethic of Responsibility?" (the short answer to both being "yes" by the way) this book seemed to ask and help answer the basic questions I was asking myself in my early twenties. It influenced my thinking immensely and was the dominant force in my ethical world-view for many years. I read other Humanist type classics (another influential one being Russell's Why I am Not a Christian) but Kurtz's book was the first that caught my fancy and was almost by default the most influential to me. Kurtz identified as the central doctrine of humanism that "value is relative to man." (Defense p. 121, italic in original.) That was a sentiment I could appreciate though I wish he would have written it "value is relative to the human being" or some other form that would include both halves of our species.

But there were a couple of other issues that were a bit troubling too. Secular Humanism was a philosophy, not a religion which I felt at the time was a good thing. But, like atheism, it tended to define itself in many things I read, including Kurtz's books, as against theism and fundamentalist theism in particular. The first chapter of Defense was entitled "Defining Humanism Against Its Fundamentalist Critics." Another chapter was "Will Humanism Replace Theism?" Much of this was written around the idea of a struggle between reason and theism. The problem was that even to the extent that Humanism could be a positive philosophy as opposed to simply being a rejection of theism and religion in general, it was an alternate philosophy - not an alternate social tradition. (At least as I saw it.)

Secular Humanism did not produce, at least as far as I could see, much in the way of Humanist themed art and music. I loved reading about Humanism and arguing about it with Fundamentalists but I was hard pressed to find anything to sing. All the good music seemed to be written for those various religions I was rejecting. Good stories, too, were hard to come by. I held onto some of the existentialist writers (I loved Kafka, Camus and the like) but there seemed too few of them. My favorite art, music, and writing always seemed to have some connection with religion, whether it was the Catholic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne Rice, or the protestant popular music of Bob Dylan, or the poetry of John Milton. And these things were important to me. There was just something about having a mythology to sing and write about.

I read a lot of books about religion - I was especially drawn to so-called liberal scholars like Crossan and Pagels. And then, in the mid-90s when I was approaching the perilous age of 30, I discovered that there was something that called itself a religion, had churches and hymnals and everything, but welcomed secular humanists as part of their congregations. In fact, humanists made up a plurality (though not a majority) of their members. I decided to give the Unitarian-Universalists a try.