What is Secular Humanism?

In a nutshell, secular humanism is pro human and pro reason.

What does that mean in detail?

Human Well-being and Ethics

First, secular humanism concerns itself with human experience, human well-being and using human resources to ensure that well-being. That means that secular humanism is a world view that is interested in ETHICS. In more recent times, that concern has been expanded to non-human organisms capable of suffering, as well as human interactions with our environment generally, something that has been termed “planetary ethics.”

Reason and philosophical naturalism

Second, secular humanists are committed to REASON. That means many things: Among others, it means striving to avoid fallacies in the way we arrive at conclusions; it means believing things only when we have good reason to believe them, i.e. when they are sufficiently supported by evidence; it means being willing to inquire into any matter whatsoever without unaskable questions or unthinkable thoughts, and it means checking our facts to make certain that our thinking is solidly grounded.  Reason also means using sound methods to arrive at knowledge. This is why secular humanists are committed to and supportive of SCIENCE. Science is in essence an error-checking mechanism that aims to ensure that we are not fooled by the mind’s propensity to see patterns and, once having seen them, confirm them over and over. We become much more effective at producing desired results when what we believe about the world matches reality. Humans have tried numerous approaches to gaining knowledge about the world, deciding what is ethical, and producing the most desirable outcomes – among them religious “revelation”, feelings, and intuition. None of them have proven nearly as effective at improving human lives as reason and science. In other words, secular humanists are committed to approaching life rationally because reason works.

Because we strive to base our beliefs on evidence, we do not accept claims about supernatural phenomena because there is no evidence to support them, meaning that we are ATHEISTS or AGNOSTICS. Secular humanists generally believe that for all phenomena encountered by humans so far, there is either a natural explanation, or, if there is not yet a natural explanation, the god hypothesis is not superior to a random guess. Since we don’t believe in a god – the traditional source of ethical instructions – we have to decide what is “good” and “bad” using other criteria, and this is the “humanist” part of secular humanism. Rather than trying to make god happy, secular humanists base their moral decisions on human happiness.  “Good” and “bad” are determined by what ultimately permits humans to flourish, not by what we imagine god wants us to do.

Aesthetics

Third, secular humanism has an aesthetic component. We are interested not only in human well-being and using human means to ensure it, but we are also interested in exploring the expression of human experience through art, music, literature, and such. Secular humanism is an exuberant way to live, rejoicing in those things that make life pleasurable, like art, music, love and friendship, travel, sex, good food and drink, philosophy, sports, nature, mastery of skills, etc.

What kinds of things do secular humanists stand for?

Here are some of the things that secular humanists value, based on the above commitments:

•  human rights

•  freedom of conscience, including the freedom to choose any religious faith, or reject it

•  freedom of speech to allow for a vigorous debate of all ideas

•  freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavors, with no topics off limits for questioning and investigation

•  democracy

•  taking personal responsibility for your actions and choices