HUMANIST VOICES

"It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label.

Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:

Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.

Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.

Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.

We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.

From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public..."

--"Humanism: A Beginner's Guide (updated edition) (Beginner's Guides)" by Peter Cave: https://a.co/1cKWQjT