Friendly Humanism?

Perhaps the unintelligent individuals that apply the label militant (or any other negatively connotative word) to atheism don’t fully understand the implications of humanism and might even consider themselves Humanist, because it sounds nice.

lots of religious people, even in particular faiths, will call themselves humanist if they think it means someone who cares for humanity. Of course in the American South it means people who put themselves before God so you get a lot of choice adjectives placed before humanist.

What can be learned from this…?

People don’t know what it is.

I was raised in a xtian household, and the term “secular humanist” was always spoken in a disparaging tone. Growing up, I got the impression that it was evil and dirty to be a secular humanist. Funny that. It seems that anytime a group puts focus on humanity and away from another group’s deity they are disparaged. To me it’s just a sign that they realize how feeble and vulnerable the concept of a “real” deity is…especially when they have to constantly defend it because it can’t defend itself.

I think it pertains to the notion that many people assume atheists are innately angry or immoral. It’s sad how we have to constantly put adjectives like “friendly” or “positive” before “atheist” in order to let people know that we generally aren’t anything like those ill conceived notions.

Um, “secular humanists” are the baddies that are trying to keep prayer out of schools, and God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, right? They’ve long been bogeymen of the religious right. The term just has a different set of negatives for the fundamentalists. Less foaming at the mouth angry white men, more sneaky multicultural
deviants undermining America’s “christian” morals.

Other than being a complete doormat in response to their intrusions into government and public life, there is no way to not piss off the religious right. You will never please everyone. The goal as I see it is to piss off the right people for the right reasons.

I see many similarities between the way “atheism” and “feminism” is treated. Both feminists and atheists are assumed to be angry all the time, they’re assumed to be somehow weird or crazy or evil, and both ideologies have the pleasure of dealing with straw (wo)men and nonsensical blather from people who would rather maintain the status quo.
Atheism is simply going against the norm. True, some atheists are rude, some call the theists on their woo no matter what, but seriously, compared with many social conservatives, even PZ Myers is a teddy bear :P.

I think it depends on who you’re talking to. My brother in law recently informed my husband that humanists have an agenda….to get rid of Christianity. I’ve also been accused of being angry and have been told that my blog is an attack on Christians. I haven’t specifically been called an “angry humanist”, but the implication is there.

Humanism doesn’t have a stigma to overcome. That’s why so many humanatheists would rather just concede “atheism” and move on.

Well gee, Bob, how many times have you met an unfriendly Humanist? 😉

I’d like to think that “friendly” is implicit in “humanist”. But it’s not.

“Humanist” may be, by definition, a less threatening term to the religious than “atheist”, but my guess is the reason more religious people have a problem with atheists than with humanists is because prominent anti-religious figures (such as Christopher Hitchens) more often identify themselves as atheists than as humanists. That is, unfriendly atheists are more visible than unfriendly humanists; so friendly atheists need the adjective more than friendly humanists do.

That said, some of us humanists still call ourselves “friendly”. Just to be clear. 😉

(PS: Thanks for the mention, Dale.)