Can you name at least five or perhaps even more than five reasons why your path, faith or religion is best for you or for the whole world?
Secular humanism is an intelligent and compassionate ideology based on the application of reason and empathy to evidence. It has given the world two huge gifts: science, and the modern, liberal democratic state with limited government and guaranteed personal liberties. These two things have transformed the world, turning subjects into autonomous citizens with longer lives that are also healthier, easier, and more comfortable.
Notably, secular humanism is free of faith based thought and religious beliefs, which I consider liberating. One of its bedrock principles is rational skepticism, or the insistence that nothing be believed without empiric support, and then, only to the degree that the quality and quantity of available relevant evidence justifies, and always tentatively, that is, with the willingness to modify belief as new evidence dictates.
This is among the best ideas that mankind has ever had, up there with things like justice. It turned alchemy into chemistry, astrology into astronomy, and creationism into evolutionary science, transforming them from sterile avenues of inquiry into modern sciences that allow us to predict and at times control outcomes.
I also admire the rational ethics of secular humanism, in which a community chooses goals for itself based on empathetic reciprocity, or the Golden Rule. Humanists choose a community which is free, safe, tolerant, just, and facilitates economic opportunity as well as self-development (education, personal integrity). To accomplish those goals, rules are devised, tested, and tweaked where necessary to facilitate achieving the desired society.
This has been an excellent choice for me. Life has been good. I came out of Christianity, which was a dark ideology, one that taught that we were all goners (it's always the end times), we might end up being tortured for eternity, we are born spiritually diseased (sinners) and need a cure, that the world is a bad place (
worldly is a derogatory term) and fit for apocalyptic destruction, one's own flesh and mind are enemies, demons are trying to destroy us, we are being constantly watched and judged.
The change to secular humanism restored hope for the world and mankind, and ended the bondage of hell theology. Submission and faith were no longer the highest virtues. They were replaced by autonomy and reason. When a cute little doe-eyed girl dies of leukemia sometime later today (and one will somewhere), I now have the comfort of knowing that it was just rotten luck, and not something caused by or allowed to happen by an unseen overlord.
With the conversion, my attention turned from holy books and prayer to academic instruction, which has paid off richly. It's simply more interesting to live in a head filled with wonder and stimulating ideas rather than spending my days reading scripture while waiting to die in the hope of something better thereafter. Like I said, I found that worldview to be rather dark and negative. Humanism celebrates humanity rather than see it as weak and sick.
