Chuck Bryant

So we mentioned Bacon.

What about Thomas Hobbes?

Because he came up with the social contract, which is basically like you and me, we basically allow a government to rule us in exchange for protecting us from nasty, brutish, short lives, which we would otherwise have without the state or without society, right?

That doesn't sound very humanist, even though it's human-centered, because he assumed that humans were essentially bad and would club you over the head and kill you first chance they got.

That's why we need government, according to Hobbes.

But he's considered one of the early humanists for sure.

Right, exactly.

So humanist.

Rationalism to understand ourselves and the world.

Thomas Paine was also one.

He was probably... Yeah, he was like the first person that you can point to and be like...

That guy's a humanist.

He even says so himself in not so many words or more than those words.

He was a pamphleteer who helped get the American Revolution started despite moving to America just two years before the revolution started.

That's how effective his pamphlets were.

Yeah, there's pretty much no better way to sum up the humanist view in a nutshell than that.

The French Revolution also, there's a couple of people who get called out a lot, Jacques Hubert and Antoine-Francois Momoro, because they established the cult of reason where they would actually go in and seize churches in France during the revolution and

repurposed them, I saw, into Temples of Reason.

I read about them on The Collector, which is a great website that explains all sorts of different philosophies and stuff.

Great website.