Chapter 1: What does humanism mean for those who don't believe in God?
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Chapter 2: How has the concept of humanism evolved over time?
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know about humanism, which I find fairly relatable in a lot of ways, but in other ways, not necessarily.
Yeah. Can we say what Livia titled this one? She's been really killing it lately.
She has.
Go ahead.
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Chapter 3: What historical figures contributed to the development of humanism?
This is on humanism, the bright side of being a godless heathen.
That's right. I was looking for that AHA definition because that put it about as good as anything in this whole article. The American Humanist Association, is it an association?
Yes, they are associated.
Yeah, they put it like this. It's a progressive philosophy of life that without theism or other supernatural beliefs, bit of a dig, Affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good. And of course, if you don't know what theism is, we're talking about, you know, religion and God.
So it's like, hey, you can be a good person and have a moral and ethical center and strive to do those things without God at the center of it.
Yeah, for sure. And most humanists, yeah, I think it's fair to say most, are atheists or at least agnostic. At the very least, if they do believe in a God, he's not an interventionist God. He's not playing a role in our lives day to day. Maybe you could also interchange that definition of God with the universe or nature or
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Chapter 4: How do humanists define morality without a belief in God?
or something like that, but not God in any religious way whatsoever. And in fact, if you do believe that, a lot of strict humanists will say, well, you can't really be a humanist because not believing in God in that sense is a core part of humanism. And a lot of other people say, hey, you're a humanist. Who are you to tell me what I believe? And the humanist says, you got me. Yeah.
Yeah, and as we'll see, it had kind of been tangled up with religion here and there until it kind of landed eventually where it did. And we're going to talk a little bit about the history, though. That term humanism goes back to at least Cicero in 1st century BCE Rome, when that very famous writer and I think lawyer and statesman used the word humanitas,
to describe like people developing or the development of these qualities, these virtuous qualities that Chuck will talk about, like a moral and ethical center, compassion, good judgment, like being a good person and doing good things.
Yeah. And then we leapfrog all the way over to the Renaissance. And you'll note that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, medieval era. The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages. That there was a part of history where essentially the church ruled everything with an iron fist.
Chapter 5: What are the criticisms of humanism from different philosophical perspectives?
Corruption was rampant and people were... were removed from their relationship with God and the church was inserted. And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did, they were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics too. They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God?
You know, there's a connection between you, this person who is important and matters just because you're a person and God who made you. And this is where the very beginnings of humanism find themselves, even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet. This is the first step.
Yeah, I mean, looking back, we apply the tag to a lot of different people. We're going to talk about some of them, but yeah, they wouldn't have called themselves that then. Petrarch was probably looked at as maybe the first humanist or the first modern man sometimes called. And in the Renaissance, it was it was a pretty hot ticket, depending on what crowd you ran with.
If you were among the elites in the Renaissance, you might have hired humanist scholars to come and teach your kids all about like sort of the moral systems of the classical era to, you know, and very much in the effort, like you were saying, to bring us out of what they call the Dark Ages.
And some aspects of this whole movement in the Renaissance included three things we're going to kind of touch on here are realism, dignity of the individual human and application of learning, like putting it into practice.
Yeah, so humanism contrasted with scholasticism, which had been going on for hundreds of years. It was essentially the church's form of teaching, and that was basically reconciling the concept of reality that came from the classical Greeks like Aristotle with Scripture, and basically using Scripture to explain the world and reality as it is.
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Chapter 6: How do modern humanists address issues related to ethics and morality?
That's right. And these humanists came along and they were like, What happens if we stop doing that? What happens if we just study the classical Greeks and just basically also still stay Christians, but stop using this scripture, this received wisdom that the church gives us? What if we study it ourselves instead?
And that brings up the second part you mentioned, which is the dignity of the individual human. Up to this point, individuality was not prized. You were not supposed to look inside yourself. You were supposed to look outside at the glory of God. You yourself, if you paid too much attention to yourself, that was a quick one-way trip to hell for you when you died.
The humanists were like, no, let's look inside ourselves. Like, we're important. You, the individual, is important.
Yeah. And also part of that first one with the realism was that we are flawed.
Chapter 7: What role does humanism play in contemporary society?
So if we want to learn about each individual and human, the nature of what it means to be human, we have to look at the bad stuff, too, like the devices and the disorders and things like that. And then that last one that I mentioned was application of learning, like all this stuff is great, but it's not navel gazing like or we don't want it to be navel gazing.
We want to actually like stimulate action.
Yeah, and you're not learning just so you can give more money to the church or something like that, too. And if this sounds a little bit like Protestant thought about the connection between the individual and God, that's exactly right.
These thinkers eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, which basically pushed the face of the church off to the side and said, you and me, God, we're connected.
Yeah, for sure. And it'll also tie into the Unitarian church in a big way later on. A church that has interested me.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I like my Sundays free, so probably not going to go. But if any quote unquote church appeals to me at this age and where I am in life, it's definitely those guys.
Yeah. Those people that you see out and about at like 10 a.m.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals create meaning in their lives according to humanist principles?
on a Sunday, give that little knowing head nod too. Yeah, yeah. So something I think is worth pointing out real quick though too, Chuck, is everything we're talking about involves God. Even though the church has been pushed out of the way, God has not. Yeah. God is still front and center. Christianity is still the most important thing around. And that is this is the cradle of humanism.
And one of the frequent criticisms of modern humanism is that it's never really shaken off its birthright from Catholicism or Christianity, even though it opposes religion itself. We'll get more into that. But I just wanted to put that out there for the moment.
And we're also talking about like coming out of a time where atheism like could get you killed. You know, like saying that there is no God was, you know, was against the law and punishable by death.
For sure. Yeah. But that started to change gradually around beginning in the 17th century. One of the people we have to thank for that is Francis Bacon, known as the father of empiricism. He also invented bacon. And he also had a big hand into coming up with the scientific method.
Yeah, yeah. We talked about him and that.
Yeah, for sure. Which has been largely abandoned by science in the last hundred years.
Yeah, well, he argued for really studying like what we call social sciences now. He kind of kicked that off as well, the systemic study of like the human passions. But all these people that we're going to talk about here in the next little bit were Christian. So this is sort of, this is where it was still a time when it was still tangled up.
Even though they had these ideas, all of these people, Bacon and this next person, Thomas Hobbes, were Christian.
Yeah, and the fact that there are Christians who identify themselves as humanists and vice versa, that goes to show you that those two things are not incompatible. You can be religious and care about human beings, and they don't have to oppose one another, although humanists have eventually said, yes, they do.
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