What the hell is humanism, you ask?

That's right - another post, twelve hours later! I hope the 2 extremely bored people who actually read my blog don't grow dependant on such frequency.

I like to say that I’d label myself a “humanist” along with calling myself a “freethinker” and an “atheist”. Today I might just inform people on what that means, and give some of my views on philosophy and crap like that. Humanism is a very tricky term to define and to understand, and there are a range of ways to think of humanism, but I’ll try to explain how I view it as well as I can.

A freethinker bases their beliefs on logic and reason rather than tradition and superstition, not believing something fully until it has evidence.  My process of becoming a freethinker went hand-in-hand with my becoming an atheist and a humanist. I was baptised a Catholic and I’ve been raised in that tradition, but I’ve always had doubts, and recently I decided to break away from religion completely and declare myself an atheist, even though I go to a Catholic school. Thankfully it’s not very fundamentalist and I’ve kept my beliefs a bit low-key, so those Christians who know I’m an atheist – including my family – have respected my opinion, which is very nice of them.

I won’t go into why I think the Bible is full of immoral myths and why certain Christian values conflict with mine (though I’m fully behind being charitable and kind and all that sort of thing). Today I’ll just get straight to humanism.

You know when someone gets hurt and goes to hospital and the religious start saying, “We’ll pray for you,” and then when they get better they go, “Thank the Lord you’re okay!” Well, to put this quite bluntly, I think praying to and thanking God are quite useless to the process of making that person better. It’s the doctor who’s doing the research and the surgery or what have you. It’s the doctor who should be thanked. And that, my friends, is humanism. Humanism acknowledges the achievements of men and does not attribute them to deities or spirits or goblins or whatever else people are believing in these days. Ancient Egyptians didn’t build the pyramids because their gods put strength into them; they earned it with strength they found in themselves.

While Christians and other religious people can also be humanists, like Renaissance thinkers Machiavelli, Da Vinci and Shakespeare, I find it most consistent with my freethinking atheism. It's really just emphasising the value of human actions, both good and bad, acknowledging how they impact our lives and the world around us.

I hope that all made sense and wasn’t just me rambling about nonsense… future posts will be about more exciting things, I promise.

Have a great day and remember, no matter what religion or philosophy or whatever you follow, I’m sure you’re pretty damn awesome anyway. Because you just read a philosophy blog.

P.S. NOTHING IS REAL.