Skip to content

Science-Based Humanism

March 20, 2006

June 19,2005    Dov in IHS forum.

Dov: My motivation is to develop a system of ethics from science, i.e. apply the methods of natural sciences, designed to accurately describe the world, to suggest how people should behave and what ideals/norms they should hold in order to alleviate as much as possible strife and pain to as many as possible and to apply to them as beneficially as possible the forms of power and advantage that become available through science.

Chris: "I see (this as) the Enlightenment simply as the continuation of the Christian Ideal".

Dov: Stop. This smacks of religious absolute truth. With how many other religions' ideals are you as familiar as you are with your Christian Ideal, and in fact to which of the Christian ideals do you refer and how does it differ from the other religions' ideals?

Chris: "enlightenment (is an) attempt at establishing the interrelationship of things in the physical world (and likewise)… in the social and personal world, via psychology…", and "the ultimate goal of the enlightenment (is) to unite perfect understanding of the natural world through reason, with the perfect understanding of the social and personal world through reason, creating the perfect society with perfect, self–reliant, open-minded, well-balanced, people? ".

Dov: Perfect, perfect, perfect…here comes the absolute truth, again…this time with motivation and goal to extend the perfect religion into a perfect religious person? And how do you settle this with >>>your alter ego Chris: "…I have given up on a discipline that encourages self-care, self-reliance, self-love, self-gratification, self-justification, self-interest, self-etc."<<<

Chris, as a normal common posting forum member I appreciate reaction/comment re my postings but I post mostly with hope to contribute to a realistic practical advance of the Humanist goals. Repeating a few sentences from my postings elsewhere:

" Evolution occurs via random mutation junctions; some mutated editions survive and some meet a dead end, depending on the interaction between them and their surrounding/circumstances. For humans, whose survival functional factors are mostly cultural, some of which are planned and not random, some cultural mutations survive and proliferate while others meet a dead end etc., like in all other biological courses for all other organisms.

Humanists, like many other fledgling cultural movements, reach their real trial grounds only when they become active in their surrounding. Like in every other biological constellation their surrounding may enable or encourage or disable their survival/proliferation. The emphasis, though, is on action, on a planned and executed course of social/political actions targeted to reach many persons.

The best chance of success for growth of Humanism is to follow the proven evolutionary course of success of the eukaryote cell birth, i.e. to become actually active and attract/join additional, complementary, cultural movement(s).

Just food for thought…or may be translated into a program?"

Dov

Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: