HUMANISM: RELIGION FOR THOSE WHO DON'T LIKE APPEARING RELIGIOUS?

Almost a decade ago I was approached by a reader of my blog at that time, Buddha's Pillow, to attend a summer planning meeting for a Secular Humanist group, loosely associated with Harvard University through the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. I am intentionally not naming names here. I do not want this essay to be interpreted as a personal appraisal or critique. Not my intention.

Frankly, as an independent blogger, I was flattered by the invitation from a published academic and journalist. I had been writing on line since 1998 without any measurable audience other than some regulars who were encouraging.

The meeting I attended was an informal affair of a handful of people in a deserted cafeteria on the Harvard Law School campus. The concept of an organized Humanist movement was intriguing to me, since I had studied the Christian Humanist authors of the European Renaissance when I was in university. 

That study had aided my own mental transcendence away from lock-step, homophobic, guilt-fostering Catholicism toward Eastern thought about individual ethical evolution, based in fostering the good in daily life within my own mind by meditation, observation, thought and action. Cause and effect. 

The other attendees at the Harvard meeting were intelligent and well meaning folks. They had come to Secular Humanism ... "Secular" in that descriptor then a proud refinement ... from various religious and non-religious backgrounds. They were mostly academics, students or teachers or engaged in thought-centered enterprises. I would also say they were at least middle-class generally.

My involvement as a volunteer lasted over the next couple of years as I watched that small planning group grow into something like a congregation. By the time I left as a regular volunteer, the organization hosted a yearly awards (Humanist of the Year) ceremony which filled a church at Harvard with hundreds of people. Weekly meetings, on Sundays, pulled about fifty to one hundred people. 

The content of weekly meetings was usually a lecture followed by a Q&A followed by refreshments with socializing and followed by a group meditation for the few remainers who chose to participate. Humanism lectures, as one might guess, are about anything that entails thought about existence in a scientific or humanistic vein.  It was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday midday. 

Three major events led to my decision to stop attending the weekly meetings. First, my 90-year-old mother's health began to decline, which required me to be more available to her. It was a difficult and lonely time, upon which the Humanist "community" had absolutely no impact. In fact, my volunteer role as organizer of food for the events became burdensome. 

Second, I was bothered by an event during which a working-class Black participant, not an academic, was castigated by an academic organizer in front of a room full of participants for implying his sincere (somewhat homophobic) feelings about gay-lesbian people. 

My defense of the man's right to voice his views without angry scolding garnered me raised eyebrows from the room of White academics.  Finally, I became disturbed by the energy and enthusiasm of the organizers for courting celebrities, politicians and religious leaders through splashy awards events and publicity. 

It became evident to me, as an outsider without academic or administrative intentions, that this Humanism was becoming a religion of sorts with a Progressive dogma and a greater alliance with other religions than it wished to have with non-religious, especially overtly atheist, thinkers without elite provenance. In other words, Humanism was becoming just another Left-leaning morality business. 

In retrospect, this makes great sense. Those at the top of American Humanism, staunch preachers against White privilege all, I am sure, are bourgeois-to-outright-rich White people with few exceptions. And those exceptions go far when they play their cards right, as you might imagine. The wealthy-White guilt of Northern intellectuals reaches back to Abolition.

American Humanists crow about their deep roots in science, but they present a public face aligned with irrationally emotional social justice causes with questionable statistical evidence in society. This contamination results from their virtue-signaling alignment with the most dogmatic and irrational religions, such as Islam. 

This alignment is rationalized by its attempt at promoting World Peace. But, as aristocrat Neville Chamberlain discovered in 1939, appeasing fundamentalists and dogmatists with concessions does not promote World Peace. Quite the contrary: It ratifies and enables the opponents of peaceful coexistence. 

The harsh reality of Ivy League universities, where Humanism is incubating within Divinity Schools, lies in their roots as seminaries for privileged White Protestant male descendants of the Mayflower passengers. That history lies within the genetic material of the places. They exist to maintain social hierarchies. And, in as much as they have failed that mission recently, their very acceptance as beacons of society is in jeopardy. And rightly so. 

American Humanism sometimes operates as part of established Ethical Societies with roots in Victorian public-lecture entertainment, exemplified by Boston's Theosophical Society. It is religion for those well-heeled people who do not want to appear religious.

"Non-religious" is in fact a preferred self-descriptor in its circles, as opposed to the media-maligned "atheist", no longer elegantly represented by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Gore Vidal.  After all, what would be the point of trying to organize strongly independent, skeptical and educated atheists into pseudo-religion anyway? Absolutely none.