Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 17 Mar 2014 7:14:28pm
Part 2

And then came the internet and WHAM, I found a worldwide community of likeminded people busy talking and discussing issues that we were not allowed to talk about around the regular social scenes as it was considered impolite. I found the world was teeming with Atheists and Secular Humanists who are of the Atheist opinion. I wasn't alone.

What the internet has done is create a community of Secular Humanists where before there were just isolated individuals. Of course the same internet is used by the religious but they already had their communities.

This mass community is what is “New” about Atheism. The Atheism itself is mostly the same old opinion that has been around since the Greeks first articulated it in writing, with the addition of new advances in science.

If only such a community and the internet and popular books on the subjects had been around when I was a teenager.

This is one thing that folk like Gray either don’t understand or don't want to understand about what is New in the Secular Humanist and Atheist sphere.

Bagging a few Secular Humanists like Dawkins is not a criticism of Secular Humanism or its principles. Gray shows that he has nothing to say against Secular Humanism if all he can do is bang away at an upper middle class English don who has some of the social characteristics of that part of Englishdom. Dawkins and co are not authoritarian bullies and have no authority over any other Secular Humanists, nor an ability to lay down a "faith". They offer opinions and get plenty of disagreement in the Secular Humanist community.

The Secular Humanist community operates in a manner that strives to harmonize moral and political values. It shows that this is an age of Enlightenment and that the Enlightenment is still ongoing and it hasn't stopped as it hasn't finished yet. We are still striving for a better social system. This is what scares organised religion. After two thousand years, organised religion has failed to harmonise its humanist moral values with its political values. Secular Humanism is doing that harmonising in a very short time in comparison and is progressing all the time, which Gray acknowledged when he notes that our secular humanist liberal social democracy is far superior to Theocracy.

Secular Humanists don't bang on about Stalinism because we are Secular Humanists, not Stalinists. We are not authoritarians. Stalinism is discredited and no longer a domino theory threat and while those states are still a threat to their citizens, Stalinism is not sticking its nose where it is not warranted in our immediate society. I doubt you will get any disagreements from Secular Humanists about the wretchedness of Marxist Communism. Despite the fact that it lifted the living standards of hundreds of millions of people, I don't recommend it.