Secular Humanism. . .

Have you ever heard of “secular humanism?” Secular humanism is comprehensive, touching every aspect of life including issues of values, meaning, and identity. Thus it is broader than religions. There’s a lot more to life … and secular humanism addresses it. Secular humanism is nonreligious, espousing no belief in a realm or beings imagined to transcend ordinary experience. It is  a body of principles suitable for orienting a complete human life (sound familiar?). As a secular lifestance, secular humanism incorporates the Enlightenment principle of individualism, which celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state, increasingly empowering each of us to set the terms of his or her own life. Secular humanism is philosophically naturalistic. It holds that nature (the world of everyday physical experience) is all there is, and that reliable knowledge is best obtained when we query nature using the scientific method. Naturalism asserts that supernatural powers do not exist, and warns us that knowledge gained without appeal to the natural world and without impartial review by multiple observers is unreliable. Secular humanists hold that ethics is consequential, to be judged by results. This is in contrast to so-called command ethics, in which right and wrong are defined in advance and attributed to divine authority. Secular humanists seek to develop and improve their ethical principles by examining the results they yield in the lives of real men and women. The Buddha was teaching these principles long before it was termer humanism and in the end his teachings point to one answer, one solution – us.