Evidence for the Existence of God and Santa Claus

Evidence for the Existence of God and Santa Claus

While the existence of a god may appear hard to reconcile with a scientific worldview, the impact of a cultural belief in a god or gods is hardly controversial. Just as the Santa Claus narrative results in many gifts “From Santa” at the prescribed time, the cultural enforcement of the laws of the Christian and other gods can be viewed as a crowd-sourced effort to establish moral expectations. Unfortunately, those expectations are millennia old and do not account for our environmental problems. However, there is no scientifically accepted theory of beliefs that would establish a stable society while satisfying environmental concerns. We, therefore, need a discussion, both respectful and critical, about the existing crowd-sourced gods.

Transracial Identity Development

Transracial Identity Development

Observations about adult transracial adoptees and the role of special perspectives in discourses around race and, in order to move the fundamental societal discussions forward, how transracial adoptees and multiracial individuals can help lead narratives around race beyond the historically simplistic and binary dialogues.

James Forman: Civil Rights Pioneer and Humanist

James Forman: Civil Rights Pioneer and Humanist

Humanism and the struggle for civil rights in the United States have had much in common. Martin Luther King Jr. is considered to have been a Christian humanist, while other civil rights leaders have been more secularly inclined. The political activist life of the late civil rights organizer and secular humanist James Forman is memorialized.

Sexual Misconduct

Sexual Misconduct

Increasing numbers of women are publicly discussing their experiences with sexual misconduct. There have been many high-profile cases in which women have credibly charged men with sexual misconduct with much fallout accruing to the victimizers. This could bode well for future efforts to combat sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Mothers Matter

Mothers Matter

Natural mothering ideology is the dominant mothering ideology in the United States. It has achieved dominance despite a lack of scientific evidence because it reflects deeply held beliefs that women’s needs and desires don’t matter, that mothers belong in the home and that children’s well-being can only be ensured by maternal suffering.

A Footnote in Hume

A Footnote in Hume

David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1748) advanced the idea that Benevolence is at the core of ethics. While this is well known, he also claimed that empathetic emotions had in human affairs, the force that gravity played in the physical world. He also denied that self-love was a major motivator in ethics. This is contrasted with the views of Ayn Rand, with a suggestion that in the present time, when empathy is receiving new attention among scholars and philosophers, new attention to Hume’s theory is warranted.

My Journey Into Skepticism

My Journey Into Skepticism

Author and keen skeptic Harriet Hall, a retired family physician and former Air Force flight surgeon, recalls the influences that shaped her scientific viewpoint.

Steve Allen: The Start of Something Big

Steve Allen: The Start of Something Big

Besides having invented the late-night TV talk show in 1953, entertainer and musical composer Steve Allen went on to have a many-faceted career. He wrote more than 50 books, fourteen of which were published by Prometheus Books, the publishing house founded by Paul Kurtz. For nearly three decades he and Kurtz were colleagues and friends. A philosopher, as well, and a dynamic advocate for rationalism and reason, Allen wrote about religion, politics and social issues. Unalterably opposed to censorship, he was nevertheless a harsh critic of the trend towards coarseness in popular culture. Allen died in 2000, so he was spared the spectacle of the United States of America’s 45th president.

Quentin Crisp: Indomitable Humanist

Quentin Crisp: Indomitable Humanist

Quentin Crisp’s name is not often brought up in humanist circles, and yet he lived his whole life as a unique, courageous and exemplary humanist. He wasn’t affiliated with humanists in any formal way, yet from an early age—without mentors to inspire or to guide him—from the depths inherent in his stalwart inner core, his humanism and compassion blazed unremittingly. Starting with himself. He was born in 1908 and lived for most of the 20th century.

Johannes Brahms, The Man and Humanist: a Psychoanalytic View

Johannes Brahms, The Man and Humanist: a Psychoanalytic View

Johannes Brahms was one of the greatest composers of the 19th century. Though he found inspiration for his compositions in the Bible, he was an agnostic with one true “religion”—his music. From a psychoanalytic point of view, Brahms’ traumatic childhood experiences are connected with his melancholic disposition and his ambivalence towards lasting commitments as an adult. On the one hand his inner conflicts caused great hardship, but on the other hand his suffering inspired many of his masterpieces, and helped to shape Brahms, the humanist.

Gay is Good

Gay is Good

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to inspire equal rights for marginalized groups, and before the Stonewall riots in 1969 energized the move towards more progressive social changes for gay people, homosexuality was considered to be a mental illness by both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. Today the struggles for LGBT people have not been entirely erased, but the 2015 landmark opinion by the Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage has pushed customs and institutions in the United States to become more equal. However, as many gay people still do, the author of this essay still harbors memories of the cruelly real world recently left behind.

Socrates: Ancient Humanist

Socrates: Ancient Humanist

Socrates was one of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, so much so that the whole history of Western philosophy is divided into pre-Socraticism and what came after. In this paper I argue that Socrates anticipated a number of ideas pertinent to contemporary humanism, though of course it would be anachronistic to consider him a humanist in the modern sense of the word. Specifically, what makes Socrates a humanist senso lato are five characteristics of his thinking: his social and moral criticism, his focus on personal integrity and an ethics of virtue, his rejection of the supernatural as a source of morality, his epistemic humility and search for wisdom, and his critical thinking approach to every question. Twenty four centuries after his death, we still have much to learn from Socrates.

The Human Gestalt

The Human Gestalt

“What is family?” is the question that I will explore. I suggest that a gestalt—the condition of something that cannot be explained in terms of its parts alone—can emerge from as few as two persons in a durable ethical space where there is responsibility. Neither needs to be related other than to be members of the human family. I use Theodore Sturgeon’s fictional More Than Human to show how this can be possible through his human gestalt. I then explore how this gestalt comes to be through Emmanuel Levinas’s responsibility ethos.

Dying (Every Day) With Dignity: Lessons From Stoicism

Dying (Every Day) With Dignity: Lessons From Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient Greco-Roman practical philosophy focused on the ethics of everyday living. It is a eudaemonistic (i.e., emphasizing one’s flourishing) approach to life, as well as a type of virtue ethics (i.e., concerned with the practice of virtues as central to one’s existence). This paper summarizes the basic tenets of Stoicism and discusses how it tackles the issues of death and suicide. It presents a number of exercises that modern Stoics practice in order to prepare for death (one’s own, or those of relatives and friends). It argues that modern Stoicism is a viable personal philosophy.