Totally out of the blue, unsolicited and with no context or prior conversation whatever @issu_assenjee sent me a screenshot. (Tweet's link)
My thoughts on its content are marked by (x) and detailed below.
It says...
If you know, let me know; I'd love to properly credit it.
Finally - Only one who seeks to promote a competing doctrine could create and deliver such a distortion of what it is to be humanist but it's always difficult for an enslaved prisoner of doctrine to properly grasp what it is to be free. The authoritarianism of a religious doctrine functions to hound the less zealous into submission to the full dogma, whereas Humanism functions without compulsion to conform to arbitrary diktats; some humans are free to choose to accept some, or all, values of humanism.
For me, the main difference between humanism and religion is humanism accepts people's differences and expands the category of 'equal' to accommodate them, whereas religion constricts and represses people's differences to enforce intransigent conformity to the arbitrary ideal of a despot.
So, a couple of questions to end...
This is one of the Too Many Questions
My thoughts on its content are marked by (x) and detailed below.
It says...
"The question, then, is: Well, did true justice not exist 10 years ago? Were people ignorant of justice 10 or 20 years ago? Was everyone evil and oppressive less than one generation in the past?I've asked for the author's name but as yet it's unforthcoming.
(1) If a white humanist atheist 10 years ago, for example, didn't recognize his "'privilege" and paid no heed to making space for women and the transgendered and wasn't sensitive enough to respect the pronoun preferences of others, and opposed gay marriage like 95% of the rest of the population, etc., etc., would he have been correct in thinking of himself as a "good" person? Clearly not, according to today's humanist, social justice standards.
(2) Look at the original version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the historical document from the middle of the twentieth century that was supposed to be the pinnacle of morality as recognized by universal human reason. No mention of sexual orientation, no mention of transgenderism, no mention of racial privilege, no mention of sex positivity, etc.,etc.
Now the humanist might say, these values had to be discovered and now reason has discovered those values and religion had nothing to do with it.
(3) But let"s look at that response more closely. It essentially concedes the entire argument because if humanists 10 years ago believed themselves to be "good" and "just" and turned out to be so deeply mistaken, then what guarantees that the humanists who think of themselves as "good"' and "just" today are not equally mistaken? What reason is there to think that 10 years from now, "reason" won't discover new values and new standards of goodness and justice, standards by which the humanists of today would be considered vile monsters?
(4) The humanist, therefore, has no basis, by his own lights, to claim that he is a good person, much less to claim that he doesn't need religion to be a good person!
One does not even need to appeal to diversity in moral standards over time. Look at the diversity in any instant of history including today. Views of right and wrong vastly differ among contemporary atheists and humanists themselves in mutually exclusive ways.
Which humanists, therefore, are in actuality the good ones, the ones truly living according to justice? Who decides?
(5) Furthermore, most humanists did not individually and independently and through the power of their own reflection arrive at the moral directives they so fervently believe to be intuitive, unassailable truths. It is not like each atheist/humanist sits and ponders for extended periods of time to formulate his own moral code that he will abide by for the rest of his life.
No, most of those moral commitments, whatever they are, are accepted by the humanist on the basis of outside authority -— the authority of other humanist thinkers or just good ol" cultural or institutional authority and conditioning. So how is that any different than the theist who claims his morality comes from the authority of religion?
Be that as it may, the only way humanists are even able to make their moronic argument in the first place is by focusing on a handful of widely accepted moral claims involving murder and rape. They make embarrassingly condescending yet asinine statements like, "I don't need God to tell me not to rape!" and "If the only reason you don't murder people is because God said so, then you're a psychopath, hur dur durr!"' In other words, the only way for their claim to have any traction is to reduce all of morality to... "
If you know, let me know; I'd love to properly credit it.
My comments...
(1) Why single out the colour of the humanist atheist? Neither humanism or atheism have colours. Are you trying to imply humanist atheists are white, or that only white humanist atheists hold those values? What's the purpose of this distortion? Seems racist.
(2) When United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was penned, religion had much more power over people's lives; it had repressed acceptance of those values, and still tries to, for thousands of years. Given the level of religious repression of the time, The UNDHR was as egalitarian as it could have been.
(3) Where there is a wrong, it can be rectified. The argument, which can be biolled down to "Humanist morals are wholly fluid" will only attain validity if the values listed fall away in a future generation, however, as humanism's core is more or less "ALL are equal", I see no way for them to do so.
(4) What a humanist(or any human) claims to 'be' is irrelevant; anyone can claim to be "good" but only one's actions and demeanour toward ALL others display one's nature. e.g. If one prays to remain supreme above others, is one being "good"?
(5) Most humanists accept the external authority of the concept of human equality, that is they accept the concept 'ALL are equal' has stand-alone authority; in a field populated almost exclusively by hatefully supremacist dogmas, it stands out as significant.
Finally - Only one who seeks to promote a competing doctrine could create and deliver such a distortion of what it is to be humanist but it's always difficult for an enslaved prisoner of doctrine to properly grasp what it is to be free. The authoritarianism of a religious doctrine functions to hound the less zealous into submission to the full dogma, whereas Humanism functions without compulsion to conform to arbitrary diktats; some humans are free to choose to accept some, or all, values of humanism.
For me, the main difference between humanism and religion is humanism accepts people's differences and expands the category of 'equal' to accommodate them, whereas religion constricts and represses people's differences to enforce intransigent conformity to the arbitrary ideal of a despot.
So, a couple of questions to end...
Do you see the quoted narrative as wholly prejudiced by religious thinking; partisan, biased, ignorant and racist or is it just me who sees those things writ loud and disgustingly proud?
As I stated earlier, I view Humanism's core as "Equality for ALL" so...
Can any doctrine, which is in competition with and opposition to "equality for all", be anything other that "supremacy for some"?
PEACE
Crispy
Crispy
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The best communications are often,
THREE WORDS OR LESS
OR ONE OR MORE FINGERS!
The best communications are often,
THREE WORDS OR LESS
OR ONE OR MORE FINGERS!
