the affirmations of humanism

 

1. We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

2. We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

3. We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

4. We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

5. We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

6. We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

7. We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

8. We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

9. We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

10. We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

11. We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

12. We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

13. We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

14. We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

15. We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

16. We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

17. We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

18. We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

19. We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

20. We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

21. We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

(source)

 

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do people really believe in this…?

 

The Star, a malaysian newspaper, recently contained an article advising people on some of the do’s and don’ts during the Hungry Ghosts festival, so as to “avoid meeting ghosts” during this month.

 

How to Avoid Meeting Ghosts

 

This article was apparently written in response to the malaysian reception of a “famous” Feng Shui guru and taoist exorcist from Hong Kong. He was invited to malaysian radio station 988 as a guest deejay in a “ghost-related” programme.

 

Among the prohibitions at night are cutting hair, shaving, going for outings and hanging clothes outside the house. People should also avoid moving house and purchasing a new vehicle as such activities increase one’s chances of encountering ghosts. Ghosts also love to “stick to walls” so one should avoid going near to walls too.

 

My God.

 

Do intelligent and educated people, raised and brought up in the late 20th and 21st centuries, believe in all of this? The problem with such “beliefs” is manifold.

 

In the first place, there is no empirical evidence for the existence of disembodied spirits and it would be ridiculous for the superstitious to claim that empirical science just cannot “prove” or “disprove” the immaterial realm. On the contrary, there is some evidence that suggests natural causes for such supposedly “supernatural” experiences by human beings.

 

Second, anecdotal evidence is NO evidence at all. Just because people claim to have “experienced” certain things does not validate the truth claims of such things. Experiences of psychic and paranormal phenomena can be attributed to so many factors; and if there is any real evidence to the existence of such spirits, their reality should be available to ALL and not just to those “who believe”.

 

It is somewhat dodgy that people who experienced ghosts are often those who “believe” in them in the first place – this suggests a psychological factor. No scientist, philosopher, historian or anyone so educated will claim to have experienced such things. The demographics of people with such claims are usually narrowed down to the gullible and uneducated masses.

 

The article also mentioned the guru warning the public not to “make fun of the belief”. Come on. We have a RIGHT to refute ridiculous claims of falsehood and superstition…to place such rubbish on the pedestal of “respectable religion” is utterly crap. It is like saying that Halloween is real, or that Zeus or Thor are real deities, etc.

 

Why should we “respect” such nonsense?

 

It is encouraging to note that our senior statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, is enlightened enough to be an atheist on such matters, given that he is part of a generation that is gullible to be deceived and hoodwinked by such charlatans as feng shui experts and taoist priests.

 

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to be a biblical scholar is to be at least an agnostic

 

Let me first define some of the terms.

 

I will define a biblical scholar as someone who studies biblical literature in all of its aspects – history, archaeology, near-eastern culture, graeco-roman culture, hebrew bible, early christian writings, etc – either for a living or as an amateur interest; from a purely SECULAR point of view, regardless of his/her faith perspective.

 

I think that the secular study of biblical literature, as opposed to a faith-based study of biblical literature, is the most appropriate and intellectually honest way to study the religion of Christianity. This will allow the student to remain relatively objective in his/her assessment of the relevant research materials and thus forbid any faith bias into the intellectual process.

 

And as such, anyone who studies the bible honestly like any other work of ancient literature, will come to a conclusion that the bible is a thoroughly human and man-made piece of work, written in mythological and legendary language, by individuals and communities who had a faith investment in the process.

 

He/she will also come to the conclusion that much of the bible is NOT history:

 

• the early patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob most probably did not exist
• the exodus account is pure myth
• the conquest of Canaan and Jericho is fiction
• the Davidic and Solomonic empires, as depicted in the Hebrew bible, may in all likelihood not exist at all
• Jesus, if he existed at all, was perhaps an illegitimate Jewish peasant born to Miryam who later became a revolutionary preacher who was then executed by the Romans for treason
• much of the gospel accounts of Jesus is theology and metaphor and thus historically untrue

 

And if Jesus is but a mere man, the Christian mythos crumbles.

 

And so would the Christian theistic concept of God.

 

Only a student with a faith bias would attempt to tamper with the evidence and come up with a different conclusion to fit his religious views. But this is not honest scholarship.

 

Now, what about liberal Christian scholars who agree with all of the above but still claim to believe in God and the post-Easter Jesus?

 

Let’s be honest. The post-Easter Jesus is a Jesus that is made up, a religious work of fiction. If there is no historical veracity to a divine god-man, then one’s religious belief becomes an exercise in humanist ethics. Just like any other atheist or agnostic.

 

Liberal scholars can believe in this made-up Jesus for all I care, but their belief does not make the idea metaphysically true. It is just a postmodern “truth” for their particular religious community which will have no bearing on the society at large.

 

Are these scholars then really agnostics or atheists? Yes, contrary to what they may say.

 

The moment one does not accept that a supernatural being who is outside of space and time exists, who also interferes and intervenes in human and worldy affairs; then one is an atheist. To say that one may not believe in a classical theistic being but still believe in a “god” that is used as a synonym for spiritual force, universal principle, human experience, luminous experiences of the transcendent, etc is to engage in bullshit.

 

There are many atheists who acknowledge the reality of experiences that border on spirituality, but nevertheless reject the existence of a supernatural god “out there”.

 

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why dialogue is better than debate

 

There was a time when I loved debates and the debate format, believing that it was an effective way to exchange ideas as well as a tool for liberal education.

 

And I used to think, albeit so naively, that the winner of those debates would most likely have the better points and thus a better understanding of the “truth”.

 

Those were the days.

 

I still listen to debates, especially on issues like atheism and theism, morality, philosophy, ethics, theology and evolution.

 

But I no longer view them as effective tools and mediums for intellectual inquiry. They are simply means from which I can gather the views of whom I disagree. Period.

 

A more engaging and effective format would be dialogue, a forum in which advocates of differing views discuss with one another in a spontaneous exchange of ideas. Such a format would do justice to actually communicate differing views in a fair and civilised manner as no prior assumption of rhetorical or argumentative ability is made.

 

Debates are otherwise. The problem I have with debates is that the more eloquent, the better skilled speaker may not necessarily be the more skilled intellectual. On the contrary, the better speaker seems to be akin to the insurance agent or the used-car salesperson – all style but void of actual substance or even integrity of truth.

 

There are many many gifted scholars and research professors who are just not debaters and would never have the bravado to engage in a battle of verbal wit. They would probably have a lot to say on the subject but too little time to deliver it. They would probably be thinking too much to be able to speak on the cuff in rebuttal. They would probably be the ones with the better arguments but the weaker oratory and rhetorics to pull it off.

 

Whenever I think of debates, the name of William Lane Craig would come to mind.

 

He is an evangelical Christian scholar whose supposed expertise lie in philosophy and theology. And he is a prolific and very experienced debater who have engaged in countless public formal debates with atheists, scientists and muslims. What sets him apart from most of his opponents is his experience behind the lectern.

 

He speaks very confidently, even when unsure of his rebuttals. He seldom, if never, hem and haw on his statements and rebuttals – this gives the impression of competence to audiences that may or may not be philosophically trained to discern.

 

But when one actually dissects his arguments, one realises that he always offers nothing new to the table. He often reiterates the same old arguments time and again. For the existence of God, he would present his pet argument, the Kalam Cosmological argument (which offers nothing but a deist view of god, which is nothing like the theistic, supernatural and interfering deity of the Bible), which is now deemed to be false due to current research on physics and quantum mechanics that present a universe that may not need a first cause at all.

 

And for the resurrection, he would always bring up his four “facts” or lines of evidences, among which are the honorable burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the empty tomb and the postmortem appearances.

 

And time and again, he would pretend that these are irrefutable “facts”, as though they have already been verified empirically, extrabiblically and historically.

 

These are NOT facts at all, but accounts that have not been verified to be historically and extrabiblically accurate!

 

Besides, the debate format is such that it favours the individual who is able to “control” the whole “conversation” to suit his purpose. Craig is known to “bully” his opponents into responding the way he wants them to, like a lawyer who is interrogating his witnesses. That is not intellectually honest or even ethical at all.

 

Thus, if he is debating a scientist, who definitely knows much more about science than he does; Craig would attempt to skew the debate in philosophical terms and nuances so that his opponent would not be able to respond “scientifically”, so to speak.

 

This does no good to the intellectual enterprise. It does not educate but merely offer spin on behalf of the better and more adept rhetorician. But if placed in a dialogue format, I reckon that Craig would then have nothing better to offer than what he has already done.

 

Which is just more rubbish.

 

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a medical miracle

 

A man who suffered from a stage 4 cancer in the brain at the age of 26 in 2002 claimed that he was healed completely of the cancer by God after going through 3 months of chemotherapy.

 

He appeared on Fox News a few days ago to give his account of what happened.

 

Fox News: Cancer Patient “Cured” by God’s Voice

 

He is now a preacher and an entrepreneur, as introduced by the newscaster.

 

Although the probability of a stage 4 cancer sufferer being healed completely is very low, the reality is that there are still people who did get better. We may not know the reasons behind such medical anomalies, but they can be attributed to a number of factors, namely the positive attitude of the patient, the age of the patient and the treatment.

 

The gentleman in this case became a Christian two years prior to the diagnosis of the disease and as such “believed” that he would not just die after “receiving Christ”. His youthful vigour as well as this positive attitude might have helped the chemotherapy along.

 

Needless to say, it is presumptuous of him to attribute his healing to god as he had undergone chemotherapy. It would be a different matter all together if the cancer disappeared by itself without any treatment whatsoever. That would be a bona fide medical mystery.

 

Such “testimonies” of healing cannot be treated with credulity and respect as they are often riddled with interpretations and theological bias. It is akin to someone suffering from a cough who took some cough mixture and got better but claimed in church that god “healed” him of the cough. It is obvious that it was the medication that made him better.

 

Besides…it is very odd for a news channel to present such incredulous stories. It will simply demote the reputation of the channel even more. It is the USA anyway.

 

The land of the silly.

 

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it is old news, really

 

According to the Christian Post Singapore edition, who interviewed the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, Hugh Williamson; some parts of the Old Testament narratives should not be read as history.

 

Read Old Testament in its Own Terms

 

This is old stuff, which has been taught in many credible mainline universities for decades – that not only the Hebrew scriptures but much of the whole bible is NOT history, in the modern sense of the word.

 

And as such, biblical inerrancy is a philosophical dinosaur that is only the province of the theologically ignorant or biased, in the case of the fundamentalist.

 

The problem with Singaporean Christianity though, is that many of our pastors, having being taught the truth, decided to return to the ignorant theological naivete of their youth so as to cope with the resulting uncertainty that is often the case when one slips into agnosticism.

 

Or that they decided to be two-faced about it – closet agnostics or atheists in their personal lives – while teaching and preaching the bible as though all of it is absolutely true to their parishioners for fear that they couldn’t digest the truth.

 

Intellectual dishonesty.

 

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intellectuals

 

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

- Albert Camus

 

Scourers of second-hand bookshops, who collect books to read rather than merely to collect, and who delights in those dusty Bohn’s Library and Everyman editions which contain everything and more of the past’s literary treasures, will be familiar with the experience of finding volumes annotated by earlier readers – frequently in ink, and often in beautiful clerkly hands – in which words have been underlined and their dictionary definitions entered alongside, and with names, likewise emphasised, earnestly supplied with one-sentence biographies in the margins.

 

In a collection of Addison’s essays on the desk beside me as I write there are many examples of this studious autodidacticism. I look at random and find the name “Ben Jonson” underlined in blue ink with the help of a ruler, and in the marginn a laborious hand has written, “Playwright and poet 1572-1637 AD”.

 

It is a touching vision; it makes one think of the medieval tanner’s son, one of a family so numerous and poor that they could not afford a candle, and who therefore, after a day’s long labour, took his book to the church so that he could read under its porch lantern. The boy grew up to become a scholar and teacher, and one might say the patron saint of all those people, invariably from among the poor, who discovered books and taught themselves; a numerous, noble, heroic army of men and women, who by their own efforts conquered more than any general has ever done; the fortifications at the foot of Parnassus.

 

The high moment of this epic is the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its story is a fascinating one. Anyone who disdains the educational opportunities now abundantly on offer in the contemporary West should enquire about this period in intellectual history because it illustrates how human intelligence, however oppressed, can slake its thirst for knowledge – or more accurately, since this is the true goal beyond knowledge: for understanding – if given half a chance.

 

What is striking about the variety of autodidact experiences which flowed from the Victorian spread of general education, and the concomitant proliferation of public libraries, is how often the beneficiaries of both produced eloquent and elegaic accounts of the excitement which books – and not just books, but music, theatre, opera, all the delights of high culture – prompted in them.

 

The children of well-off parents, with educational opportunities commensurate with the home environments from which so much cultural familiarity is absorbed, can be denied the extraordinary delight felt by the self-taught man first stumbling across Ruskin or Marx, Beethoven or Rembrandt. A clue lies in this to the reason why these things matter more than the artefacts of the commonplace; one imagines the eager, darting look of an intelligent eye, unblinkered by conventional education, seeing the value in things without having been told to expect them there – and therefore seeing them truly.

 

Ruskin is one of the salient names in this story. He figures at the top of the list of influences for MPs in the early Labour Party, almost all of them men from working-class backgrounds whose educations were substantially, if not wholly, self-provided. An Oldham millworker who became Lord Privy Seal, J.R Clynes, encountered Ruskin when young, having bought The Seven Lamps of Architecture for a shilling he could ill afford.

 

It did not matter that the subject of that book was architecture. One book led to another, breeding a consciousnesss of debate, of ideas unfolding into further ideas, inviting agreement or controversy, raising questions which further books were needed to answer. By this means working people learned of their oppression and their rights, and formulated new hopes therefore. Women learned about their own bodies and how to control their fertility. A worker in the Swindon railway factory taught himself Greek and Latin and thereafter published translations of Ovid, Pindar, Sappho, Plato, Menander and Horace; this was Alfred Williams. The tramp poet W.H Davies could only afford classics sold at second-hand bookstalls, so he had never read contemporary poetry, and when he met other poets he felt mildy embarrassed because they knew his work but he did not know theirs.

 

And so the stories go on – extraordinary and heartening, sometimes astonishing, often moving. Of course these autodidacts were a minority in their own class, and they more often suffered the disappointments of Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure or the rebuffs of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End than the successes of Williams and Davies. Bast’s haunting fate is illustrative of the terrible snobbery too often encountered by working-class autodidacts. Bast – a bastard in cultural terms, straining to acquire culture, working hard at going to concerts and reading systematically, eventually killed by his own bookcase falling and crushing him – is the target of the uneasy, guilty disdain which led to modernism’s attempts to lock the fortifications of Parnassus again, to keep out book-devouring workers and evening-class graduates by making culture too remote and difficult for them. On this view, access to modernist art and literature required the incrowd knowingness of those already in possession of Parnassus’s keys; so all the Bohn’s Library and Everyman classics in the world were no good to the factory hand who exchanged his luxurious shilling for them, or the dress-maker’s assistant who bought a ticket for the gods at Covent Garden.

 

After 1945 the culture of self-education rapidly declines, partly because of increased formal schooling, partly because of television and other distractions, and partly because increasingly rapid changes in cultural fashion make self-taught classicism look conservative. No doubt the internet will spawn a new, perhaps a better, resource for autodidacts. But it will not be the same.

 

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This article is written by Anthony C. Grayling, professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

 

 

chimpanzees help others out

 

 

US scientists at a primate research centre in Georgia discovered that female chimpanzees like to spontaneously help others rather than act selfishly.

 

This might suggest that altruism is not a uniquely human trait.

 

Chimps like to Help Others, study finds

 

Chimps like to Help Others rather than act selfishly

 

 

This is not news really, since it is a FACT that chimps are humankind’s closest cousins (along with the bonobos and the gorillas), contrary to the silly rants of religious fundamentalists. It also suggests that much of religion’s trivial rantings about morality being god-originated is cow dung.

 

Much of our morality is innate in our species not because it is a sign of our souls being made in the image of god but because it is part of our genetic make-up through thousands of years of evolution.

 

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thugs deserve the harshest punishment yet

 

A 65-year-old Singaporean man was bashed up by a group of thugs when he asked them to smoke somewhere else instead of the very narrow stairwell landing on the second floor beneath his third floor flat at 31 Seah Street.

 

The man was obviously distressed by the second-hand smoke.

 

Hooligans beat up Elderly man

 

If the thugs weren’t drunk or under the influence of some other substances, then they were but barbarians – surprise surprise – to see them in 21st century Singapore. Call me naive, call me childishly so, but such an act is appalling and it violates the good common sense of any decent human being.

 

I hope the long arm of the draconian Singapore legal system catches up with these clowns.

 

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vice

 

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink, but he did not die of it; he degenerated – into vice.

- Nietzsche

 

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