Reading:   from Humanist Manifesto II  (Sep/Oct, 1973 issue of The Humanist)

     The next century can and should be the humanistic century.  Dramatic scientific, technological, and ever-accelerating social and political changes crowd our awareness.  We have virtually conquered the planet, explored the moon, overcome the natural limits of travel and communication; we stand at the dawn of a new age, ready to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit other planets.  Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.

     The future is, however, filled with dangers. In learning to apply the scientific method to nature and human life, we have opened the door to ecological damage, over-population, dehumanizing institutions, totalitarian repression, and nuclear and bio-chemical disaster.  Faced with apocalyptic prophecies and doomsday scenarios, many flee in despair from reason and embrace irrational cults and theologies of withdrawal and retreat.

     Traditional moral codes and newer irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow.  False “theologies of hope” and messianic ideologies, substituting new dogmas for old, cannot cope with existing world realities.  They separate rather than unite peoples.

     Humanity, to survive, requires bold and daring measures.  We need to extend the uses of scientific method, not renounce them, to fuse reason with compassion in order to build constructive social and moral values.  Confronted by many possible futures, we must decide which to pursue.  The ultimate goal should be the fulfillment of the potential for growth in each human personality – not for the favored few, but for all of humankind.  Only a shared world and global measures will suffice.

     A humanist outlook will tap the creativity of each human being and provide the vision and courage for us to work together.  This outlook emphasizes the role human beings can play in their own spheres of action.  The decades ahead call for dedicated, clear-minded men and women able to marshal the will, intelligence, and cooperative skills for shaping a desirable future.  Humanism can provide the purpose and inspiration that so many seek; it can give personal meaning and significance to human life. . .

      At the present juncture of history, commitment to all humankind is the highest commitment of which we are capable; it transcends the narrow allegiances of church, state, party, class, or race in moving toward a wider vision of human potentiality.  What more daring a goal for humankind than for each person to become, in ideal as well as practice, a citizen of a world community.  It is a classical vision; we can now give it a new vitality.  Humanism thus interpreted is a moral force that has time on its side.  We believe that humankind has the potential, intelligence, goodwill, and cooperative skill to implement this commitment in the decades ahead.

Sermon:

     After a few weeks’ break, we return to consideration of some of the primary sources from which our Unitarian Universalist Living Tradition draws.  Under consideration today are “humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

    As we shall see, Humanism has had a profound influence on our liberal religious movement over the past century.  However, humanistic thought goes back much farther in the history of our species.  The great classical civilizations of China, Greece and Rome were rooted in Humanist values.  And while those values seemed to subside into the background during the European Dark Ages, they re-emerged during the Renaissance of the fifteenth century.

     For example, the humanists of Renaissance Italy believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life.  They developed a new, rigorous kind of classical scholarship in order to correct and understand the works of the earlier Greeks and Romans, which seemed so vital to them.  Elite families hired humanists to teach their children classical morality, and to write in the classic style.

     Then, through the time of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, humanist ideas gathered new strength.  Those were the days of the blossoming of science.  A time that saw the critical examination of previously accepted doctrines and institutions from the point of view of rationalism.

     But what, exactly, is Humanism?  What sort of ideas qualify as humanistic?  Well, I hesitate to formulate any precise definitions.  As with some of the sources I’ve discussed in previous weeks, Humanism is hardly monolithic.  It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, both within and without other religious traditions.  I will try and give a description of Humanism as it has been generally understood for about the past century.  In doing so, I paraphrase from editor Margaret Knight’s Introduction to her Humanist Anthology.

     Typically, Humanists see no reason for believing in a supernatural God, or in a life after death.  They hold that humans must face their problems with their own intellectual and moral resources, without invoking supernatural aid.  They assert that authority, supernatural or otherwise, should not be allowed to obstruct inquiry in any field of thought.

     Knight goes on to mention two corollaries that commonly accompany those basic beliefs:  “First, that virtue is a matter of promoting human well-being, not of obeying the commands of a supposed superhuman lawgiver; and, second, that the mainsprings of moral action are ... the social instincts – those altruistic, co-operative tendencies that are as much part of our innate biological equipment as are our tendencies towards aggression and cruelty.”

    And so, the basic point of view of Humanism is that our understandings of the world, and our ethical framework for living in the world, arise from our human experience and reason.

    Some see a humanistic orientation as arrogant.  When Protagoras said “Man is the measure of all things,” wasn’t that as bad as claiming that the Universe revolves around the Earth?  How dare we claim to be at the center of things?  On the other hand, in some sense, each of us is at the center of our own Universe.  That is, the world, as we experience and understand it, is necessarily filtered through our own individual experience as human beings.  The only world we really know is the world of human experience.

    Furthermore, it strikes me that a major implication of a humanistic orientation is responsibility.  If we are essentially on our own, then it is our responsibility to figure out what’s what.  It’s our responsibility to figure out how to share the planet, both with our human brothers and sisters, and with all living beings.  Life does not come with an instruction manual.  We  write it as we live it.  One of the gifts of Humanism is to make us aware of that responsibility.

    I’d like to return now to the historical background of Humanism, especially as it relates specifically to Unitarian Universalism.  A couple of months ago, when I began this series on our sources, I spoke about the rise of Transcendentalism in the mid-nineteenth century.  I talked about how the source of religious truth and understanding was expanded beyond scripture and church authority, to include direct experience in the form of spiritual intuition.  Well, the whole story is actually a bit more involved.

    The radical wing of Unitarianism, which included the Transcendentalists, formed a new group, called the Free Religious Association, immediately after the Civil War.  But, in addition to the Transcendentalists, or intuitionists, the FRA included another faction – the scientific school.  This group’s thinking was moving away from supernaturalism toward science, away from theism toward Humanism.  One of its leaders, Francis Ellingwood Abbot went so far as to claim that “Science is . . . destined to be the world’s true Messiah.”  Implicit in his thinking was the conviction that reason and the deepest religious truths are in no sense contradictory.

    All this was going on in the late nineteenth century, but the rejection of theism was definitely a minority viewpoint at least into the early twentieth century.  The Humanist movement really began taking shape in the second decade of the twentieth century.  That occurred largely through the developing theological positions of two Unitarian ministers, Curtis Reese and John Dietrich.

    Dietrich argued that life is a process of the constant adjustment of the organism to its environment, and that religion was developed by humans to help them adjust to their environment.  He felt that human development had reached a point where the concept of God could be discarded without affecting religion’s role as an adaptive behavior.  His conclusion was that “one does not need to believe in God in order to be religious.”  Dietrich saw worship, in the highest sense, as paying reverence to valuable qualities.  As such it did not depend on a belief in God.  He saw worship as an attitude involving mind and emotion, and directed toward certain worthy qualities, not necessarily toward a being in which those qualities reside.

    Curtis Reese rejected both theism and mechanistic materialism.  He embraced a form of humanism that took an organic view of humanity’s place in an evolving natural reality.  He saw humans as continuous with nature, but having developed to a point of being able to contemplate their purpose.  And he saw that purpose as enhancing human life.

    Reese saw humanistic religion “as a human effort to find satisfactory models of living.”  He wrote that “the trend in modern religious development is away from the transcendent, the authoritative, the dogmatic, and toward the human, the experimental, the tentative... away from the...otherworldly; and toward the ethical, the social and the worldly.”

    Dietrich and Reese played an important role in bringing a certain level of respectability to non-theistic Humanism, at least within Unitarian circles.  They were also both involved in one of the defining moments of the American Humanist movement, in 1933.  That was the unveiling of the Humanist Manifesto, perhaps the first attempt at a systematic articulation of the Humanist position.  The Manifesto contained fifteen short theses, running to about three pages.  It was signed by thirty-four individuals, many of whom were Unitarian or Universalist ministers, Dietrich and Reese included.

    Among other things, the Manifesto described the universe as “self-existing and not created,” asserted that humanity is a part of nature, having “emerged as a result of a continuous process,” and declared that “Nothing human is alien to the religious... The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.”

    The ideas expressed by John Dietrich and Curtis Reese, and by the Humanist Manifesto, took root and grew within Univeralism and, especially, within Unitarianism.  This was possible because of long-held convictions regarding spiritual freedom, congregational autonomy, and tolerance of a wide range of ideas and beliefs.

    One final historical note:  you will notice that my reading this morning came from Humanist Manifesto II, which appeared in 1973.  Its writers point out in its Preface that in the forty years since the original Manifesto, events had made that earlier statement seem far too optimistic.  They write, in part, “Nazism has shown the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable.  Other totalitarian regimes have suppressed human rights without ending poverty.  Science has sometimes brought evil as well as good.”

    While toned down a bit, however, the newer version reiterates many of the same basic positions found in the original.  It criticizes “traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience,” and says that “Any account of nature should pass the tests of scientific evidence.”  It calls for a religious approach that includes a full appreciation of human potentialities and responsibilities.  It extols reason and intelligence as “the most effective instruments that humankind possesses,” and affirms “that moral values derive their source from human experience.”

There is no doubt that Humanism has been an influential source of our Living Tradition over the past hundred years or so.  Surveys in recent years have shown that, when forced to categorize themselves, more Unitarian Universalists describe themselves as Humanists than as anything else.  Many of the ideas and attitudes I’ve described this morning have been expressed frequently from this and from hundreds of other Unitarian Universalist pulpits around the world.

    And where lies the greatest value of the Humanist contribution to our tradition?  A part of that value lies in the wider reach of our communal arms, as we embrace a greater range of religious seekers, many of whom may not be considered “religious” in a traditional sense.  Broadening the notion of “religious” to include all who grapple honestly and sincerely with the deepest issues of life – that’s a gift for which I am very grateful.

    The contributions mentioned at the outset are also central:  counsel to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and a warning against idolatries of the mind and spirit.  Reason may not be sufficient to provide answers to all our questions.  But it is necessary to test the validity and reasonableness of potential answers, whatever their source.

    As for the results of science – those are important, but for me, perhaps more important are the methods of science.  Science at its best – a systematic, open-minded inquiry into the nature of things – is perhaps the most effective tool through which to exercise our reason.  But in order for science to play that role, it must be willing to follow the truth wherever it leads.

    Science and faith are very closely related for me.  I think I may have quoted Alan Watts on that point before.  But I’d like to do so again.  He wrote: “Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would wish it to be.  Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.  Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.  Belief clings, but faith lets go.  Faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”  The pursuit of science, like the pursuit of faith, involves plunging into the unknown.  We ask questions to which we have no answers, and we follow wherever they take us.

    Idolatry is something we don’t talk about very often, but it’s an interesting and important concept.  James Luther Adams writes that “idolatry occurs when a social movement adopts as the center of loyalty an idol, a segment of reality torn away from the context of universality, an inflated, misplaced abstraction made into an absolute.”  In other words, idolatry means treating as ultimate, something that is less than ultimate.  A traditional religious example would be Moses’s people worshipping the golden calf, losing sight of its symbolic nature.  Buddhists speak of mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.  You can probably think of examples of people who seem to worship one idol or another.  It may be money, or power, or physical beauty, or just about anything.

    One way that Humanism addresses idolatry is by unmasking the idolatrous nature of religious icons, rituals, and traditions that fly in the face of scientific reason and knowledge.  But in warning against idolatry, Humanism is addressing itself as well.  That is, we must be careful not merely to replace one idol with another.  After all, science, reason, and even freedom can also become idols, when applied blindly and narrowly, without consideration of the larger context.

    I already claimed that one of the values of Humanism was to enlarge the theological tent of Unitarian Universalism.  I would add that that value would be diminished if it were to banish others, such as theists, from that tent.  Curtis Reese, sometimes called the Statesman of Religious Humanism, once said that “theism is philosophically possible but not religiously necessary.”  That strikes me as an appropriate Unitarian Universalist attitude.  There is room for a variety of theological orientation, as long as we don’t set up as idols our own particular brand.  In the words of our Transylvanian forebear, Francis David, “We need not think alike to love alike.”

    I’d like to close this morning with a reading by Norman Cousins that’s included in our hymnal.  I think it captures the captures the positive quality of the Humanist spirit.  It’s called “The Body is Humankind.”
 

    As we celebrate our humanity, as we exercise our human freedom, may we always accept as well our human responsibility by recognizing and acknowledging the consequences our our actions, our thoughts, and our feelings.