Critiques of Pure Arrogance Intellectual or Political?

by Gary Berg-Cross

Disciplined insincerity & confident ignorance are already evident in this spectacle we call the primary season.  Well it’s still the money primary I guess, but there is a steady effort to test market ideas for the later campaigns. It’s already evidenced an unhealthy dose of arrogance to go along with the insincerity & ignorance (not to mention those flashes & dashes of egoism, conceit, intolerance, sub-surface anger, quarter truths, & light, gossipy slanders.  

I’m thinking of, for example, of Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s sharp-tongued & perhaps dimmer-witted comments.  These started at the winter meeting of the free market Club for Growth winter economic conference in February.  It was a good time to be Palm Beach, but perhaps too comfy an environment for well-reasoned arguments. I’m already tired of people who want-to-be-in-charge of things saying “I’m not a scientist” followed by an awkward opinion that back hands real scientific understanding out of the conversation. In Jeb’s case it was his opinion about climate change, an important topic for Florida and the rest of the world.  Ok, so you are not a scientist or an economist but why not get informed?  There are advisors.

Perhaps we can be disappointed but not surprised with the opinion, since he is very much a politician fitting George Bernard Shaw comment in Major Barbara :

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points

 clearly to a political career.” 

But it gets worse, because Jeb was just starting on the not-being-humble path. More recently in New Hanpshire he upped the attack as one sees from the headlines:

‘Jeb Bush Says People Who Accept Climate Science Are ‘Really Arrogant’

It is one thing to be “not a scientist” (Re climate change.) and another to attack scientists for their inconvenient evidence, if not a good approximation of reality.  Why are they not to be believed?  Well their explanations are too complicated – he used the more manipulative work “convoluted” in comments reported by CNN.  Then we have the pithy punch:

“For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you,” ... “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it, even.”

Well I think that was a swing at President Obama as much as at Science. He’s speaking up.  But it is easy to believe that the arrogance (perhaps anti-intellectual arrogance in this case) really dwells in those politically conservative people.  Sure, one can perceive strength as arrogance in fact-based people, who are right but the not believed. They have a lot to go on. Evidence-based belief comes from the various climate scientists who actively publish research, 97 percent agree that humans cause climate change. Further the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

leveraging research  from ~ 800 climate experts across the globe,  concludes that  it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of atmospheric and ocean warming since the 1950s. Scientists speak in probabilities, how’s that for arrogance?  Well pulling math on you seems arrogant to some, I guess.

I think that the more dangerous arrogance is this.  It is the acted upon and emotion-centered belief of people who are wrong on the evidence (see above), don’t like testing evidence (what is the trend for the next decade?) and for one reason or another can't face this reality and projected reality.  This type of arrogance is manifested in Jeb's attack on the evidence based community and is especially true of political leaders who need to comfort the flock.

Unfortunately, this is just an early, primary season example of the attack on intellect, facts and critical thinking. We are likely to have more as part of 2015-16 silly season. I know that I will still be upset when I see  how many hands get raised this year when the candidates are asked about their belief/non-belief in evolution. Sort of a reverse American Exceptionalism demonstration.

Picking Winners

By Gary Berg-Cross

A form of March Madness is leaving the bracket-littered scene, but it provides lingering thoughts about what is given emphasis and effort in our culture and the limits of knowledge and prediction.  It’s all humbling and a bit of a mirror both on our values and also human limitations.  Basketball brackets and the associated discussion are highly structured and “professional.” They are laced with expert observations, data of all kinds and statistical analysis.  There is a run up to the tournament with lots of predictions:

NOTABLE TEAMS RISING: Saint Louis, Florida

NOTABLE TEAMS FALLING: Creighton, Michigan State, Baylor

And on the day after the last regular game newspapers have special sections on all 68 contestants.  The main players on each team are discussed and strengths and weaknesses noted.  You can see a range of predictions. This year one heard of the analysis we had statistical NCAA bracket “optimization” and lots of simulations. You can read about how off or not off predictions were explained as Bracket VooDoo which is way of gesturing that things turned out a bit different than experts believed. 

Of the 11 million people who filled out a bracket on ESPN.com, only 1,780 predicted a Kentucky-UConn final. That’s 0.016% of entrants. It was pointed out that statistically a high school basketball player filling out a bracket on ESPN has twice as much chance of getting drafted by an NBA team (0.03%) as he would have at accurately predicting the final.  Pretty humbling. Our cognitive biases have once again beaten our critical thinking, but there are psychological strategies to consider and use next year.  In America we are optimistic (well not about climate change). 

Bracketology: Somewhere between Art and Science lies perfection

So when we turn to other, important areas of American life, like political campaigns one wonders why predictions seem so much more accurate.  It seems strange that the dynamics are simpler.  Well, of course, there aren’t 68 teams.  But still if we think of an election day there is the notion of predicting the future and winning, which every 4 years involves hundreds of different races at the national, state & local level.  The results of those contests are of much greater importance for the direction of the country than the NCAA tourney, but the culture devotes less consistent, if frustrating, effort to covering it for the citizens and our evolvement seems less focused.  Perhaps this reflects the fact that unlike basketball professionals and experts, pols and their advisors want less intellectual power devoted to help citizens figure out the contests.

So perhaps it is time for the citizenry to bone up on the process of selecting good candidates and what better way than leveraging some ideas from that big elimination contest – March Madness.  Given the disappointments with most of our March brackets we’d probably be far from the ideals of our founders, but I sure would feel better if, as a culture we tried a bit harder and smarter.  

Oh, and of course the bracket metaphor is used widely including for rating religious things as below where people get to vote for their favorite eJsus movie:

Searching for the Real Hannah Arendt -Her Life & Thoughts, a movie version

by Gary Berg-Cross

During a recent trip to Europe a friend recommended German director Margarethe von Trotta's new film Hannah Arendt. It’s a look at a portion of the life of philosopher & historical-political theorist Hannah Arendt. A secularized, agnostic, German Jew & refugee from Nazism Arendt settled in New York to lecture and write. In the 50s she wrote on "The Origins of Totalitarianism."  In the 60s she covered the war crimes trial of the Nazi transport chief Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker.  Trotta’s new movie, with Arendt as the protagonist flashed through DC theatres before I had a chance to see it, but the DVD was released recently and is available from Netflix.

The movie is interesting on several dimensions.  It tries to deal with an intellectual life, personal and world history as well as related controversy. As a film it is challenging to see the portrayal of thinking, skeptical musing along with reluctant understanding covered within a biopic frame. Along the movie we see long trains of thoughts punctuated by rather pointed arguments.

Coming out of a Hegelian tradition layered under Martin Heidegger’s Existentialism and her own efforts to reconcile reasoned and cultural understanding, there is much to infer going on below the surface of facial expressions.  This is alluded to sometimes in flashbacks and group debates, but the film’s main device is to show things through Arendt penchant for questioning the conventional wisdom of the times. In particular it is what she sees and tries to understand at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. .She worries that there is a show trial aspects using as a frame crimes against a people, the Jews, rather than a crime against humanity which she sees as the relevant concept. Slowly she develops a counter narrative to the trial’s frame.

At the trial Eichmann adopts a "Nuremberg-style defense" which argues that he was only following orders from a maximum leader. He didn’t know any more than that people were being moved.  He was disinterested and thus could not possibly be charged with war crimes. The man that Arendt sees thinking (in contrast to seeing her thinking about what he is saying)  in some robotic way (shown in black and while clips from the actual trial) is not that a raving, power-centric sociopath with special goals. Instead she sees a hollowed out person who speaks like a bureaucrat. He is more of a clown or an amoral careerist playing by rules with a system and uninterested in asking questions. Honestly this portion of the film had me thinking of plausible deniability mixed in with George W. Bush and friends and the run up to and execution of the Iraq War.

To Hannah Eichmann is a nobody who seems frightfully conformist & normal. This is the result, she speculates, as part of a de-humanizing and anti-intellectual aspect of modern life with dire consequences.  As a person who sees special virtues in reasoning she is horrified and fears future atrocities if civic humanism and ciritical thinking is not restored and emphasized.  The horrendous consequences passively following orders without reason leads to a situation that she calls "the banality of evil."   

Much of the latter part of the film concerns the backlash to her 5 part series in the New Yorker and the subsequent book on that banality.  Along the way we get to know more about her values and how she frames her life.  We see the consequences of various criticisms such as defending Eichmann by trying to understand him, disrespecting the Jewish victims and not defending her tribe, the Jews.  The film nicely shows and implies points on both sides of the argument, her strengths as a critical thinker and her weaknesses in not always applying that same critical thinking – perhaps due to the brittleness of being too abstractly philosophical. You can imagine the type of criticism she took for her critique of what she called a “cooperative” European Jewish leadership that often worked with the Nazis.  To them (and many of us looking back) there was some hope of saving as many Jews as possible by accommodation. To Arendt, it was an enabling capitulation reached by an absence of perspective and a central value for civic humanism in their reasoning.

A strong point of criticism was her apparent lack of self-identification with nations, cultures, or faiths. These are not the primary foundations for Arendt as shown in this portion of a letter not shown in the film, but implied in her stances:

“this kind of love for the Jews would seem suspect to me, since I’m Jewish myself….. We would both agree that patriotism is impossible without constant opposition and critique. In this entire affair I can confess to you one thing: the injustice committed by my own people naturally provokes me more than injustice done by others.”

Critical thinking covered in portions of her letters are used as dialog in the film with a central one being an exchange with Zionist Gershom Scholem. The film has a dear friend, stand-in character for Scholem, named Kurt Blumenfeld.  Their debates are used to show the destruction of some of Arendt’s great friendship due to political-philosophical differences. In a letter to Arendt the real Scholem wrote (in 1963) that “In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel, or Love for the Jewish people.’ In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German left, I find no trace of this.”

Arendt response to Scholem is covered as movie dialog and seemed to me a central point of her character as shown in the movie:

“How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first, I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective — not the German, French or American nation, or the working class, or anything of that kind.  Indeed I love ‘only’ my friends and am quite incapable of any other kind of love.”

The film nicely exposes Arendt’s relations with a network of friends who largely abandon her with exceptions like Mary McCarthy, who is deliciously portrayed.  A paradox glimpsed is her unchanging devotion to mentor Martin Heidegger, who was Rector at Freiburg in the 34 where he instituted the Hitler salute, and collaborated in the persecution of Jewish students and faculty-members including his own mentor. Interestingly the

argument is that he saved some Jews by such accommodations – which seems to be of a type of what Jewish leaders were trying.  Arendt accepts this for her mentor, but not other leaders. At Freiburg Heidegger in 1934 told the student body that “the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” It is an unexplored paradox that Arendt had the temerity to wave away as a minor weakness. After the war in a birthday address broadcast on West German radio Arendt explains Heidegger’s Nazism as an “escapade,” a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely “succumbed to the temptation . . . to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.”  What conclusion does she take from Heidegger’s behavior?  Well she seems to say “the thinking ‘I’ is entirely different from the self of consciousness.” And so Heidegger’s thought cannot be contaminated by the actions of the mere man.

Whew!!  Now there is a separation that raised moral issues of responsibility. Where did critical thinking go when a friend, lover,and great man was involved?  Some blind spots remain almost irresistibly seductive for intellectuals of all magnitudes. And that is perhaps part of the movie’s message, but made quietly in contrast to the big dialogic arguments.

On the plus side, if you can get over her blindness for great thinkers, we see in the movie some of her important insights in lectures to admiring students at the New School.  Part of it is a warning about the danger that comes from some meta-belief, some idea that humans can "know" in some permanent or absolute way what is an ultimate "good" or is “right.” She fears ideologies that define some fixed course of future human history rather than thinking through it pragmatically in context – an approach that she might share with John Dewey. This belief in a God or Grand Leader view she associated with religious fanatics and violent revolutionaries who accept using a necessary evil in the pursuit of desirable ends. Her counter to this was an evolutionary type of change she called revolution. This idea of "revolution" she reserved for identifying fundamental changes in human ways of thinking and relating which she associates with modernity.  It is interesting to know that she speculated that this revolution had a secular form, whereby we humans are slowly freeing ourselves from long-established fears, often though violence and power from cultural-national-religious myths.

The Appeal to Common Sense

By Gary Berg-Cross

Everyone appeals to common sense. President Obama recently used it:

“The idea to shut down the government at a time when the economy is gaining some traction ... I am assuming that they will not take that path… I have confidence that common sense in the end will prevail.”

I’m not so sure he’s right there that sound judgment will prevail.

You hear in the debate over Immigration (A plea for common sense and compassion in the immigration debate) where the common sense appeal to is one of a humanitarian and, ultimately, moral basis in distinction to economic, social and enforcement aspects of the issue.

I might agree with that priority, but this argument is not that common. common sense is a term with philosophical origins, which is today commonly used to refer to a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things which is shared by ("common to") nearly all people, and can be reasonably accepted by nearly all people without any need for debate. A practical example these wet summer days is if it looks like rain take an umbrella when you go out.

This comes out of our everyday world of seemingly direct perception and experience of getting wet.  Common sense evokes the idea of practical world and easy, harmonized knowledge and reasoning we can use to plan our day.

There is idea of a reasoning independent of particular training and experience and hence shared by us all.  Or perhaps we might say that just the common life experience of growing up in the world gives us the base to reason from.  It’s not an idea that holds up well under examination given the appeals to it we see used widely.  

The trouble is that common sense appeals often seen to be about values that immediate perception and involving basic knowledge acquired from age 2-8. .

All too often the topic is something we might or should agree on and don’t. In these cases common sense gets argued for secondary things, not the primary ones and that is an important debating point.  Such hidden agendas are technically way beyond a topic of 8 year olds. The argument in the previously cited article is for an immigration bill that “upholds values Americans cherish—hard work, opportunity and compassion.” 

Sounds great but values are much more abstract than immediate and a subject for well informed and reasoned debate with agreed upon facts. Consider the reasoning applied to the recent Farm Bill:

Today we have crops that are more resilient to extreme weather and disease, meaning that the livelihood of my family is less tied to the whims of Mother Nature. In fact, about 90 percent of corn and soybeans have been improved with biotechnology today. By producing a higher yield, these crops allow me to do more with less and help meet the growing food needs of our world.

Any technology that helps me and my family earn a little bit more for each hard-fought acre we farm is a welcome advancement. But not everyone chooses to see the benefit of these technologies for America’s families.

It’s a simple, linear type argument but not everyone would agree with the chain of reasoning because our knowledge, experience and reasoning differ:

·         less tied to nature’s whims is good (does nature really have whims?)

·         Biotech improves crop yield (or does it reduce pest damage if we use it with,,,?)

·         Result more food crops that the world needs (cost/benefit analysis please)

·         It helps my family so it is good (what about damaging other families with pesticide food?)

All too often we get the inverse labeled as “common sense”. There is, for example, a common sense show http://thecommonsenseshow.com/. It is a little disconcerting to see some of its topics:

•  the communist inspired practice of paying an income tax. 
•  The Invasion of Sharia Law with a claim:

o   Sharia law, illegal immigration and the free trade agreements are designed by the globalists to subvert the Constitution and to undermine the national identity

We should be progressing in better and better common sense.  Some blame education for the lack of it. I think the reasons go deeper and include an anti-intellectual culture attitude which dis-respects reflection and encourages a divisive acceptance of shallowness.

Did the Gay Rights Decision Make an Intolerant God Angry?

By Gary Berg-Cross


The recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings ruling on DOMA and gay marriage is rightly celebrated as a civilized advance. But it has caused some cultural consternation in conservative and religious circles who see rights as something God provides rather than something human's decide. Dan Cathy son of founder Truett Cathy & president of the closed-on-Sunday fast-food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A bull-tweeted his way into the debate. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he tweeted:


"Sad day for our nation; founding fathers would be ashamed of our gen. to abandon wisdom of the ages re: cornerstone of strong societies," The post was later deleted but not before the paper and others captured screenshots of it.

As reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy had earlier told an online religious magazine that he was “guilty as charged” in his opposition to gay marriage.: “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit,” Cathy edged into harsher comments of vengeance: “we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,”

That’s not the tone of some mainstream religious groups even if they support the religious conception of marriage and speak of gay marriage as some type of sin. Their compromise position is to “tolerate” gays. But as reported by Crooks and Liars tolerance wasn’t the tone taken by televangelist Pat Robertson who pointed to HebrewTestament style vengeance: 





"Look what happened to Sodom. After a while, there wasn't any other way, and God did something pretty drastic."

Robertson also had some thoughts on how we’ve come to this. It the fault of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who may have law clerks "who happen to be gays." Another sign of faulty reasoning about why the arc of history bends towards justice.  And another sign of embedded intolerance among some who are very sure of their god-generated wisdom. As the Dalai Lama said:

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”

  Images 

Tolerance: http://toppun.com/Political/Pro-Tolerance-Designs-Products-Merchandise-Store-Shop.html
 Chick-Fil-A: http://www.stitchinc.org/apps/blog/entries/show/17764427-the-true-debate-of-chick-fil-a
Tolerance?: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/karenspearszacharias/2011/06/13/why-i-refuse-to-tolerate-gays/

Arguing vs. Discussing - The Challenge of Talking to True Believers

By Gary Berg-Cross

Annual CPAC meetings generate quite a bit of talk around the Beltway where politics, policy and lobbying are popular sports. You or I may even be that eager person who often slides into these easy conversations. They may start out on sound grounds say gun safety policy or the boundaries of religion and politics and slide into surprisingly murky concepts.  One often finds emotions rising and sound reasoning banned from the area.

 

CPAC seems to have more of this than some other meetings and it does attract media attention.

Did an audience member at the Conservative Political Action Committee panel on Republican minority outreach really defend slavery as good for African-Americans?  Something like argument arose when Frederick Douglas was noted as forgiving his slave masters. Forgive them for what?

 

“Shelter, clothing, and food?”

Boy, is this an ahistorical summary of slavery, but perhaps civics classes aren't what they once were.  It was reported that several people in the audience cheered and applauded the comment. Well, what does one say to such seemingly affirmatory bias thinking that tramples on reasonable understanding?

There have any number of practical guides generated by people of experience to better handle these situations where entrenched interests, affiliations, identity, ego, debating habits and ideology all play a role. 

One I saw recently was called “How to Talk to A Conservative” by Courtney Horne.  Her topic was “drug testing welfare recipients” but the points are a bit more general than the examples used. To be sure there are entrenched interests like the lobbying of drug testing groups, but they have analogs elsewhere such as the NRA for gun safety discussions.

In either case grounding a discussion in facts rather than arguing abstract points may be useful. In Courtney’s case she went to the cost of the policy, evidence that it wasn’t effective and implications for the idea of “welfare” and what we know about the working poor. I’m not sure that any of this would actually have worked with the CPAC audience member who may have opinions set in cement. Asked by a women about his claimed Republican Party’s roots and his demographic claims, he is reported to have responded:

 “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Arg!   Well what does one say besides some people are ready to argue, but not to discuss? At least exposing such things to the light provides some perspective of the challenges we face.

This is free opinions without what Paul Kurtz described as the new paradigm of free inquiry here beliefs are treated as hypotheses to test.

We are increasingly in a fact-free zones where any opinion is equal to any other opinion and facts and skeptical stances are given the day off along with critical thinking & reasoned argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images

 

True Believer: http://powerpopoverdose.blogspot.com/2011/10/true-believers-true-believers-1986.html

 

CPAC from CPAC site

Paul Kurtz in Quote- Part 1

By Gary Berg-Cross

The thoughts of Paul Kurtz, one of America’s leading humanists, will be the topic of the Sept. 8^th 2012 WASH MDC-organized panel. As a preparation for this I thought it interesting to provide some Kurtz quotes. These reflect some of the many subjects Kurtz has commented on over a long career. As the author of several version of the “Humanist Manifesto, including the recent Neo-Humanist statement, he’s earned the title of a modern” father of secular humanism.” As a member of the American Humanist Association, and a long-time editor of its magazine, The Humanist, he contributed to the writing of Humanist Manifesto II in 1973, which was an update on the original which his mentor John Dewey co-authored. He served as editor-in-Chief of Free Inquiry and Chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Below are some quotes from these and other sources.

Free Inquiry & Tolerance

"Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom." 

"Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success."

Strategy and Criticism of Religion

I am not suggesting that we should not critically examine religious claims, especially where they are patently false, injurious, and destructive. The secular world constantly needs to be defended against those who would undermine it, and we need to responsibly examine the transcendental and moral claims of supernaturalism and criticize its pretensions—especially when they impinge on personal freedoms. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Freedom from Religion

A key point to recognize is that one does not have to be an atheist or agnostic in order to defend the separation principle. In the United States, most Protestant denominations defend separation, as do secular Jews, liberal Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and members of other denominations. Secular humanists have many allies in this great battle. Indeed, both liberals and conservatives, believers and unbelievers, have stood firmly in support of the First Amendment. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Humanism and Liberation of the Human Mind

“If God is dead. Humanism is alive.”

Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

“There is a broader task that all those who believe in democratic secular humanist values will recognize, namely, the need to embark upon a long-term program of public education and enlightenment concerning the relevance of the secular outlook to the human condition.” 

from  the   Humanist Declaration

Humanism and "Secular Humanism

Secularism needs to be adapted to diverse cultural conditions if it is to gain ground. I submit that we cannot legislate secularism uberhaupt without recognizing the cultural traditions in which it emerges. Accordingly, multi-secularism seems to be the best strategy to pursue: that is, adapting secular ideas and values to the societies in which they arise.

The question that I wish to raise is: What is secularism and/or the secular society?

Among the secular values that emerge today is the compelling need to develop a new Planetary Ethics. Because we must share the Earth, no entity can any longer be allowed to attempt to impose an exclusive, doctrinaire religious creed on every man and woman. We live in a multicultural world in which multi-secularism needs to be developed—in which different forms of secularism need to be adapted to the diverse cultural traditions and contexts of specific societies. Thus, we need secularized Christianity, secularized Judaism, secularized Hinduism, and even secularized Islam; all are requisite for societies to be able to cope with their problems. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

A New Enlightenment

If we are to usher in a New Enlightenment, we need to spell out new goals to be achieved in the future. I can only briefly suggest what these might entail:

•The New Enlightenment needs to defend secularism, that is, the separation of church and state and the secularization of values.

•It must be planetary in scope, applying to all members of the human family—thus it would develop a new planetary ethics.

•It would seek to develop the public appreciation of scientific methods of inquiry and the scientific outlook.

•It would emphasize the need to use reason to resolve social differences and to lessen the resort to violence on the national and international level.

•It would defend the protection and cultivation of democracy and human rights everywhere.

•It would seek to banish poverty and disease from all parts of the globe and to reduce the disparities in income and wealth by expanding the amount of wealth and income available.

•It would focus on education and persuasion as the best methods for achieving social change, and it would make education and cultural enrichment truly universal.

•It would seek to elevate taste and appreciation, to cultivate the best of which we are capable as human beings, to achieve excellence, and improve the quality of life.

•It would seek for all people to work together to deal with global problems such as the unmeasured growth of population, environmental hazards, and global warming.

•It would seek to cultivate individual freedom consonant with the rights of others.

•While it would respect diversity and multiculturalism, it would seek always to find common ground that we may share.

•It would encourage cultivation of open societies, equal access to the media, and freedom of inquiry and research.

•It would seek to go beyond the ancient religious, ethnic, and national moral prohibitions of the past and move on to new alternatives appropriate to the contemporary world, new ethical values and principles.

•It would seek to generate and expand equality before the law and equality of opportunity for all individuals.

•It would seek to develop cooperative efforts among all segments of the world to deal with common problems.

Finally, it would exude some optimism about the human prospect, some belief that the human condition can be progressively improved, and above all, express the resolve to do so. (Free Inquiry Editorial -October/November 2005 Vol. 25, No. 6)

Life, Happiness & World View

Life, when fully lived under a variety of cultural conditions, can be euphoric and optimistic; it can be a joy to experience and a wonder to behold.

It is not the "courage to be" that we must develop as much as the "courage to become." We are responsible for our destiny. The meaning of life is not located in some hidden crevice in the womb of nature but is created by free persons, who are aware that they are responsible for their own futures and have the courage to take this project into their own hands.

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can

Ethics & Values

…since the Renaissance, secularity in the ethical domain has been growing in influence. Secularists do not look to salvation and confirmation of the afterlife as their overriding goal, but rather focus on temporal humanist values in the here and now—happiness, self-realization, joyful exuberance, creative endeavors and excellence, the actualization of the good life—not only for the individual but for the greater community. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Far from living in a moral vacuum, secular humanists “wish to encourage wherever possible the growth of moral awareness.” (The quote comes from “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” the Council for Secular Humanism’s founding document, authored by Paul Kurtz.)

“common moral decencies” (include) qualities including integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. These qualities are celebrated by almost every human religion, not because God ordained them, but because human beings cannot thrive in communities where these values are ignored.

Free Inquiry into Science

Not the least among secular values of course is free inquiry and freedom of scientific research, the very basis of science and technology. Religious censorship or limitation—such as that intelligent-design advocates seek to impose on scientific theories of evolution—is unacceptable. The free mind is vital for the open society. If one wants to pursue scientific inquiry, then one needs to abide by methodological naturalism: objective standards of evidence, rational coherence, and experimental testing are quite independent of the Bible or Qur’an. (from Free Inquiry April/May 2004)

Skepticism (The New York Times called him "a skeptic of everything but fact.")

"a skeptic is one who is willing to question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence." Skepticism and Humanism by Paul Kurtz

“I would like to introduce another term into the equation, a description of the religious "unbeliever" that is more appropriate. One may simply say, "I am a skeptic." This is a classical philosophical position, yet I submit that it is still relevant today, for many people are deeply skeptical about religious claims.
Skepticism is widely employed in the sciences. Skeptics doubt theories or hypotheses unless they are able to verify them on adequate evidential grounds. The same is true among skeptical inquirers into religion. The skeptic in religion is not dogmatic, nor does he or she reject religious claims a priori; here or she is simply unable to accept the case for God unless it is supported by adequate evidence.” From Why I Am a Skeptic about Religious Claims

Life, Happiness & World View

As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise. It typifies the human species as it has evolved, particularly over the past forty to fifty thousand years: leaving the life of the hunter and the nomad, developing agriculture and rural society, inventing industry and technology, building urban societies and a world community, breaking out of the earth's gravitational field, exploring the solar system and beyond. The destiny of humankind, of all people and of each person, is that they are condemned to invent what they will be - condemned if they are fearful but blessed if they welcome the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress. Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 18, Number 3.

Facing Death

…each person must face death: life has meaning only if we realize that it will end. It is in viewing one's life as a complete whole that one sees it for what it is: what I accomplished and did well; whether I fulfilled some of my dreams and plans; whether I enjoyed life, made friends, fell in love, worked for a beloved cause, and so forth. I should have no false hopes about death, but I should do what I can to ward it off. Indeed, health is a first condition if one is to live well. We must not be deluded by a belief in immortality but should face death realistically. A free person worships the creative life as the ultimate good. But when death comes, he or she will accept it with equanimity, if with sorrow; and he or she will realize that in the face of death the only thing that really counts is what has been the quality of life, and what has been given to or left for others.

Image Credits

Skeptic Card Trumps by Crispian Jago: http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/05/skeptic-trumps-paul-kurtz.html

Free Inquiry Cover: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=index_25_6