Secular Humanism in the United States - Influences On Humanism, Religious Humanism, Progress And Science, Humanism In American Culture, Bibliography
The philosophy and ideology of secular humanism has its roots in Enlightenment thought and is based in large part on the Western tradition of liberalism and notions about the status and role of science in the modern world. At base it is a nontheistic belief system that upholds the prime importance of rationality, human autonomy, and democracy. The term secular humanism has come to be widely used in the United States to indicate both an explicitly worked-out humanistic worldview as well as a more ambiguous irreligious or nonreligious secularism with which it is often confused.
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The groundwork for modern humanism was laid during the Enlightenment by those philosophers who sought to purge religion of most of its superstitious elements and replace them with a deistic or atheistic rationalism. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason (1794–1796), which argues for a religion based on a belief that the world was created by a rational God, was one of the most important such w…
Humanism as a distinct intellectual movement arose in early-twentieth-century America among self-described religious humanists. It arose first among radical theologians, especially Unitarian clergymen, who saw religious humanism as anything but an irreligious movement; although these men entirely rejected the "God language" of their colleagues, they felt it essential to retain the in…
Liberal theologians were not the sole architects of twentieth-century humanism. These religionists were also joined by a number of well-respected academic philosophers in the Deweyan tradition, who were either fellow pragmatists or scientific naturalists. The influential Columbia University school of philosophy as well as a number of professors in mid-Western universities actively participated in …
In the last third of the twentieth century, American humanism went through a variety of transitions, and the movement diversified and grew, although still remaining quite small in absolute terms. It was in this period that the term secular humanism came into currency, popularized by conservative Christians who saw humanism as a nascent secular religion. These religious conservatives argued that th…
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