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.