human tradition in human values

Humanists today include broadcasters like David Attenborough and Laurie Taylor, cultural figures like Jonathan Miller; novelists like Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett; world-class scientists like Sir Michael Atiyah, Sir Harry Kroto and Dr Helena Cronin, journalists like Polly Toynbee and Jenni Murray; philosophers like A C Grayling and Simon Blackburn; politicians like Ken Livingstone, Neil Kinnock and John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, entertainers like Stewart Lee, Robin Ince and Stephen Fry – and so many more. based on the recognition that people have divergent views and interests and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth  (George Soros: appendix to The Bubble of American Supremacy – Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). Mutuality implies directly the value of the individual and over time human moral thinking has come to impute this value to all humans on earth rather than just an in-group of family, tribe or nation. Most of them believe in a god – sometimes many gods. What meaning we have is of our making. Of course, reason is not enough, and there are areas of life where it has nothing to say. Similarly Lord Ritchie-Calder, while working for UNESCO, was instrumental in starting the UN Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy and was later, alongside another eminent humanist, Dame Jennie Lee, prominent in the creation of the Open University. Karl Popper said it was like food: breakfast, lunch and dinner are human inventions, but the need to eat and to space out that eating are part of our nature. This makes it unsurprising that Humanists were very prominent in starting and running such bodies as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Health Organisation and UNESCO, whose first directors-general were respectively Lord Boyd-Orr, Dr Brock Chisholm and Sir Julian Huxley. For humanists, belief should be proportioned to evidence. Lifestances can be religious or non-religious – or both insofar as there is a grey area in between. It follows that we have no belief in an afterlife. This was enormously encouraging, suggesting to us that our (small) community is ready The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific intellectual content of its own. So, I can give my own life a purpose: I can adopt goals that seem worthwhile, I can shape my life to achieve them – and at the end look back and assess whether I have succeeded or failed, whether I have made good use of my time or not. The organizational culture is outlined in Schein (1990) as overall phenomenon of the organization such as natural It is of course in strong contrast with traditional religious views that having no religion means having no morals – that moral law is God’s law – a logical nonsense, of course, as Plato pointed out with Euthyphro’s dilemma: is something good because God commands it, whatever we may feel (so that our own sense of what is right or wrong is redundant at best, misleading at worst) or does God command it because it is good, in which case goodness is independent of God and God is redundant. It is only by rejuvenating religion and its traditions that any balance can ever be restored. This is a strong contrast with religions that value faith and belief in the teeth of the evidence. But circumstances alter cases and particular formulations of morality and ethics can get out of date. Moreover, HRPS has found that such practices disproportionately affect women, So, Humanists reject ideas & theories that are not reasonable, and we do not accept notions that are not backed by adequate evidence. As J S Mill said, “better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. Sonnenberg’s assertion that “tradition enables us to…celebrate diversity” does not ring true. Here again we are different from the religions: almost all religions believe in a continued existence after this life, some of them a reincarnation in this world, others a translation to a different realm of existence – and sometimes they believe in existences before this life too. Another key belief held by Humanists is that it is part of human nature that we are moral creatures – not that we are necessarily moral in the sense of good, but that we all – with the exception of a few psychopaths and severely autistic people – have the capacity to think in moral terms and cannot escape from doing so. . Instead, Humanism is a label for a certain range of beliefs and values. My life has no purpose in a sense analogous to the table that I make having a purpose. In fact, all the relevant laws and international human rights treaties talk about ‘religion or belief’, where the courts have repeatedly held that beliefs include non-religious beliefs like Humanism and indeed atheism and the denial of any belief as well as holding it. So we are individually responsible for our own lives and collectively responsible for the future of the planet – for the sake of our descendants and all the life on earth. So that is Humanism – an alternative to religion that fulfils much the same function as a religion. Humans have lived as social animals since millions of years before we were even human, and all social animals have rules – patterns – of behaviour that enable them to live harmoniously and productively together. Religions do not make up the whole spectrum of ultimate beliefs about life: there are non-religious philosophies of life also. I shall describe the beliefs that I see as at the core of Humanism, but other humanists would offer differing accounts. Nature’s law is that all things change and turn, and pass away, so that in due course, different things may be. The answer to this is that the coherence and the recurrence through history of this combination of beliefs and values justify seeing Humanism as a unity, as a valid concept. Values determine the future.” Today some of the most forward-looking companies are engaging employees by designing policies and practices that address four core human needs—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—the same factors used in human-centered product design. as did Samuel Butler, the Victorian novelist (Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh) and thinker (1835-1902), suggesting that you live on in people’s memories and in your achievements like ripples on a pond long after the stone has sunk: To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead. Taken together, they are a set of beliefs and values which constitute a view of the world – a philosophy by which many people live their lives. The Theory of Basic Human Values recognize ten universal values, which can be organised in four higher-order groups. Then we had no idea of the origins of disease, of the atomic structure of matter, of the size or age of the universe, of the evolution of species; we had few medicines, no painkillers, no detergents, no transport quicker than a horse and only candles, the moon and stars for light at night. It is an old idea, supported by modern science. What we call morality – our having ideas of things being right or wrong – arises simply out of human nature. Human welfare and fulfilment set the terms of ethics – the framework. It is about cultural and artistic fulfilment. The term, traditional values, is so broad that it can contain or condone anything including practices that are not compatible with human rights. We survived, and with language and our ability for abstract thought, we refined these unwritten rules into extensive moral philosophy. “Lifestance” covers the whole spectrum. (Sir Joshua Reynolds, 13th discourse (quoted in The Guardian 16.8.03). Of course, people who share all these beliefs and values are free not to call themselves humanists: many people simply do not wish to attach a label to themselves. Not only that, but the word “humanism” is used in altogether other senses – it was coined in the eighteenth century to describe the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, is linked to the idea of “the humanities”, and came to be applied to our sort of non-religious lifestance only in the early twentieth century. Different lifestances assert different facts about the universe and how it came to be. values, determine how they influence product choice, and, subsequently, advertise accordingly. It is our responsibility to keep morality under review. It requires us to exercise judgement in the circumstances of each case. I want to be clear that traditional values cannot be an excuse for violating human rights. The afterlife is invariably linked to the way one lives in this life, and the imagery of the Christian Last Judgement terrified Christians until recently – indeed, it still does terrify some today. We call such a state a secular state – not in any sense of being atheist but in the sense of neutral, providing a level playing field for all beliefs and religions. In fact, they do so’!). Among these ideas, values alone concern the manner of our actions, rather than the consequences (as with plans, goals, and fears) or the mere factof their performance (as with intentions, and policies). Values are ideas that guide us in action. We stand for a free, open and inclusive society: one. Meaning and purpose are human constructs. What science gives us is not the truth but an ever closer approximation to the truth. The Golden Rule surfaces and resurfaces across the world and across time as a central proposition – which, incidentally, implies strongly that religions and non-religious beliefs and law codes are all influenced by the same ultimate facts around us – in fact, that morality has influenced religion more than religion has influenced morality. We have no right therefore to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favour of any special belief… (William James Varieties of Religious Experience). It is equivalent to the German Weltanschauung or “world view”. Morality exists to serve a human end – human welfare and fulfilment. ties, the intrinsic value argument is that, as human beings, we ought to have an interest in our history, culture, ideas, languages and so on. UIA’s decades of collected data on the enormous variety of association life provided a broad initial perspective on the myriad problems of humanity. You don’t ‘convert’ to Humanism and then have to take the rough with the smooth. Epicurus in the 4th century BCE believed that if there were gods they had no interest in mankind. Mutuality is in fact fundamental to all morality, as is seen in the universality of the Golden Rule. A collection of papers written over a period of years by David Pollock, trustee of Humanists UK  and sometime president of the European Humanist Federation. Note that I am talking about a secular state, not a secular society. In such a society, the government, other public authorities and social institutions need to seek the maximum individual freedom while building on common interests so that people may live together constructively. But the experience is still very real, even if of natural origins. Based on lectures to PGCE courses at York St John University in September 2010 and September 2012   [PDF version]. Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies. Similarly in the nineteenth century those who lost their Christian faith found a belief in extinction at death was a great relief – relief to be rid of the expectation of burning in hell. grammes. The resolution as tabled assumes that “traditional values” inevitably make a positive contribution to human rights. But humanist morality does not go so far as to lay down fixed rules. In the past, Human Rights First joined forces with Muslim groups who reaffirmed from a Koranic perspective that the concept of “defamation of religions” runs counter to Islamic values. His follower the Roman Lucretius wrote a poem in several books called On the Nature of Things. I shall start with our beliefs (about what is) and move later to our values (about what should be). The initial content for the Encyclopedia was seeded from UIA’s Yearbook of International Organizations. What we are saying is that biology and culture have created our moral sense. Whereas it may be difficult to harmonize the diverse traditional values as they exist in different societies, there is a benchmark against which common values can be gauged. Our beliefs are that the universe works on according to natural laws, that this is the only life we have, and that it is intrinsic to human nature to have a moral capacity. The historian Roger Smith remarked 10 years ago that ‘Modern evolutionary accounts of human origins continue to reflect the belief that there is an essential human nature, the nature all people share through their common root’ [19, p. 27].While this may have been true of some evolutionary approaches to humans, it was—and still is—by no … As part of our interviews, we found this approach widespread in almost all regions. A secular state could be very religious – as in the USA – and a secular society can grow in a state that is residually theocratic – such as ours today in England, with an established church that helps make our laws in Parliament and laws that privilege religion in many ways. This imbalance allows secular ideas to influence all values and behavior. Our values are to do with reason, morality, social attitudes, and meaning and purpose. The word was coined to fill a gap. This flexibility, this commitment to dialogue and ethical conversation, is fundamental to humanist morality – just so long as, for all the flexibility, the touchstone is always human welfare and fulfilment. We are not souls trapped in a mortal body: what we are resides in our bodies and brains, and bodily death means the end of the vastly intricate system of matter animated by electro-chemical impulses that make us up. In part this seemed to be because there was no word to cover the whole spectrum of fundamental beliefs about what are sometimes called Ultimate Questions about Life, the Universe and Everything – about the nature of existence & the universe and how we should behave. It is also empirically observed to conduce to human welfare. Furthermore, human life is marked by other “traditions”, whether it is setting up a Christmas tree, baking a turkey at … This is the call for reawakening of those positive traditional values that promote human dignity in our society. Human Rights First has appealed to traditional values as part of its strategy to build coalitions to fight discrimination, hostility and violence. So this is not happiness in the rather superficial sense of today but in that of say the Declaration of Independence when it speaks of men being. This is buttressed by modern science – by chemistry & biology. What exactly constitutes a meaningful, worthwhile, purposive flourishing life is an area where we not only differ but where it is good that we differ, both because people are inherently different in their talents and inclinations and because it allows different experiments in living, trying different models that feed off each other and lead to a diverse and interesting and flourishing human society. And science is a method, not a set of facts. There is no ‘second layer’ to existence – no gods and ghosts, no souls or spirits of the place – and our only route to sure and certain (or rather eternally unsure) knowledge is through an assumption of naturalism. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. Science refuses to accept dogma, refuses to allow anything to be unquestionable, accepts that it may make mistakes, but contains its own means of correcting them. And Wendell Berry, in his vision of a society centered on marriage, family, community, and nature provides the best ground upon which the human tradition can again take root. And religion needs to answer for real-world actions that are based on these propositions – dogmas that the Vatican uses to justify obstruction in the UN and elsewhere of family-planning programmes or the use of condoms against AIDS. There is a clear theoretical dividing line between beliefs and values but in practice the values are based on the beliefs and so there is a close correspondence and interaction between them. EVERY morning, it’s the same ritual for millions of people: have a shower, get dressed, pour a cup of coffee, eat breakfast, brush teeth, etc.When they come home, it’s often another rhythm: open the mail, change out of work clothes, start supper, etc. Of course, scientists can go wrong – but that is human error or delinquency, not a fault with the method. In arguing that human rights found in the UDHR have a particular touch of Christian tradition, this essay elaborates on the values taken from the Christian scripture—not only the New Testament pertaining to the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the apostolic era, but also the Old Testament referring to God and the Jewish people. They lay the pitch on which the ethical game is played. The tradition has had breaks (for example, in Europe during mediaeval times when the Roman Catholic church was all-powerful so that even the freest of freethinkers was unable to think outside a theological framework) but it has always been resumed, because this is a philosophy inherent in the very fact of human existence in communities. That may seem obvious, but it is not, so I want to linger on it for a minute. I had a try at him a long while ago myself. What sort of thing is Humanism? Let me at this preliminary stage meet one possible criticism – namely, that Humanism is just a ragbag of ideas with no real justification for having a name and identity. Each of the ten universal values has a central goal that is the underlying motivator. Before I was born. The Catholic intellectual tradition, particularly over the past hundred years, has emphasized the fundamental dignity of the human person and the fundamental sanctity of human life. There are all sorts of pro-social behaviours – altruism, cooperation – that are necessary for living together with others of your own species – this applies to humans pre-eminently. If there is any suffering in death, there must have been suffering also in the past, but actually, we felt no suffering then. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. Given the huge disparity of lifestances – religions and beliefs – in society today, that means that the government and official institutions must remain neutral on such questions. These values are acquired by mental programming in the enculturation process. Humanists find it difficult to see a distinction except in comparative antiquity between mainstream religion and ‘New Age’ people who accept unthinkingly nonsense about the healing powers of crystals, about feng shui, astrology or alternative medicine whose practitioners refuse to test it in controlled trials. Trees have no purpose: we may have uses for them – shade, or timber – but they just exist. And this spirit of open-minded, rational enquiry is an important part of Humanism. It will be the same after me as it was before me. All religions and all ethical systems include the Golden Rule. In this, they are similar to plans, goals, fears, intentions, policies, etc, and the like. Our instincts are the basis on which the concept of morality is built – but we are not naturally (exclusively) good: some instincts are aggressive or selfish, and some are group-focussed, which can seem hostile to outsiders. In many cases finding the truth means turning to scientific enquiry, which has proved to be an outstandingly successful and reliable method of finding the truth since it came back into common use 200 or 300 years ago – back into use because the ancient Greeks and the early Islamic scientists were pretty good at it. Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. Not only this but they all have the same status in law and in human rights. So, our current moral views are massively redesigned and built on by culture but at root reside in human nature, hard-wired into us. Culture shapes values. To some degree, the answer turns upon one's views on the nature of culture and the nature of international human rights standards. Culture is a way of life that is made up of traditions, beliefs, rituals, from the most spiritual to the most materialistic. Another aspect of fulfilment in life is that realm of elevated and intense experience that includes what the religious call spirituality. The meaning of words is determined by their use, and the organised humanist movement has no monopoly of the use of the word Humanism. It also follows from our basic moral outlook that we are strongly committed to human rights – those definitions of the limits to which we will allow the majority or the authorities to go in restraining deviant individuals or minority groups from behaving in the way they wish. Another formulation comes from Bertrand Russell: “A good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”  These two categories – love and knowledge – recur in humanist conceptions of the good life – love because one’s inner life, one’s emotional life is vital – it is the relational aspect of life, of emotional fulfilment, sympathies and affections both in relation to others and to the natural world; and knowledge, because the life of the mind, finding things out, learning, knowing and understanding, gives joy & fulfilment. Just think how different – how much clearer and more comprehensible – our understanding of the world is now than only 200 or 300 years ago. Traditions, as a human construct, reflect this. Ancient philosophers already had a concept of death as the end of personal existence: the mind grows with the body, tied to physical being, and nothing is permanent or eternal. It has no sacred texts, no source book of unquestionable rules or doctrine, no liturgy, no founding figurehead, no structure of authority. But life as a whole, as a phenomenon on earth or any other planet, has no purpose of this kind. None of them is the monopoly of Humanism – some  of them are certainly shared by many religious believers – but the combination is definitive. So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Now happiness here is not just the absence of suffering or indeed the passing of time in amusement and entertainment. People with non-religious beliefs were – and often still are – thought to have “god-shaped holes” in their lives: they lacked a religion and had nothing to put in its place. It was established in 1907, by Henri la Fontaine (Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1913), and Paul Otlet, a founding father of what is now called information science. It is an important to grasp this concept. When, around 1940, existentialism became dominant in literature on the There must be  no privileges for Christians or Humanists or any other belief group. ‘When was this?’ you’ll say. Karl Popper, the great political philosopher, wrote: Rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to contrary arguments and to learn from experience. [5] They are not eternal truths, never unquestionable. It is about relations with other people – for our personal happiness is inextricably tied up with that of others and depends on a richness of emotional contact. Happiness is something much more substantial. It can also be found in discussions of the humanities, one of its (W K Clifford, The Ethics of Belief). – a transcendental realm may get recognised as a house and more and documentation centre, based Brussels. Enables us to…celebrate diversity ” does not go so far as to lay down fixed rules choices of the. Now happiness here is not, so i want to linger on it for a free, open inclusive! 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