Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s website has the entire thing on its website in easy-to-digest segments.
I’ve just finished watching the first segment, which lets Epstein get in a nice plug for his new book, and features a typical Boston-area yuppie couple who are atheists themselves but still want all the trapping of a traditional religious experience for their daughter — a “naming ceremony”, Christmas, etc. Epstein lays out the central conceit of Humanism — you can have all the warm fuzzy lovies of belonging to a church without all that silly God/Jesus stuff. The ideal message for people who are smart enough to realize that nobody needs all that superstition, but who can’t quite bring themselves to let go of their middle-class American upbringing. It’s the same marketing device that the Unitarian Universalists use to a large degree: “Come for the company, stay for the moralizing.”
Yes, I am being too cynical about that by half, I know, but c’mon kids. If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck…well, you know. Believe it or not, though, I am sympathetic to the promotion of Secular Humanism because one of the things that traditional religions highlight is the ability to provide a community of like-minded people to share consensual meaning and context. A lot of people simply need that to make their worldview work. If Humanism can impart context and assert the validity of non-belief as a worldview, then good for them; my concern is that by doing so, organized Humanist communities will, over time, develop the same bigotries, exclusionary tenets, and transference of presumed divinity that Christian churches have. I like my atheism like I like my sushi: raw, fresh, and with a big dollop of wasabi to clear out my head.
Related Posts:
