By Nominis Expers
Humanism
has its roots in ancient
Greek
philosophy, generally associated with the
pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras, who set
forth his system under the motto "Homo
mensura", or "Man the measure." The idea
behind the motto is that man is the measure
of all things; mankind itself is the ultimate
norm by which values are to be determined.
Therefore man is the ultimate being and man
is the ultimate authority, making the system,
in technical terms "Anthropocentric". This
term is a simple compound word stemming from
"anthropos" ("man", or "mankind") and
"-centric" referring to a centrality of
focus. One can immediately see the built in
tension between this and other philosophical
systems which are termed "Theocentric",
having the view that God is the Ultimate
Being, and which would derive its values from
the ultimate authority and character of God.
It's important at this point to make
clear the distinction between the terms
"Humanism" and
"Humanitarianism". Humanitarianism is defined
as a concern for the welfare of human beings.
There are few philosophical systems that do
not claim to be humanitarian.
The term Humanism denotes a system
that espouses humanitarian concerns, but also
in
its current state encompasses much more,
including militant atheism and vitriolic
opposition to religion.
Such was not always the case. Renaissance
humanism has been described as "man's
discovery of himself and the world", and its
proponents then had no trouble reconciling
the valuing of classical culture and a
theocentric worldview. In fact, the operative
phrase of the day was "ad fontes"; "to the
sources". This signified a rebirth of
interest not only in the study of the
humanities (history, literary
criticism, grammer, poetry and rhetoric,
taught from texts
of the Greco-Roman period) but also renewed
attention to Greek and Hebrew, the languages
of the Scriptures. In fact it was this
intellectual climate that was (along with
other historical factors) responsible in
large part for the Protestant Reformation. It
was the "Prince of Renaissance Humanism",
Erasmus of
Rotterdam who in 1516 published a Greek
edition of the New Testament together with
his own Latin translation. His reconstruction
of the Greek New Testament came to be known
as the "textus receptus", which was the Greek
text upon which The King James Version of the
Bible was based.
It is for another
article to discuss in detail Erasmus' role in
the
reformation, but the point here is humanism
at this stage in its history could not be
accurately described as "atheistic".
Humanism in the sixteenth century saw
religion as, not valid in terms of its
supernaturalist framework, but nevertheless
valuable in its ethics and social impact. Its
foundation was not the theocentric basis of
Christianity, but it did embrace the
values of the faith, considering
them to be one dimension of the growth and
development of the human race. Humanism
gradually acquired its present-day
association with agnosticism and atheism due
to the repercussions in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries of the Enlightenment,
and the influence in the nineteenth century
of thinkers like John Dewey, who saw the
conservative influence of religion as
anti-progressive and damaging to the
evolution of society. By the twentieth
century, Humanism's antipathy to
religion in general and Christianity in
particular was well established.
THE EFFECT ON YOU AND ME
Since present day Humanism vilifies
Judeo-Christianity as backward, its goal to
assure progress through education
necessitates an effort to keep all mention of
theism out of the classroom. Here we have the
irony of twentieth century Humanism, a belief
system recognized by the Supreme Court as a
non-theistic religion, foisting upon society
the unconstitutional prospect of
establishment of a state-sanctioned
non-theistic religion which legislates
against the expression of a theistic one by
arguing separation of church & state. To
dwell here in more detail is beyond the scope
of this article, but to close, here are some
other considerations:
In the earlier spirit of cooperation with the
Christian church the ethics or values of the
faith were "borrowed" by the humanists. In
their secular framework, however, denying the
transcendent, they negated the theocentric
foundation of those values, (the character of
God), while attempting to retain the ethics.
So it can be said that the Humanist, then,
lives on "borrowed capital". In describing
this stuation, Francis Schaeffer observed
that:"...the Humanist has both feet firmly
planted in mid-air." His meaning here is that
while the Humanist may have noble ideals,
there is no rational foundation for
them. An anthropocentric view says that
mankind is a "cosmic accident"; he comes from
nothing, he goes to
nothing, but in between he's a being
of supreme dignity. What the Humanist fails
to face is that with no ultimate basis, his
ideals, virtues and values are mere
preferences, not principles. Judging
by this standard of "no ultimate standard",
who is to say whose preferences are to be
"dignified", ultimately?
The Horse's Mouth:
One can see the militancy against
theocentricity in The Humanist Manifestos.
The hostility and antipathy toward the
Christian church in particular can be noted
here.
Humanist
Manifesto I (1933)
Humanist Manifesto II (1973)
Other Humanist Documents
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