Please see below selected recent humanism-related change.
See also:
August 2019
- More and more people are identifying as non-religious. While this can be seen as a good or a bad thing depending on your perspective, there’s one aspect to this development that isn’t ideal: the decline of communities. 22% of millennials claim they have no friends, and many are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness. How can we regain this sense of community without having to subscribe to a religious worldview? Atheism doesn’t offer much aside from the rejection of belief, but "Secular Humanism" claimed to provide a different perspective. The American Humanist Association calls this life stance: "A progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfilment that aspire to the greater good of humanity."
December 2018
- Petitionary prayer can benefit a person as an expression of longing, hope, or desire. Singing about hopes or desires does nothing directly to bring them about, but singing can still be valuable as an expression of hopes and desires. So too with prayer. Prayer can be a kind of poetry of the heart, something that atheists need not deny themselves, argued the iai.
- Atheism has grown significantly in recent years. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins sold over 3 million copies and some of philosophy’s biggest names are flying the flag of the non-believer. Yet simultaneously, some traditional religions like Christianity are growing faster now than ever before worldwide, suggesting that both belief and non-belief are here to stay.
October 2018
- For The School of Life, a well-functioning secular society should take more care with its role models and ‘voice’ internalisation processes. The harshness of our inner voices could be corrected by having access to a range of imaginary friends, whose fortifying wisdom we would regularly and ritually be able to remind ourselves of. TSOL believes that an absence of religious belief in no way invalidates a continuing need for patron saints of qualities like Courage, Friendship, Fidelity, Patience, Confidence or Scepticism. We can still profit from moments when we give internal space to the voices of people who are more balanced, brave and generous-spirited than we are.
August 2018
- The modern age is inherently anthropocentric in outlook (from anthropos, Greek for human), that is, it places human beings and their experience and concerns at the centre of the hierarchy, above the claims of nature, animals, gods or the universe more broadly. We are now, in every way, in our own eyes, the centre of the show. But it was not always thus, noted The School of Life.
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