Re: Humanism in 2006


Joseph H wrote:

> > Humanism became an influential idea around the year 1500, and it set
> > off a tendency towards secularisation and rational thought.

> I'm just wondering if you aren't conflating two kinds, or brands, of
> humanism - the one we know today and which you clearly support and the
> general drift away from a purely religious mode of thought which
> occurred in the late Middle Ages. These latter gentlemen - artists,
> writers and the like - were most definitely not humanists in your sense
> of the word.
> But I take your general point about the shift in values during the last
> half-Millennium. I think, however, that other factors played a
> prominent role - trade, travel, disease, the fall of Constantinople,
> the Reformation etc.

I understand your question, because if you look at any single one of
these philosophers and thinkers we cannot find anywhere the simple and
clear humanism we can see today. But you have to understand where we
were in the middle ages. We had hardly learnt to think in rational ways
yet, most people were still trapped inside a very religious way of
thinking and a religious way to express themselves even when they could
think a little outside the religious box.

That's why it has taken us 500 years to get to here from there.
It was not an easy task. A lot of people wrestled with the only
thinking mind they had, a religious mind, to find ways forward for
mankind.

It took centuries of using logic to overcome the belief-based earlier
ways to think.
Then it took centuries to realize that logic and math are only tools,
theoretical models, which have no eternal truth to give us, logic can
be used to prove practically anything, and we have to use our sound
judgement to choose the logic models and mathematical formulas we have
practical use for in certain situations.

So it is not two kinds of humanism, it is the same humanism in
different historical times. The most basic idea in humanism is to use
the human as the base for our thinking, not the God.

We had gotten into the church dominated world of the medieval times by
building a world based on God. That was not a good world, and it was
hindering development of science and technology, and locked people into
very restricted ways to think and live. We nedeed to change the most
basic idea our society was based on. We needed to replace the old
testament thinking based on God into a thinking based on humans.

The way from the old creator God of the old testament to our secular
humanism went through the humanitarianism of Jesus for a lot of
thinkers, so they expressed themselves in religious and spiritual terms
while they were criticizing the old testament religion, but they
finally arrived to our modern language and ways of thinking, which is
caring about humans, wanting to create a better world for humans,
without having to use religious ideas and the religious secret social
system at all.

Now we have removed the religion based laws from our law books, we have
separated the state frrom the church, we have replaced memorizing bible
verses with science in the schools. Officiallywe are no longer
dominated by religion in our modern society.

But if we look closer at our social life we find that many religious
ways to do things are still present, but now as traditions which are
kept alive by social communication.
The views of the old testament based on gender roles, initiation
procedures, mobbing, manly honor, are still present in social life.

So a big part of this job is still not done, we have only removed the
theoretical and formal superstructures like the church, but people are
still ruled by old religious laws in their social life.


I edited an article in wikipedia yesterday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_law
and its discussion page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Oral_law

My explanation for my change:

Oral law often comes into conflict with modern laws, like when a father
kills his own daughter to preserve the honor of the family. He is
following an old oral, or earlier written law in his culture, but
modern law forbids such action. Many modern laws are written to change
or counteract old oral laws which now are transmitted as an oral
tradition. This is an important case as it often happens that people
continue to follow old traditions and the modern society cannot
tolerate such behavior. When immigrants from one culture come to
another country they have to follow the laws in the new country, but
the cultural pressure in the immigrant community is strong to ignore
the official laws and follow the old oral laws of their culture
instead. Many oral laws are _not_ written laws precisely because it is
no longer legal to follow these old traditions in a modern society. The
currently valid laws are the written laws. Roger

>>From the article page, the actual change:

"From a legal point of view, an oral law can be:

* a habit, or custom with legal relevance or when the formal law
expressly refers to it (but in this latter case, it is properly an
indirect source of legal rights and obligations);
* a command, an order, verbally given, that has to be respected as
a law (in most modern western legal systems, some dispositions can be
issued by word in given cases of emergency).
* a remnant of earlier traditions or laws which are no longer
accepted or legal, such as the honor laws that says that a daughter who
has dishonored the family must be killed."

I added the last point here. The rest of the article, before my change,
only talked about positive aspects of so called oral law, so I thought
it was important to add the case when oral law and modern law are
direct opposites of each other.

(Remember (If you look it up in the wikipedia) that wikipedia can
change quickly, somebody has maybe already removed my edit from the
article page, but my version is saved in the history of the page.)

Checking it now:
Yes, somebody quickly removed my point, and wrote this on the
discussion page:

"Jews do not do honour killings. Are you suggesting that following the
written religious law should exonerate one from violations of national
law? You seem to completely misunderstand the topic under discussion
here. JFW | T@lk 12:12, 16 January 2006 (UTC)"

Probably a person who thinks oral law is a specific jewish thing, and
he does not understand the general case in the world today. That's
wikipedia today, a battle between defenders of special interests, who
seldom see further than the tip of their own nose.


--
Roger J.

.

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