Response to Neil's post.
entropicangel
posts about how he took a quiz that said he was a humanist, and then talks about his development
and his loss of Christian faith, but how he felt that "agnostic" was accurate but empty. To his entry I wrote this response.
Yeah, coming from perhaps a different perspective than Dan, I also say that the quiz is bunk. Its dichotomies are false. Not only the faith vs. reason one that Dan mentions, but the scientific vs. spiritual. Science is about seeking better and better understanding about how the natural world operates, based on theories that are tested by evidence (experiment, ideally). It tells us nothing about anything beyond the natural world, aside perhaps providing evidence against something supernatural that would cause the natural world to behave differently from how the natural world is actually observed.
Dedication to science will likely prove incompatible with accepting literal statements about the natural world made by religions, such as the age of the Earth or the origin of life, for example. But since when is accepting dogma a necessary part of spirituality? Or even, I would argue, faith? Sure, faith in a particular statment that is contradicted by scientific evidence may be at odds with reason or with science, but a more general faith in humanity or in the goodness of the architect of the universe seems unproblematic.
There do exist people called "religious humanists", who generally don't accept most dogmatic statments of religion, such as the miracles in the Bible or claims of many religions that much if not most of humanity is damned, but believe that humanity is greater than the sum of its parts, and that religious traditions offer something of value in magnifying humanity. Religious traditions contain much that may be rejected on grounds of science and reason, but they also contain a great deal of human social wisdom.
And just as humanism can be religious, religion can be humanistic. Think charity, social gospel, etc. MLK is of course a great example.
So anyway, "agnostic" is indeed an empty-feeling label because it only addresses the issue of whether you believe in a deity or not. And belief in and of itself is not very fulfilling. Rather, a sense of purpose and meaning and community is. Various forms of humanism, from the secular to the religious, can offer these things without sacrificing reason and belief grounded in evidence. Oddly enough, I'd also say that politics can do this too, but that's something for another day.
Yeah, coming from perhaps a different perspective than Dan, I also say that the quiz is bunk. Its dichotomies are false. Not only the faith vs. reason one that Dan mentions, but the scientific vs. spiritual. Science is about seeking better and better understanding about how the natural world operates, based on theories that are tested by evidence (experiment, ideally). It tells us nothing about anything beyond the natural world, aside perhaps providing evidence against something supernatural that would cause the natural world to behave differently from how the natural world is actually observed.
Dedication to science will likely prove incompatible with accepting literal statements about the natural world made by religions, such as the age of the Earth or the origin of life, for example. But since when is accepting dogma a necessary part of spirituality? Or even, I would argue, faith? Sure, faith in a particular statment that is contradicted by scientific evidence may be at odds with reason or with science, but a more general faith in humanity or in the goodness of the architect of the universe seems unproblematic.
There do exist people called "religious humanists", who generally don't accept most dogmatic statments of religion, such as the miracles in the Bible or claims of many religions that much if not most of humanity is damned, but believe that humanity is greater than the sum of its parts, and that religious traditions offer something of value in magnifying humanity. Religious traditions contain much that may be rejected on grounds of science and reason, but they also contain a great deal of human social wisdom.
And just as humanism can be religious, religion can be humanistic. Think charity, social gospel, etc. MLK is of course a great example.
So anyway, "agnostic" is indeed an empty-feeling label because it only addresses the issue of whether you believe in a deity or not. And belief in and of itself is not very fulfilling. Rather, a sense of purpose and meaning and community is. Various forms of humanism, from the secular to the religious, can offer these things without sacrificing reason and belief grounded in evidence. Oddly enough, I'd also say that politics can do this too, but that's something for another day.