Humanism - christiansquoting.org.uk

Happy day, when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!

Indeed there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.... like any other human activity, religion can be abused but it seems to be something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art and poetry it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without god -not all religions, of course, are theistic. ~Karen Armstrong

On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing; and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. ... H. J. Blackham

The end product of atheist humanism is the modern totalitarian state, in which the illusion of man's metaphysical freedom from divine government goes hand in hand with the reality of his political subjection. -- J. V. L. Casserley, _Retreat from Christianity in the Modern World_, 1952

I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. Thess [sic] teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level -- preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new -- the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism. --John Dunphy, A Religion for a New Age, Humanist, Jan.-Feb. 1983, p. 26

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own. -- Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, _Space, Time, and Gravitation_

If you find examples of humanism which are anti-religious, or at least in opposition to the religious faith of the place and time, then such humanism is purely destructive, for it has never found anything to replace what it has destroyed. -- T. S. Eliot, "Humanism of Irving Babbit," _Selected Essays_, 1917-1928

Humanism sucks the egg of personality's value and then tries to hatch a higher religion out of it. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick, _As I See Religion_, 1932

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it. ~Václav Havel.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903 INVICTUS

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.-- Eric Hoffer

I use the word "Humanist" to mean someone who believes that man is just as much a natural phenomenon as an animal or a plant; that his body, mind or soul were not supernaturally created but are products of evolution, and that he is not under the control or guidance of any supernatural being, but has to rely in himself and his own powers. Julian Huxley

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.-- Thomas Jefferson

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.... John F. Kenney

A scientific humanism frequently offends the dignity of man, which it ostensibly extols, by regarding human beings as subject to manipulation and as mere instruments of some "socially approved" ends.-- Reinhold Niebuhr, _Christian Realism and Political Problems_, 1953

We have it in our power to begin the world again. -Thomas Paine

Militant humanism grates on me much more than evangelism. - Tom Stoppard:

There will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. --Henry David Thoreau _Resistance to Civil Government_ (1849)