Commencement - Source: Robert Spencer/Getty Images North America

5/17/12 1:30pm
HHA Welcome Reception

For those of you who are just joining the conversation…. This is my second blog post discussing the idea of an American Humanist Retreat Center (AHRC). I appreciate the comments I’ve received and PLEASE if you are reading this feel quite free to comment and join in the conversation. As in the lyric quote above, freedom tastes of reality. And to me that taste is just the best.

I’d considered location or philosophy as topics for this blog entry but I’ve decided to focus this time on The Who… no not the band but Who Is This Retreat For?

I think the first people to take advantage of the AHRC will be people who are already involved in one or more Humanist or Humanism-related groups either on a local or national level. These people already have some commitment to Humanism and are looking for a deeper learning experience, more extended social experience or just a retreat from the religiously infused day-to-day world. These people know what Humanism feels like and they want to feel it some more.

Group number two consists of the religiously disaffected who have heard about Humanism or Humanist-related groups but have no current affiliation. These people are looking for information about what Humanism is, how good a “fit” it is for them. They want to know what Humanism feels like.

Group number three is people who may not yet have given much thought to a secular lifestyle but who are interested in a particular topic that we may be offering at the Center such as a lecture on the origin of the universe by Lawrence Krauss or a week of Self-Expression through Crafts or a musical concert by a steel drum band. Those people aren’t coming specifically for the Humanism but their opinion of non-believers may be affected by what they experience at the AHRC.

I see us making efforts to attract people of all ages, backgrounds and economic circumstances by offering a variety of programs, amenities and lodging. I want to be as inclusive as Humanism is…. Inclusive of everything and everyone (but religion).

If you think this is something you would enjoy, write a reply and let me know your vision for an American Humanist Retreat Center. And PLEASE share this on Facebook, in your own blog or via e-mail. Join me in this, feel free… because freedom tastes like reality.

Part I

Part II

Values

What are the most important values to humanists?

Try not to do harm. Tell the truth, help the less fortunate, and seek justice in all its forms. Be generous with your resources, have courage, be fair. Try to achieve dignity.

Use your power of reasoning. Be aware that earth is our only home; preserve and protect it. Be inclusive, not exclusive in matters of race, minorities, women, sexual preference, religion, financial status, nationality.

Do humanists believe that a god is necessary to create values?

No. Humans are quite capable of developing values that lead to a happy life

Are values timeless? Can they and should they change?

Values do change. For example slavery, now unacceptable everywhere, was once considered morally acceptable by almost all religious people, including Christians. Values do change.

How do humanists regard the Golden Rule?

Every religion’s sacred book includes The Golden Rule. It is easily understood by all. The good person tries to live up to the Golden Rule in both its positive and negative parts. The positive part: treat others the way you’d like to be treated. And the negative part: don’t do things to others which you would not want them to do to you.

The Golden Rule is basic to all who want to pursue a good life.

Does the Golden Rule, a basic moral law in almost every religion, require or involve a god of any kind?

No.

How do humanists regard the values espoused by Jesus, Mohammad and leaders of religions?

The major religions of the world are most proud of their leaders when they encourage their followers to be compassionate, caring and generous. Humanists share these same values.

Morals, ethics and goodness

Where do our ethics come from?

Humanists believe ethics come from human needs and human interests, tested by experience. They believe values are derived from social contracts that “work,” having proved they are the best way to treat others and to get along together.  Over thousands of years, humans have learned things NOT to do. And things TO DO to have a safer and happier life. Humanists believe our values come from our experience as humans trying to live together in harmony. Since humanists want a safe and happy life, they believe in values like truthfulness, courage and compassion.

What is “morality” to a humanist?

Morality is about promoting human advancement. It’s about improving people’s lives, building a better world, and demonstrating concern for the happiness of others, while maintaining a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Morality is all about helping others live a better life, and alleviating their unnecessary suffering. (Unfortunately, some suffering is inevitable.)

Morality is about doing things that make you proud of yourself.

What elements are not included in a humanist’s definition of morality?

Morality is not about religious books, heaven, hell, punishments, sinners, saints, promises and threats.

What do humanists believe “being good” is not?

Reading a holy book, attending a church service, reciting an oath, worshipping, praying, invoking a deity, blindly following the dictates of an organization, living in fear, attending a certain school or college, participating in unique customs, wearing religious jewelry and displaying religious ornaments.

How do humanists know what is right and what is wrong?

Human experience tells us it is wrong to murder, steal, cheat and lie. Humans do not need a book to tell us these things. Neither do we need a book to tell us that it is right to be honest, caring and truthful.

What motivates a humanist to do good and be good?

The same as anyone else: doing good makes you feel good about yourself.

Being good can contribute to:

• happiness
• Less stress
• More confidence that you are making good choices
• More self respect
• More friends

Why would a person who does not believe in God want to be good?

Humanists do not believe that the only way you can get people to act decently is to promise them eternal reward (heaven) or threaten them with eternal punishment (hell).

We are better off aiming for cooperation than aiming for selfishness. We must cooperate and get along with others; we need to give and take.

What is “pay it forward”?

We may not realize it but we are constantly aware that our behavior may be seen and evaluated by others, for better or worse. We can “pay it forward” meaning that I will help you in the hope that it will encourage you to help someone else. It feels good to give to others, whether or not we get anything in return.

Does it make any difference whether a person is good without God, or good with God?

Not to a humanist. But it certainly does make a difference to millions of others.

What non-religious organizations have “creeds” that might be termed humanistic?

Almost all service clubs have creeds that embrace people of all religions. Rotary International is one. It has 1.2 million members in 132 countries. Its creed is “The Four Way Test” which asks, “Of the things that we think, say or do:

1. Is it the truth?
2. Will it be beneficial to others?
3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

What notion of absolute morality has been used to justify almost every war ever fought?

“The one true God is on OUR side!”

After a fascinating anecdote of a 16th century freethinker in a small Catholic village, Zuckerman, whose most recent book is titled “Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion,” offers 7 key reasons for the rise of irreligion, followed by discussion of its consequences. Greg, in his talk, introduces the then-unborn Humanist Community Project and explains some of the rationale behind the Humanist movement.

Don’t miss this unique event, delivered to your desk from Santa Monica, CA! See below for the footage of these excellent talks and the ensuing dialogue between sociologist, community organizer and a diverse audience.

Dave Muscato here again with more practical advice for running your group as successfully as possible. I have for you today some general information about group officer turnover, as well as one specific suggestion, which I will offer at the end of this article.

So, it’s nearing the end of the school year, and it’s time for your student group to elect new officers. If none of your current officers are graduating and all have been doing a stellar job, great! Re-elect them and keep up the good work.

But where many groups fall apart — literally — is when the one or two people who were really holding the group together graduate and move on. You’d be surprised how often seemingly-active campus groups have to restart from scratch every few years when this happens.

You’ve put a lot of effort, time, and resources into building and growing your group. Don’t let it all dissolve just because you’re leaving!

The question before us is, how can we help our groups stay strong when graduating officers are moving on? The answer is, it’s a process, and you must start early.

The first and most important priority is to go out of your way to get to know your freshman and sophomore members, as soon as possible. If you are President or Vice President of your group, it’s likely that you’re a senior or at least a junior, and you might feel like you have more in common when chatting with other group members who are your age. You must actively resist the urge to chat only with people you already know. Make an effort, additionally, to meet and get to know your new & especially younger members. This is not just for reasons of replacing graduating officers down the line, but generally a good idea for making your group a good place of community for humanists in search of a group to call their own.

If you’re graduating and are looking to replace yourself as an officer, you must go out of your way to cultivate relationships with people younger than you. It’s rare that freshman or sophomores will feel comfortable enough in their abilities to run for office, and even if elected, it’s equally rare that they have the experience and leadership skills necessary to carry out those responsibilities well.

Give brand-new members some time to get comfortable with your group as “regular” members, and to become comfortable with the college environment & identifying as a college student. Get to know them during this time. Hang out socially. Learn about their interests and form genuine friendships. You already have at least one thing in common — secular humanism — and humanist groups are an ideal place to make friends.

Ask specific members whom you think have leadership potential to help you with certain projects — for example, running your Ask an Atheist table, writing guest articles for your group’s newsletter or blog, giving TED-style presentations at your meetings, and so on. If your group sponsors an annual conference or hosts a guest speaker, tap your younger members as volunteers to help out behind the scenes. You will learn quickly whom you think would make a good officer in coming years, and on whom you can count for extra help when you need it.

Once you’ve identified whom you think would be a good candidate to replace you, take him or her aside, or even out for coffee or dinner, and have a chat about it. I can’t speak for all officers, but I can say that I never would have thought about running for office if the outgoing president of my own group hadn’t told me explicitly that he thought I would be good at it. It just never occurred to me. Sometimes a nudge like that is all someone needs, and if you can provide it to someone qualified but who doesn’t yet see it in herself, you’re on the right track.

The purpose of my article today is to make a suggestion to outgoing officers:

Write a short open letter, say 500-700 words, about your experience as a group officer, and how being an officer has made your life better and more meaningful. Talk about how you felt when you initially joined or started your group, how you started to become active in it, and how you became an officer. Talk about what it means for you to be leaving and moving on.

In your essay, encourage members who aren’t yet graduating to consider running for office themselves, and talk about why it’s important to be an activist for science, reason, and secular values. Then, publish this essay to your members, e.g. in your aforementioned e-newsletter or blog.

I did this myself on my group’s blog, and found the experience not only spiritually fulfilling, but I hope that it will stir an interest in running for office among our membership, too. We have twice as many people running for office this year as last year, and I see that as a great success!

Until next time!

Dave Muscato

Below is the next section of the book draft. Please comment with your feedback!

The Issues: What does a humanist believe about….?

Abortion

A woman has the right to choose. Neither society, government nor religion should have a role in the subject.

Afterlife

The only afterlife we humans experience is the way we affected individuals and institutions while we were alive.

A better world.

Being optimists, they have hope for a better world, but believe that this better world will come about through the efforts of humans and not through praying to a supernatural being.

Evolution

The earth is five billion years old, not 10,000. Plants, animals and humans have evolved and changed over millions of years. They were not created during one week several thousand years ago.

Gay marriage

Being inclusive, they support it.

Heaven and Hell

That there is neither heaven nor hell.

Minorities

They are an accepting people. They welcome people of all races, skin colors, religions and national origins.

Miracles

They believe that the laws of nature govern this world. And that “miracles” are events that really did not happen or they are events for which mankind will have an explanation in the future.

Myths

Myths are stories. While they most often are not true, they seldom do harm.

Noah’s Ark is a typical myth. It is physically impossible to place two of each insect, animal etc. in one boat. For instance, there are 124,000 species of beetles. However preposterous, this is an example of a harmless myth. (But they wonder what type of god would be so angry that he drowned almost every adult and child on earth.)

Praying

Because they lack belief in the existence of a supernatural being, they do not attempt to pray or make requests to a supernatural being.

What do most humanists believe is the “purpose of life”?

For each individual to reach his potential and to help others do the same. And when choosing a purpose of life your choice should be based on how you, as a human being, should relate to other human beings. Humanists think that almost everyone is capable of choosing purposes and goals that will help guide their life.

Salvation

They do not believe that anyone is born sinful or guilty. Threfore, they do not believe anyone needs to be “saved.”

School prayer

They support the current national legislation that prayer should not be part of a public school experience.

Sociability

Humans are social beings. We all need friends and we need institutions through which we can develop our potential and help build a better world. Organized religion and the local church can play a leading role.

Virgin birth

This is physically impossible. It is an example of a harmless myth.

Women’s rights

Being inclusive, they support the efforts to achieve equality.

“I have a dream today.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.” – Gary Portnoy & Judy Hart Angelo

I have a dream. In the dream I am in a place where rationalism trumps ritual, where friendship trumps prejudice and where thought plus activism leads to progress every day. And in the dream there are Humanist communities all over the country that are alive and growing and speaking out.

I know a lot of you reading this share a part (or all) of my dream already. And that is why I want to share with you through this blog in the coming months, a very special part of the dream: The American Humanist Retreat Center.

The findings of the University of Toronto study mentioned above may or may not be accurate. But I don’t think many will question that nontheists do experience many of the same stresses of modern life that theists do, plus the stresses of being a non-conformist in a world that rewards conformity.

Many of us are at various stages in forming Humanist communities on a local level or participating in the American Humanist Association on a national level. In Phoenix, Arizona, where I lived for the past seven years, we have the first membership owned, full time Humanist Community Center. In at least twelve states and one province we have Camp Quest programs for kids. And Harvard has the Humanist Community Project (which sponsors this blog) supporting the further growth of Humanist communities without each one having to reinvent the wheel (or at least the same wheel).

I see the American Humanist Retreat Center as a place nontheists can get away from religiously-based communities and think, study, socialize or play. It would be a place for both structured and unstructured education. It would be a place for people of all ages and offering accommodations at different levels so that it could be available to people of varied economic levels. Some programs might be a day long and others might be a month or even longer.

Right now it’s just a dream. And until now it has been my dream. But now that I’ve shared it with you it can be our dream, if you want to dream it, too.

I know it isn’t easy to take a dream like this and make it come true, but I see what we’ve done in Phoenix and I know it is possible. In the coming months I’ll continue to share the dream and the specifics like philosophy, location/population, programs and fundraising. I hope those of you who want to share the dream with me will write in with your ideas.

Think about it. The American Humanist Retreat Center. Together we can make this a dream come true.

For we live in the shadow of NASA’s space shuttle program. Or at least we did — that era is gone now. I felt that profoundly when we watched Atlantis lift off last summer. I had taken for granted the ability to step out my front door and simply turn my head slightly to the left and then up to watch as shuttle after shuttle departed our atmosphere. Over the years, the growth of several trees in our neighborhood had begun to obscure the view reminding me of the passage of time, but not as poignantly as standing in my front lawn this morning holding my son’s hand.

I was exactly his age when my fifth grade teacher stopped class and took us out to the fields behind the school to watch as the first space shuttle was flown over Huntsville, Alabama on its way to Florida. It rested on the back of a 747 offering little indication of its own power and potential. This morning, we watched as NASA honored the residents of our county with a ritual fly over before transporting the space shuttle Discovery to Washington for placement in the Smithsonian Institution.

As trite as it may sound, I’m comfortable claiming membership in the Space Shuttle Generation. I was in elementary school when it lifted off for the first time in April 1981, in my senior year of high school when Challenger exploded, established as a college co-ed when the program resumed, a new mother when John Glenn took to space again and now, with my own teenager in the house, turning my thoughts to the potential accomplishments of the next generation. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up, you see.

When we watched the orbiter, supported by a large 747 and escorted by a much smaller fighter jet, fly over our neighborhood, there was little hope of making any immediate sense of the flood of emotion I felt. I just had to allow myself to reside within the experience. The reflection and personal meaning-making would have to come a bit later.

When Skylab fell to earth in 1979, the shuttle program was well into development and we carried in our hearts the hope for its potential. I understood that even as an eleven year old child, but this may have been because I was surrounded by people directly committed to its success. As the shuttle program comes to an end, I suspect my feelings of pride are marred a bit by uncertainty concerning space exploration’s future. NASA’s website states, “As humanity’s first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle pushed the bounds of discovery ever farther, requiring not only advanced technologies but the tremendous effort of a vast workforce. “ This simple statement resonates in my humanist heart.

I know too many people who have little appreciation for the return on our investment in this program, but its impact on the welfare of humanity truly cannot be emphasized enough. As the most visible artifacts of the space shuttle era are relegated to museum collections, I’m left wondering. What next? Today’s ritual brought a bit of closure and certainly helped with the expression of conflicting emotions, but I have to admit it failed to evoke a sense of transition and expectation. That’s what truly effective ritual does at its best.

I have friends who flinch a bit when I use the word ‘ritual’ as it evokes a religious sentimentality they seek to avoid. But ritual is not by definition or nature dependent upon religious beliefs. Rituals are symbolic acts that invest more emotional meaning into life’s transitions. They provide us a way to express what we are hard pressed to put into words. They are a form of shared communication. NASA could have taken out an ad in “Florida Today” to say thank you and farewell, but is that really going to evoke the same depth of emotion as a symbolic fly over? In practical terms, the flight path this morning was completely unnecessary and impractical if the goal was simply to move an object from one place to another. That clearly was not the point. As an expression of honor and gratitude, it was priceless.

In the inadequate world of verbal expression, I too offer my thanks to the men and women who labored for decades to make space exploration and experimentation a reality. I sincerely hope their work is but the foundation for further communal investment in pushing at the boundaries of both human knowledge and mutual concern.

The deepest current issue in economics is how to balance the three kinds of concern that are described in the following diagram:

Let me try now to characterize succinctly the relevant basic views of three categories of people: (1) capitalists, (2) theists and (3) good humanists. Let me for this purpose define capitalists as people who wish and expect capital to grow always more and more, and therefore wish and expect material production and the market to increase infinitely, but who, as capitalists, don’t care whether people other than themselves are thereby rendered materially better or worse off. (All capitalists are humans, and some of those humans may care about the welfare of other people, but that is a feature of their human-ism rather than of their capital-ism.) I think humanists should care about per capita material welfare and should therefore advocate zero population-growth. I also think humanists should care about people in poverty, that is, people who don’t have a decent amount of material welfare. This raises some tricky questions  – such as “How much is enough per capita?” and maybe even  “How much is too much?” – which we can discuss. (I think humanists should also be concerned about spiritual welfare in this our life on Earth, but that’s another matter, not economics.)

As for distribution, I would suppose that some but not all capitalists would wish it to be not so unfair as to give rise to very destructive forms of violence. (It seems to me, by the way, that such violence is seldom wrought by the destitute; they’re too weak for that; it is wrought by people strong enough to have effective rage.) All good humanists and probably most theists share that wish. (I have in mind theists who, for instance, don’t subscribe to the concept of Armageddon.) Perhaps most humanists and some theists would also wish economic inequality to be moderate enough that the more affluent folks can feel morally at ease with it. And, some humanists and theists may advocate material equality (which I regard as an unfeasible ideal; we can discuss this).

Humanism calls for ecological sustainability (the belief that it would be OK to render the Earth uninhabitable by humans since Nature would carry on without us is hardly humanist), and yet the tension between capitalism and ecological sustainability is going to get worse and worse. It is palpable already. Some theists may feel that God would providentially prevent anything dire from happening to the Earth as the home of humankind, or else that if He wills such dire things, then so be it; but humanists should take seriously the possibility – the likelihood – of catastrophic ecological degradation, and try to prevent and mitigate it. This problem raises scientific and moral questions (combined as in medical science) as to how much of this or that change would be too much for us biophysically. I think it will become an even bigger problem than the somewhat related one of running short of consumable energy.