I'm not sure of your assertion that secular humanism claims to describe the entirety of human experience. I don't claim to be a secular humanist (although it's possible I am one without knowing it, I suppose), so I've not researched the matter, however, if you can find such a claim in secular humanist literature I'd be interested in seeing it.
According to the Council for Secular Humanism, among the main aims of secular humanism are questioning and testing things, applying reason, and looking for ethical principles. The page does go on to mention naturalism, I'll agree, but also says that while they'd be sceptical about claims which seemed to be supernatural, they would not dismiss them out of hand. I bet they'd want to question and test such claims, in fact.
I'd suggest that what's axiomatic to a secular humanist view is that belief should be backed by evidence, and be proportional to the evidence.
Sagan's statement is certainly popular with the "why Christianity is right" websites. If you've been reading these people, you realise they're nutters, right? Anyway, it sounds like a definition of what he means by cosmos, not an assertion of materialism (another page I read claimed the statement was inserted into the Cosmos series because it sounded poetic, not as a great philosophical statement). What about it do you disagree with?
Your definition of historic Christianity (which sort is that a euphemism for, by the way? It sound like evangelicalism in practice) requires God's existence as an axiom, and also the idea that the Bible is God's revelation. Both of these are huge leaps of faith on very scant evidence.
If God does exist, he's pretty reticent about it, and so I conclude that either he doesn't exist or maybe doesn't want to be disturbed. He certainly doesn't look like the Christian God, anyway.
The Bible is an interesting book, but I really do hope that a book in which, to take one example, someone becomes a hero of the faith after sacrificing his daughter to God is not, in fact, God's revelation. (I've also addressed another, factual, problem with the idea that the Bible is inerrant, in this thread, though it's not clear you're claiming that).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-11-05 03:26 am (UTC)I'm not sure of your assertion that secular humanism claims to describe the entirety of human experience. I don't claim to be a secular humanist (although it's possible I am one without knowing it, I suppose), so I've not researched the matter, however, if you can find such a claim in secular humanist literature I'd be interested in seeing it.
According to the Council for Secular Humanism, among the main aims of secular humanism are questioning and testing things, applying reason, and looking for ethical principles. The page does go on to mention naturalism, I'll agree, but also says that while they'd be sceptical about claims which seemed to be supernatural, they would not dismiss them out of hand. I bet they'd want to question and test such claims, in fact.
I'd suggest that what's axiomatic to a secular humanist view is that belief should be backed by evidence, and be proportional to the evidence.
Sagan's statement is certainly popular with the "why Christianity is right" websites. If you've been reading these people, you realise they're nutters, right? Anyway, it sounds like a definition of what he means by cosmos, not an assertion of materialism (another page I read claimed the statement was inserted into the Cosmos series because it sounded poetic, not as a great philosophical statement). What about it do you disagree with?
Your definition of historic Christianity (which sort is that a euphemism for, by the way? It sound like evangelicalism in practice) requires God's existence as an axiom, and also the idea that the Bible is God's revelation. Both of these are huge leaps of faith on very scant evidence.
If God does exist, he's pretty reticent about it, and so I conclude that either he doesn't exist or maybe doesn't want to be disturbed. He certainly doesn't look like the Christian God, anyway.
The Bible is an interesting book, but I really do hope that a book in which, to take one example, someone becomes a hero of the faith after sacrificing his daughter to God is not, in fact, God's revelation. (I've also addressed another, factual, problem with the idea that the Bible is inerrant, in this thread, though it's not clear you're claiming that).