There’s an excellent book I’ve been reading about Humanism, titled Good without God: What a Billion People Do  Believe. It would be an excellent choice for our once-every-three-months book discussion group. 

Here’re the first several paragraphs of the book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, which provide a number of interesting alternative answers to the question:

What is humanism?” That is the question posed, in David Nobbs’s 1983 comic novel Second from Last in the Sack Race, at the inaugural meeting of the Thurmarsh Grammar School Bisexual Humanist Society—“bisexual” because it includes both girls and boys. Chaos ensues.

One girl begins by saying that it means the Renaissance’s attempt to escape from the Middle Ages. She is thinking of the literary and cultural revival conducted by energetic, free-spirited intellectuals in Italian cities such as Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But that’s not right, says another of the society’s members. Humanism means “being kind, and nice to animals and things, and having charities, and visiting old people and things.”

A third member replies scathingly that this is to confuse humanism with humanitarianism. A fourth complains that they are all wasting time. The humanitarian bristles: “Do you call bandaging sick animals and looking after old people and things a waste of time?”

The scathing one now puts forward a different definition altogether. “It’s a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method.” This is well received, until someone else raises a problem: some people do believe in God, yet they call themselves humanists. The meeting ends with everyone more confused than they were at the start.

But the Thurmarsh students need not have worried: they were all on the right track. Each of their descriptions—and more—contributes to the fullest, richest picture of what humanism means, and of what humanists have done, studied, and believed through the centuries.