In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent
December 28, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/on-religion-where-are-the-humanists.html...
humanist movement — an umbrella term for those who call themselves atheists, agnostics, secularists and freethinkers...
“It is a failure of community, and that’s where the answer for the future has to lie,” said Greg M. Epstein, 35, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of the book
Good Without God. “What religion has to offer to people at moments like this — more than theology, more than divine presence — is community. And
we need to provide an alternative form of community if we’re going to matter for the increasing number of people who say they are not believers.”
Darrel W. Ray, a psychologist in the Kansas City area who runs the Web site
The Secular Therapist Project...“The best we can do as humanists,” he continued, “is to talk about that pain in rational terms with the people who are suffering. We have
humanist celebrants, as we call them, but they’re focused on doing weddings. It takes a lot more training to learn how to deal with grief and loss. I don’t see celebrants working in hospice or in hospitals, for example.
There are secular people who need pastoral care, but we abdicate it to clergy.”
...
While tacitly excluded from religious coalitions, humanist groups did respond to the Newtown killings. The
Ethical Culture Society chapter in Teaneck, N.J., helped organize a gun-control rally there. The
Connecticut branch of the American Humanist Association contributed about $370 to Newtown families from a winter solstice fund-raiser. The organization
American Atheists reports on its Web site that it has collected more than $11,000 in online donations toward funeral expenses in Newtown. A secular support group called
Grief Beyond Belief operates on Facebook.
...
Mr. Epstein is currently involved in a three-year, $2.5-million project to study, develop and spread the concept of
nonreligious community. But he believes that better organizing must be accompanied by better messaging.
“A lot of humanist rhetoric of previous generations revolved around reason,” he said. “We’d say, ‘We’re people of reason rather than people of faith.’ But I’ve always been uncomfortable with that as the banner under which we march. We need to think of reason in the service of
compassion —
caring, being cared-about,
a life of meaningful connection. Reason itself is the tool. When we see it as the end-product we miss the point.”
Alex's comment: UUism is the answer. UUism is a religious community of humanism.
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