Facticity

Overview

Welcome to the Humanism section of facticity.org. You can find many different definitions of humanism, depending on where you look and the motive behind the definition. Humanism is considered by some a religion and by others an anti-religion. It is looked on as a serious threat, evil and possibly supernatural in origin, by a large number of fundamentalist Christians. There are theistic groups, such as the Christian Humanists, that claim to follow humanist principles. While we don’t reject these groups’ claim to humanist values, humanism as we define it involves a rejection of supernatural views of reality and hence a rejection of theism.

Humanism Must Be Non-Theistic

Consider the following worldviews:

Naturalism: A naturalistic worldview consists in grounding one’s beliefs on human experience of the natural world and on our interpretation of that experience through the faculty of reason.

Theism: A theistic (or supernaturalistic) worldview consists in grounding one’s beliefs on a being beyond reason and nature.

By definition, worldviews are foundational in nature. Anything inconsistent with one’s worldview is either filtered out before reaching the conscious mind or rejected once the inconsistency is realized. Thus, there is an inherent conflict between theism and naturalism and hence between humanism and any theistic worldview.

We accept the minimum statement propagated by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. We further affirm the principles of secular humanism as defined by the Council for Secular Humanism. This stance combined with our experience of the world and our study of human history has convinced us that the world would be better off without theistic religions of any sort. While there may be some neutral or even beneficial religious worldviews (e.g. the Quakers), the existence of theistic religion in general has been a plague upon both man and nature for thousands of years and we look forward to the day when humanity no longer feels the need to believe in these ghosts of our violent and fearful past.

What You’ll Find Here

In this section, we will put content related to living well. That is the province of ethics, of course, and we will cover theoretic ethics in the philosophy section of this site. But ethics is an essential component of humanism and we will detail here what we believe are the building blocks of a good life, lived in balance with nature and our fellow humans.

A Mini-Rant on Life Out of Balance

This rant doesn’t quite belong here, but until I move it somewhere else …

Life out of balance is miserable and will eventually lead to our extinction as a species. The United States has long been an extreme case of life out of balance. Many of us live well beyond our means, work ourselves to exhaustion and then use chemicals to fuel us past the point when our bodies want to rest, and exploit others to feed our unquenchable desires, all in the pursuit of a life that our media tells us we must have in order to be whole people. The collapse of the U.S. economy and the expanding effect of that collapse on the rest of the world has laid bare the greed and general irrationality that have fueled our economy for so long.

Many in China, partially freed from totalitarian socialism, have hurried to adopt the unbalanced western way of life and have fed their desire for quick wealth by producing toxic products. They have killed infants, children, and companion animals around the world, all in the name of emulating our unbalanced western way of life.

No longer is the suffering caused by our desires confined to the so-called third world. The world economic collapse is touching people in every nation. We who have exploited the poor and the natural world are now realizing that we must change our ways quickly, or perish.

Living well inherently means living in balance, balancing your work and personal life, the give and take of healthy relationships, sustaining others while also finding time for yourself, living so as to minimize the suffering of other beings, and learning the importance of extending yourself through creative work and minimizing the negative impacts of your destructive instincts. We will cover these topics here and we hope you find something of value to help you in your own life.