#humanism

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. ↗

— Paul Johnson

#education

Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect. ↗

— Wangari Maathai

#inspirational #inspirational

We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there might be something here to be learned. Before we go any further the author of this cartoon wishes to make an apology. Such an impression was deliberately cultivated. It is a ruse. It is a lie. We are every bit as lost and afraid as children abandoned in a wood: every bit as lost as you. ↗

— Anders Nilsen

#comradery #disillusionment #fear #humanism #lost

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it ↗

— Maimonides

#disease #humanism #medicine #nurse #medicine

But this was the real world wasn't it? Miracles must happen in some parallel universe. ↗

— Clyde Dsouza

#science-vs-religion #singularity #transhumanism #religion

From my point of view, there is a tremendous amount to be said for secular humanism. ↗

— Vidal Sassoon

#humanism #point #point of view #said #secular

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society. ↗

— John Ralston Saul

#exercise #freedom #humanism #integral #limited

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. ↗

— Christian Smith

#human-nature #humanism #identity #personalism #personhood

The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#democracy #jesus #secular-humanism #sermon-on-the-mount #the-cross

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it. ↗

— George Carlin

#equality #feminism #humanism #humor #inspirational