Category: Humanism’s Roots in the Enlightenment
Introduction
Gordon Gamm, a lawyer and longtime humanist activist (among other positions, he has served on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association), approached Free Inquiry last year about the possibility of asking an historian to write an essay addressing the connections between the Enlightenment and contemporary humanism. Although humanists routinely reference the Enlightenment …
The Enlightenment, Naturalism, and the Secularization of Values
The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was the secularization of ethical debate. Historically, however, it would be one-dimensional—indeed wrong—to understand this phenomenon as the product of a virgin birth of ideas in the Enlightenment. Both deistic and atheistic …
The Basis of Paul’s Ideas of Christ
In my previous Free Inquiry, article, “Jesus: What’s the Evidence?” (August/September 2011), I noted that the Jesus of the earliest extant Chri stian literature is fundamentally a supernatural personage. By “the earliest extant Christian literature,” I mean the early Epistles, including those most scholars accept as authentically Pauline (that is, written by Paul himself). In …
Grog and Zog: A Parable for Secular Humanists (and Everyone Else)
A long time ago, there was a small band of cavepeople trying to survive in a harsh world. The group’s two best hunters, Grog and Zog, had been tracking prey together for years. Among the many things Grog and Zog had learned was that when they worked together, they were more likely to catch the …