Washington Post article on atheism and humanism

Not long ago, I wrote a post about the recent rash of atheists lashing out at religion in well-publicized and popular books. Tonight I came across a nice article in the Washington Post describing humanists' response to books by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. The subtitle of the article reads: Humanists Say Atheists Need to Offer More Vision Than Rhetoric. There are several interviews with humanists, including a leader from the American Humanist Association. The general consensus: these nasty attacks on religion ignore the reasons why humans create religion in the first place, and they offer no vision, only condemnation.

As I described in my first ever post, I consider myself a religious humanist and an agnostic. I think this is why hard-core atheists kind of bug me. They sometimes come off sounding just as harsh and dogmatic as fundamentalists (as this article actually points out). Religious humanism offers a vision of human potential and meaning, as well as the ethical foundation for cooperation, justice, and responsible living. This is far more pro-active and constructive than the rants of devout atheists.

The article also discussed the finding that the number of religiously unaffiliated increased significantly during the 1990s, and may still be increasing. While only a minority of these Americans are atheist or agnostic, they may nonetheless be a group of people open to humanism as a moral, ethical, practical approach to living. I have noted this elsewhere on this blog, in terms of what implications it might have for Unitarian Universalist growth. About half of Unitarian Universalists consider themselves humanists.