Six weeks ago I wrote about false assumptions and how Christians suffered in the past because of them just as atheists suffer today. Atheism doesn’t have a philosophy or principles to counter these false assumptions any more than it has a philosophy or principles to deserve them. Secular humanism does put forward a set of positive traits and promotes a world view. These are:

1. Need to test beliefs
2. Reason, evidence, scientific method
3. Fulfillment, growth, creativity
4. Search for truth
5. This life
6. Ethics
7. Building a better world

This life – A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.

I know that many Christians seek to make the very best of this mortal life, also that some are more concerned with the next life. Both, in my opinion, still have the benefit of believing in a second chance at existence. As an atheist I do not believe in God and I do not believe that my existence continues beyond the death of my brain. My brain is the physical receptacle for all my firing little axons and thoughts, all my neural pathways make up my memories and the direction of my thoughts. I am a slave to my biology, wonderful, mysterious and barely fathomed biology that it is.

What does a biological machine do with his average day?  Well, we’re complex organisms, much more than eating, sleeping, reproducing machines, much more than the sum of our parts.  We’re imaginative primates too, wonderfully clever and inventive, much more than any other animal.  That is our great strength as a species as well as our curse.

Secular humanists, among many other groups, concentrate on life and making the most of it.  We try to understand how we got to where we are, not just through the important lessons of history but through our development from earlier hominids and our inheritance from them.  We can have no idea how a hominid thought or if they saw beauty in the world around them but we can understand how our cave dwelling ancestors looked at life.  We can examine cave drawings depicting animal life and the hunt.  How their survival was dependent on other creatures and how they recorded the most important, we assume, act of hunting on their cave walls.

We can note this tendency to record in art form in successive generations of humans from aboriginal tribes in Australia, Africa and the Americas right through to the modern age.  What does art tell us about humans?  We can tell something of the way we think from how we express ourselves in art.  Not just visual art but in music, sculpture, literature, poetry, anything that we might consider thought provoking or beautiful.  Our art forms appeal to our senses but also to our emotions and our intellects.  We can be moved by art or influenced to think on a matter in ways that we might not have reached independently.

Art is simply one way that we express ourselves and explore our humanity.  History is a fairly obvious way to understand how we arrive at where we are.  One event leads to another.  What would the world be like today if Arthur Tudor (Henry VIIIs big brother) hadn’t died when he did?  Would England have split from Rome?  Would we even have Protestants today or any of the range of Christian beliefs that we have in the West?  Understanding how history shaped the world is one way to appreciate all that we have today as well as a way to ensure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of our ancestors.

Another great way to understand ourselves is to explore.  Both geographically and in terms of scientific exploration.  We explore the world to better understand it but also to better understand ourselves.  I know I keep saying this but I really believe that it’s true.  It is a concern of mine when scientific research is curtailed.  Not that we shouldn’t consider the ethics of research, quite the opposite.  We should consider the ethics of research but shouldn’t necessarily shy away from things that could be hugely beneficial to us.  Recent newsworthy controversy over research is in stem cell research.  The potential medical benefits are enormous but research is limited because of the source of the stem cells.

In life we encounter many people with differing views to us.  We could ignore them or avoid them and cocoon ourselves away but then we would miss out on some very interesting conversations.  More importantly we’d never discover anything about ourselves because we’d never challenge ourselves against those who feel differently.  Our lives would stagnate without challenge and other people provide the greatest challenge to our views that we can encounter.

I am convinced that we create our own meaning in life rather than draw it from an external force.  We create meaning by drawing from our experiences and our physical make up and by adjusting our views as new experience and evidence is presented.  The emphasis is on this life and not on anything else.

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