You know, I think that Stephen Fry could read a shopping list and make it interesting,... and these aren't shopping lists. They're four short videos from the British Humanist Association. Excellent, aren't they?
I don't call myself a humanist, because every humanist seems to have a different idea of what it means. I'm not kidding. I've encountered both a communist humanist and a libertarian humanist, and they couldn't have been more different in what they thought humanism was. Any label which can be stretched
that far doesn't seem to have much value
as a label.
In general, though, I'm certainly sympathetic to humanists, and if this is a representative sample of the British Humanist Association, well, I'm impressed. Of course, it didn't hurt to have Stephen Fry narrating these. :)
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I’m not a big person for labels either; if you don’t call yourself anything then you never have to explain what exactly you are and what you believe. Being an atheist is the exception – it’s really easy to explain if anyone ever asked. But, having said that, at one point I looked at the definition of a humanist from the wiki and went ‘yeah, that’s what I think, that’s what I feel, guess I’m a humanist then’. Up until that point I thought it was someone who loved humankind and being a bit of a cow at times and wanting to give collective humanity a great big loving punch in the face a lot of the time I didn’t think humanist was really going to be my bag. But, it turns out, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a lover of man. Who’da thunk?
Heh, heh. Yup. And in general, I do identify with humanism. But different people claim that humanism implies different things, so I just find it easier to skip all that.
I'm an atheist and I'm a skeptic. As labels, they work well enough for me. They're simple, they're easy to explain, and the 'skeptic' label can cover most questions easily enough (indeed, I'm an atheist because I'm a skeptic).
So I don't worry too much about humanism, even though I'm sure I'm in agreement with most humanists about most things.
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