Posts Tagged ‘secular humanism’
Secular Buddhism & Secular Humanism
For more information about secular humanism, see the Council for Secular Humanism‘s website.
Read MoreWhat is Secular Buddhism?
This is a short experiment, a video I’ve cobbled together and put up on YouTube on the question “What is secular Buddhism?” where I try to explain both what it is, and how it has come about historically. It’s quite short, seven and a half minutes long, so I don’t go into a whole lot…
Read MoreThinking and Feeling, Critically
We are deep into the political season. Looking at the Trump phenomenon, an article by Phil Torres in Salon bemoans the “anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture.” Torres notes that, “[T]he most dangerous consequence of Fox News is that it discourages that most important form of rigorous curiosity called critical thinking.” Critical thinking,…
Read More"Buddha vs. Faust": Responding to Ronald Lindsay
Ron Lindsay’s recent blog post “On the Pursuit of Meditation: Buddha vs. Faust” begins as a mild critique of Sam Harris’s recent book Waking Up, and then segues into a skeptical review of meditation. Lindsay is President of the secularist/skeptic Center for Inquiry.* Although I dealt with many relevant topics at some length in my review of…
Read MoreCultivating Wisdom in an Era of Technological Change
My grandmother grew up in the era of the horse and buggy, but lived to see a man set foot on the Moon. When I was a kid growing up in New York we had rotary dial telephones. Personal computers were just being introduced, with green phosphorescent screens and weird command-line interfaces. The first office Xerox…
Read MorePhilip Kitcher on Secular Humanism
One criticism of ‘New Atheist’ books has been that they lack sophistication, that they attack only the most extreme forms of theistic belief without touching its more nuanced, liberal forms. So it comes as a welcome development to read Philip Kitcher’s new book, which takes a more nuanced look at religious belief and practice. As…
Read MoreSecular Humanism and Secular Buddhism
Recently I attended a meeting of the Center for Inquiry, a Secular Humanist group, where I got into a discussion about Secular Buddhism. It raised the question of how to distinguish Secular Humanism from its Buddhist counterpart. What were their strengths and weaknesses? What did they each have to learn, and how could they be…
Read MoreEpisode 104 :: Rick Heller :: The New Humanism
Rick Heller speaks with us about the intersection of Secular Humanism with mindfulness practice.
Hi, everyone. There’s been a great deal of discussion online recently about how Secular Humanism has very strong alignment with what we’re calling Secular Buddhism. We see very little difference in the ideological propositions about social interaction, and one of the few outlying differences seems to be in the realm of practice. That is, we agree that improving our interactions with others is a positive thing, but what can we do to get better at that on a personal level?
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