I would make a distinction between the original humanists of the 14-17th centuries and the "Humanists" the adherents of that atheist quasi-religion which is riddled with the most basic contradictions but there seems little point in that, now. There were problems with that original humanism but it was intellectually, by far, the superior claimant of the name but it died a long time ago. So, now when it's "Humanists" it is the atheist religion, the American form of which is what I'm most familiar with. especially the organized form that you can google.
Among the most obvious things about this atheist religion that puts humans on a pedestal as opposed to the gods or God is that positions humans far lower than the Abrahamic religions do. It begins by stripping them of their immortal souls, of a hope for eternity, salvation, ultimate justice, and a host of other things hoped for by the religious view of humans. Humanism being a materialistic religion, it demotes humans into a merely temporary phenomenon of aggregated chemicals because it demotes everything into a "congregation of vapors". And that's pretty much the alpha and about the alpha and omega of Humanism. I'll come back round to the demotion of human beings by these folk who put humans on a pedestal, later.
One of the most amusing practices of the Humanists is the ridicule they heap on what they claim is the anthropomorphic God they discern from the Jewish conception of God. The accusation of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism from people who call themselves "Humanists" and who in one form or another make "man the measure of all things" has its hilarious features. Not least of those is that their very name announces their most radical anthropocentrism. You will hear their mockery on this most often in some riff on the theme of "man created God in his own image". While that might be true for the gods of the Greeks and Romans, the Babylonians and others whose gods were material gods which were created in their theogonies, the God of the Hebrews is definitely not material and certainly not human nor was God created. But it is the Humanists I'm talking about here so I will talk about their replacement of the material universe as conceived of by science for God because it is, as well, an expression of the radical anthropocentric thinking of these folk who so disdain and despise anthropocentric thinking.
As you never have to stop pointing out with these worshipers of science, science is a conscious human invention, based on conventional, agreed to and very imperfectly carried out rules for attaining an agreed to standard of reliable knowledge about the physical universe. Everything about science is a product of human imagination, of human convention. Science produces a temporary and changing view of the universe. The universe, as presented by science is created by man, it is a universe entirely contained within human minds, in terms which human minds can deal with. That scientific universe is the creation of man. Its scope has never been and never will be complete, it will never contain a theory of everything which will explain everything and which will make testable, observable and accurate predictions of all possible phenomena even within human capabilities to perceive them. The clues to that ultimate truth of science were present in that other great human activity, mathematics, which is certainly known to not have the possibility of ultimate closure in a unified system.
But I'm going to tie up this post by pointing out more of the consequences for the idol that Humanism turns humans into, its golden calf. The scientism and materialism of the Humanists further reduces the view of human beings from that held by the Abrahamic religions in that it impeaches even the minds of people. The materialism of the humanist can't but force a denial of the possibility of free will, of free thought because materialism must hold, in every single case, that everything that exists, everything that happens, every physical entity of which everything is one of, is the product of material determinism and causation. There can be nothing in the universe which escapes that or materialism is invalid. There can be no window through which human beings can escape that aspect of materialism if it is to stand. You can't even get away from that fact if you try to disguise materialism as "physicalism" or "naturalism" or, most clueless and incoherently of all, "Humanism". The "free thinkers" are the first and most vociferous of all groups which deny the possibility of free thought because free thought, free will, cannot be real if their materialism is true. You can look all through the recent and much of the older literature of atheists, materialists, "free thinkers" "Humanists" and find that the denial of the possibility of free thought is one of their foremost obsessions. The fields of neuroscience, cognative science, psychology, sociology, anthropology are full of such assertions.
There is no more degraded view of human beings than the one ascribed to by the "Humanists" even as they put "Humans" up on a pedestal and there is no more basic self-contradiction than the holdings of such "science" about the deterministically controlled minds of human beings and the value of the science they use to make those claims. If human thinking is the mere phantom of material determinism then that includes science, mathematics, logic, and every single other aspect of human thinking. Science cannot be more than a product of the particular chemical constituents present in the minds of scientists worked on by physical forces in accordance to fixed law, such a thing cannot produce anything like truth, which is a transcendent property which cannot exist in materialism. The question Pilate asked Jesus on that point is one of those incredibly insightful points in the scriptures because it is the hinge between a materialist view of reality and the transcendent, religious view of reality. One system, the materialist one, falls on exactly that point. If materialism is right then it cannot be true. A materialist would do better to go with the most idiotic nihilist presentation of atheism that is found among the angry, self-centered, conceited brats who infest pop culture and the internet than with something that aspires to philosophical or scientific significance. Materialism must, ultimately, be nihilistic and, as such, must devolve into anti-intellectualism because materialism can't but help corrode the system of values that intellectualism is based in
Update: Why would I care that he posts excerpts he doesn't understand from what I write> It's not as if anyone who sees it is going to read what I wrote, the few, the sappy few, the bund of blithers.
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