Time for a new Enlightenment
Paul Kurtz bemoans the growing religiosity in Western culture, and delivers a stirring paen to secular humanism.
Personally, I believe he’s too hard on religion. I don’t think spirituality, in some form, will ever go away. It has served a multitude of useful purposes in the past, from social organization to personal actuation. Open, adaptive, dynamic religiosity is a positive social force in our culture today.
I share with Kurtz a kind of faith in humanity as-is, a belief that human beings have an intrinsic value that doesn’t require the metaphysical notion of “ensoulment”. I doubt any scientist who has experienced the beauty of our world could avoid such a conclusion, no matter his or her religious beliefs. Yet turning science itself into a kind of religion, one in which we suppress our natural curiosity about the experiences that exist outside our rational faculties, seems to me a betrayal of those human characteristics that he claims to celebrate.