Summary of My Understanding of Humanism

I believe that error always does harm and when it doesn’t it will in the long run. Too much error is definitely very dangerous. Errors slander and cause bother those who try to expose them for it accuses them of being wrong and doing a bad thing and they have to go to the trouble of counteracting it when they could be doing other things such as helping people. Goodness is doing what is best and you need to know what is real to the best of your ability and to keep thinking and searching and doubting in order to be really serious about being good.
 
I believe that comfort from supernatural beliefs and belief in medicine that has not been scientifically or satisfactorily proven is no excuse for letting such beliefs thrive or adopting them. Would you recommend alcohol to help a vulnerable person? The beliefs cause division and bother and resentment. The person is better knowing right now that they have been lied to. Don't let them wait until later when they could find out at a really difficult point in their lives. The problem would abate if people just made decisions based on natural grounds and kept religious or political dogma (that which you are “obligated” to believe) out of the equation.
 
I believe that nobody has the right to make up my mind for me. That is, I should not be doing things just because the Bible or God or whatever tells me to but because my reason and experience and effort to learn the truth tell me. I must put the needs on the material level first for the rules of the world I see come before the rules of the world I do not see, the spirit world which may not even exist for at least I am positive that the real world is there. If I believe in religious dogmas there are people out there who have dogmas that contradict mine who believe just as strongly if not more so I have no right to act as if I am sure I am right in my dogmas.

I believe I should work out my own right and wrong by thinking, avoiding contradictory thinking and testing and should not let myself be influenced by the rules of any religion or God. When I have to think of something as plausible anyway before I can accept it and this happens even when I claim that God tells me what to think and do, I might as well do it independently and do all I can to help others.
 
I define love as not voluntary sacrifice but as liking. Liking is selfish for it is me feeling pleasure in the wellbeing of myself and others. Those who say love is not liking are fooling us because you have to at least like a person a tiny hardly detectable bit to be willing to help them in any way. Love is liking and when you like a person you mean you are after them for the pleasure they give you and nothing else. Liking is what we mean by selfishness or egoism for liking means you feel fulfilled by the person so it is all about yourself and not them even though they may benefit. Egotism which is selfishness that relishes hurting others is totally opposed by Humanistic atheism.
 
I believe that because what I do this minute is caused by what I felt a moment ago that I cannot have free will because I cannot change what I feel be it in the past or the present. Feelings and genes control me. Belief in free will is useless for whether we have it or we don’t, the important thing is motivating people to do good. Belief in free will is believing in hate because you cannot hate a person unless you think they did wrong of their own free will so it is an accessory that leads to hate. It is hate to even have such an accessory. The only way I can love a person and hate the evil they do is by denying free will which means I see the evil as sickness not as sin. If I tell John I hate his essay I am saying I hate what is in him that made him write it which is the same as hating him. To reduce the chances of hating, it is vital that we have no belief in free will.
 
I believe all love is just an expansion of the love I have for myself so I should love myself in being kind to my neighbour. I’m not saying I should abuse other people, I should not. What I am saying is that I am just doing whatever everybody else does all the time, look out for number one. I am doing that even if I give all my money to the poor and I am doing it for me because I want to do it. But I am not pretending this is unselfish like altruists do. Selfish means you care for yourself – there are good and bad varieties.
 
I must love myself alone – God does not come first in my life as the doctrine that God deserves all love implies but me.  I cannot love others for their own sake but mine so strictly speaking I love only myself for everything I do is to satisfy some desire in me. When I give all I consider dear away to help another person I do it because I want to despite it being hard. Want means I am after MY fulfillment. The reason I am doing it is for me and not for the other person though the other person benefits. There is nothing bad about this for we want others to enjoy helping us, and get as much out of it for themselves as we get out of them.
 
In summary, altruism is impossible but I practice everything the altruists practice except their lies.
 
I believe that all devotion to God and his miracles is hypocrisy because there is only one God for each human being which is herself or himself. Why? For she or he does all she or he does for self-gratification. To claim to have no self-interest so that one can be devoted to something other than one’s own needs is pretending. Religion is intrinsically deceitful and any good that comes from an unneeded deception does so not because of it but despite it. What is real is good for us if we are not afraid of it.
 
I believe that there are only two emotions in the final analysis: love and fear. When I follow reason as best I can and bless others with my compassion and warm feeling I am a disciple of love. To put God or religion first is a sign of fear and fear is the root of all evil.
 
I believe that prayer is wicked because it is trying to get help from a supernatural source when the truth is that you are your own God and it is all in your hands to make yourself accept and cherish your life even with all its problems. To need prayer is a sign of mild mental illness. If you want to help others, roll your sleeves up. You see the natural world is there but to pray is asking a world of spirit that may not be there at all to help and it is wrong. What you see comes first.
  
I believe that miracles – alleged events like Jesus rising from the dead - if they happen, speak against the existence of God.
 
Are miracles violations to the law of nature?
 
Believers say they are not violations of nature for God set up natural law and will not change his mind about it for he is always right. If miracles violate nature then they mean that God is not God but stupid and incompetent and mad. He has to force natural law to go against itself as if he is not in control.
 
When a miracle report is judged credible, believers only assume it is not a violation of nature. They assume so they don’t believe it is a non-violation though they lie saying they do. They are only guessing. When we have to guess that so-called miracles are not anti-nature what is the point of any God doing them for they are just left guessing? They would prove his stupidity which amounts to disproving God! Miracles still may be a violation of nature which means that their assuming is as reckless as assuming that triggering a nuclear bomb won’t make it go off. It is less serious to trigger the bomb than it is to question that natural law is free from supernatural interference because it is our belief in nature that enables us to have a life at all. Belief in nature is our basic need. It is absolutely necessary to hold that the supernatural has a natural explanation for holding to anything else is evil.
 
Are miracles exceptions to the law of nature?
 
This does away with the idea of God having to fight the laws he created. Exceptions must prove the rule. They can only do that if you clearly prove the reasons for the exception. In other words, the rule might be that your charity does not pay out money to drunks. That's the rule. But there might be a very unusual and extreme case where you might have to pay the money out to a drunk. This is not contradicting the rule for it means you have no choice but to give the money. No rule can be kept at all costs. An exception will be allowed to the rule IN CASES WHEN IT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KEEPING THE RULE. We need to see the reasons and prove them before we can consider any miracle to be an exception. Religion replies that God knows these reasons and that is enough. But what if evidence appeared that some priest was turned into a frog? Religion universally says miracles like that are nonsense no matter what evidence is produced. It can only say that if it can come up with reasons why such miracles didn't happen. The Catholic Church refuses to investigate miracles and apparitions that contradict Catholic doctrine for it says regardless of the evidence they were not real or from God when they contradict the Church. Suppose you say that dead people stay dead. Suppose the Christian says that Jesus was an exception. The burden of proof then is on both of you as it is with anybody making a claim. But your burden is sorted. So the Christian has to deal with theirs. They need to know why the exception had to be made but they cannot and they don't claim to. They need to know how it was made as well. Because if there is no question of how then there is no question of why either for how matters more than why.
 
 If you start saying that bad people are not really bad but just making exceptions to ethical obligations when you don't know what the exceptions are that is bad and so is saying miracles have happened when you don't know what justification there is for the exceptions.
 
If you need very strong evidence that will fill books that somebody committed murder imagine how much evidence you need to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. Religion's evidence for the resurrection isn't that good. It is always more likely that the witnesses of miracles are lying or mistaken or both than that any miracle they report must happened.
 
To say, "this miracle really happened because it was an exception to the law of nature and it was an exception because it really happened" is circular reasoning and is no good. You may as well argue, "This miracle didn't really happen for it was an exception to the law of nature and such exceptions do not happen." In fact, if there is a circle to choose from it should be the latter for the latter respects nature and what we can see. It doesn't look for unnatural explanations. Remember, if we start looking for unnatural explanations or far fetched ones we will soon become total nuts and incompetents.
 
Exceptions to the rule are bad. They are necessary evils. To say that God needs to make exceptions to his laws means he can't run the universe and has to fix his mistakes by suspending or changing the way nature works.
 
Are miracles just religiously significant coincidences, eg a prediction of the future coming true despite the odds being nearly 100% against this?
 
That means miracles are natural. But if miracles are natural then it follows that we should always assume that there is a natural explanation for them even if we don’t have one yet which means they are not miracles!
 
Miracles are not evidence for God. Miracles are blasphemy. Miracles do not give us any reason to take any religion to be true.
 
I believe that since I am surer people suffer than they have free will, that is, are not programmed to do what they do but do it without anything determining them to do what they do. I know people suffer but I only guess that they and myself have free will. Therefore I have no right to believe in God because that implies that suffering is our fault for abusing free will and not his. Hate is wrong for it is based on the idea of free will and it wants to hurt people. It is promoting hate to advocate the free will teaching. How can we reward if we don't believe in free will? Reward only to encourage, not to acknowledge free will and do not punish but simply regard jailing and fining as ways to protect people from themselves and to reform them. To punish without putting the attempt to reform first and making it the main motivation is really just to take revenge.
 
I believe marriage is evil and should not be sanctioned by the state. Religion should not tell the state what to do – and marriage, being unnecessary if the law is set up right, is nothing more than a religious superstition for it claims that it can make a man and woman belong to each other even they hate one another.  Whether a couple are committed or not, then marriage will make no difference. If one is sure of the partner's devotion then marriage wouldn't even be important or necessary and getting married expresses a desire for control over the other person usually the woman.
 
I believe in the absolute value of human life. It is ridiculous to say persons should be happy for happiness matters more than persons so human life is intrinsically valuable no matter what the quality of that life is. A single life is so valuable that you don’t take it away even to please the entire world. That is why books like the Bible which claim to be the word of God though they command killing, eg of adulterers and apostates, are evil and have no authority and whatever wrote them it was not God so the miracles, eg the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that testify to them are worthless and of no evidential value and testify that no miracle comes from an honest source.
 
I believe that if I really accept that I will never be perfectly happy I will cherish this life more and it will mean more to me. When we are content with life being imperfect and a challenge a lot of the time we can be like that all the time if we train ourselves. I will settle for what I have got and love it. I will not need a life after death to believe in and needing it is a sign of immaturity and underdevelopment.
 
I believe that if anything does not do any harm or does the least possible harm to myself or others that that is what I must do.
 
I believe that Atheism is love. Love is simply being happy and allowing yourself to be infected by the love you rouse in other people. This is loving yourself and it is the only way you can love others for happiness is infectious and makes you want to help yourself and others. That is all. I say my Amen to Atheism.