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Accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist? The Worldview Tree Browse All Entities The Schism Register The Diptych: Compare The Christian AssessmentInstruments for working with the collection: set two worldviews side by side, read an entity against the Christian faith, trace a tradition through its divisions, and search the whole site.
All Tools The Diptych: CompareThe Secular Humanism timeline in the History of Worldviews.
The Secular Humanism dataset follows the movement from Feuerbach and the Ethical Culture societies through religious humanism and the manifestos to the organized movement's institutions, its court victories, its declarations, and its congregational experiments.
Its twenty events stand across six eras as the movement's own dataset, distinct from the wider secular family record.
Sources: Lamont, Corliss. The Philosophy of Humanism. New York: Humanist Press, eighth edition, 1997.; Kurtz, Paul, ed. Humanist Manifestos I and II. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1973.; Walter, Nicolas. Humanism: What's in the Word. London: Rationalist Press Association, 1997.
Streams: All of Secular Humanism Secular Humanism
Ludwig Feuerbach argues in The Essence of Christianity (1841) that theology is anthropology: God is human nature projected and worshipped. The book turns a generation, Marx and Engels among them, and gives atheism its humanist form, religion explained as man's own essence estranged from himself.
Felix Adler founds the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1876 on the motto deed, not creed: ethical life and social reform without theological tests. Its schools and settlements become the institutional seed of organized humanism in America.
In 1896 the ethical societies of Europe and America, the movement Felix Adler began in New York in 1876, federate at Zurich as the International Ethical Union. The union gives the ethical movement, religion's duties without its doctrines, a world body a half century before the humanist name takes over its work.
In 1907 the Oxford philosopher F. C. S. Schiller publishes Studies in Humanism, gathering the essays in which he defends humanism as the name of his pragmatist philosophy: man is the measure, truth is what proves itself in human life, and every abstraction answers to experience. Schiller's use of the word is the philosophical one the later movement inherits.
In 1929 Charles Francis Potter, a former Baptist minister who had debated Clarence Darrow's opponents and left the pulpit, founds the First Humanist Society of New York. The society is humanism organized as a congregation, with lectures in place of sermons, and its founding is the movement's institutional beginning in America.
Thirty-four signers, John Dewey among them, publish the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933: religious humanism, holding that the universe is self-existing, that man is part of nature, and that ethics is autonomous. The document names the movement the associations then organize.
In 1934 John Dewey, America's leading philosopher, publishes A Common Faith from his Terry Lectures at Yale. Dewey separates the religious quality of experience from religions and their supernatural claims, and commends a faith in human possibilities worked out by intelligence. The book is religious humanism's charter text, written the year after the first Humanist Manifesto, which Dewey's circle informs.
The American Humanist Association is founded in 1941, gathering the humanist fellowships and the Humanist Manifesto's signers into one national body. Its Humanist of the Year awards and its journal carry the humanist stream into American public life.
In 1946 Julian Huxley, the biologist and grandson of Darwin's defender, becomes the first Director-General of UNESCO and writes its founding philosophy: a scientific world humanism, evolutionary in frame, which he will name evolutionary humanism. The appointment carries the humanist name into the charter institutions of the postwar world.
In 1949 Corliss Lamont publishes Humanism as a Philosophy, later The Philosophy of Humanism: the movement's standard textbook through eight editions. Lamont, a philosopher and civil libertarian who funds much of the movement's work, sets out humanism as a complete philosophy of nature, ethics, and society without supernatural belief.
In 1952 the humanist and ethical organizations of five countries found the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Amsterdam, with Julian Huxley among its first presidents. The union gives the movement its world body, consultative standing at the United Nations, and the congresses at which its declarations are made.
In 1961 the United States Supreme Court decides Torcaso v. Watkins, striking down Maryland's religious test for office. Justice Black's opinion lists among the religions of the country those that do not teach belief in God, naming Secular Humanism in the famous footnote. The phrase enters American law, and later controversy, from that page.
In 1967 the Rationalist Press Association and the Ethical Union combine their humanist work in the British Humanist Association, with A. J. Ayer as its first president. The association, now Humanists UK, becomes Britain's national humanist body, campaigning on education, ceremonies, and the place of religion in law.
In 1973 the American Humanist Association publishes Humanist Manifesto II, drafted by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson and signed by, among others, Isaac Asimov, Francis Crick, and B. F. Skinner. Where the 1933 manifesto spoke in religious tones, the second speaks politically: ethics without revelation, world community, and the control of technology for human ends.
In 1980 Paul Kurtz, who has broken with the American Humanist Association over its religious tone, founds the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism and its journal Free Inquiry. The council fixes secular humanism as the movement's explicit name for its non-religious form, and the magazine becomes its fighting paper.
In 1991 Paul Kurtz founds the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, joining the secular humanist council and the skeptic movement's committee under one roof. The center gives the movement a campus, a publishing house in Prometheus Books' orbit, and a permanent institution beyond its founding generation.
In 2000 Paul Kurtz publishes Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism, the third manifesto, issued through the International Academy of Humanism. It answers the second manifesto a generation on: planetary ethics, the scientific outlook defended against its postmodern critics, and humanism proposed as the ethic of a single world civilization.
In 2002, at its fiftieth anniversary congress in Amsterdam, the International Humanist and Ethical Union adopts the Amsterdam Declaration as the world movement's official statement: humanism is ethical, rational, and democratic, affirms human dignity and freedom, and stands as the alternative to dogmatic religion and to nihilism alike. Member organizations across the world adopt the text as their own definition.
In 2013 the comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans found the Sunday Assembly in London: a godless congregation that sings, hears talks, and keeps the forms of church without doctrine, under the motto live better, help often, wonder more. Assemblies spread to dozens of cities, testing whether humanism can hold the communal life the manifestos describe.
In 2019 the International Humanist and Ethical Union renames itself Humanists International, simplifying the name the 1952 founders chose and keeping the Amsterdam Declaration as its defining statement. The renamed body speaks for national humanist organizations in more than sixty countries.
