Rights of Man or Rites of Religion?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

IHEU’s Executive Director Babu Gogineni made a wide- ranging speech at the GA covering questions of universal values, globalization, militarization, and the challenges to the modern Humanist movement. Extracts are printed below.

 

We need to move towards a post-religious Humanism. We need renewal. We need rejuvenation. We should identify the most pressing problems of the world – and, as groups of concerned individuals, we should apply Humanism’s liberating principles to the solution of these problems or to set the direction for change.

 

Today’s Humanism combats the despotism of religion on the mind, proposes alternative rituals, and advocates care services to match those performed by religious groups. Valuable work. But why target religion alone? Why not the despotism of the market?

 

In today’s world Humanism is threatened by more than just extreme religion – if the global society that is to be formed has to be formed on universal principles, then we need to demonstrate that our values are not just an elevated particularism, but that they have a universal significance and are applicable to all aspects of life. Are Humanists to play politics? I suggest they should. Not by playing power politics that as someone said is the strife of interests disguised as a conflict of principles, but by playing the politics of freedom – the promotion of democratic principles, and the defence of human rights. What is Humanism, if it is not about human rights?

 

Organized Humanism

A Humanist group should be open only for Humanists because we have shared objectives to pursue and common goals to attain. The organizational mode undoubtedly has its own hazards: frequently we are caught up in organizational identities. Our identity I believe should be as human beings, first and last; an identity we realize best through Humanism. We are children of reason, and, like Thomas Paine, we let passion fill our sails, but reason is our rudder. Since we look at our tradition as a human tradition that exists within and without our groups, we should be able to build alliances with people, even outside our groups, to achieve our common purposes.

 

Our Utopia

Our Humanism should not be a Humanism defeated ‘by the pessimism of thought, but fired by the optimism of the will’. We should recreate the world according to our conception of the human being. And to succeed in that grand cultural task we need to re-engage with our grand tradition.

 

The goal is freedom. Freedom is also a path and as we traverse it we achieve it, as Prof. G.D. Parikh put it. The means of Humanism have to be consistent with the goals of Humanism. Are all these Utopian ideas? Maybe so! But then the one freedom denied in Thomas More’s Utopia was the freedom to be an atheist, and the freedom to deny the immortality of the human. Even in a Utopia, there is no rest for Humanists!