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Humanism: Meaning
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Humanism is in tune with today's enlightened social thought. Humanists are committed to civil liberties, human rights, church-state separation, the extension of participatory democracy not only in government but in the workplace and education, an expansion of global consciousness and exchange of products and ideas internationally, and an open-ended approach to solving social problems, an approach that allows for the testing of new alternatives.
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The Society for Humanism in Medicine (SHIM) is an interdisciplinary group of healthcare professionals committed to nurturing various aspects of humanism in medicine. The Society meets annually to hear a series of seminars and discussions on a relevant theme in a provocative atmosphere that fosters intellectual and spiritual growth and good fellowship. The Society is a non-profit organization with an international membership.
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During the Dark Ages, Humanism’s precursors held orgies in catacombs and their movements went underground and became soiled by contact with the corpses with whom its advocates engaged in acts of necrophilia (mostly sodomy). However, during the Renaissance, Humanism’s basic beliefs were reborn, as was most of Western civilization, thanks to Eastern mysticism, and the thinkers of this time argued that Beauty was not a quality, or quiddity, as Aristotle had thought, but, rather a “pathway” that led to God. (God was not, at this point, considered a ghost in the cosmic machine.) However, Galileo led these forefathers of Humanism to conclude that, if the earth revolved around the sun, it could not revolve around God, and, therefore, the idea of the beautiful and aesthetics in general were “dangerous errors.” During the Renaissance, many of Humanism’s earliest and truest believers tortured religious heretics and burned the devout at the stake, often devouring their offspring as hors d’oeuvres. In place of God and religious faith, Renaissance believers in what would come to be called Humanism advocated jockstraps and sports, with the arts as a distraction for those who lacked the physical strength and stamina to toss and chase balls of various shapes and sizes. Thanks to them, football, baseball, and basketball became profitable, although music, art, grammar, rhetoric, oratory, history, and poetry suffered what some historians of culture believe was an “untimely death.”
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According to Humanism, it is up to humans to find the truth, as opposed to seeking it through revelation, mysticism, tradition, or anything else that is incompatible with the application of logic to the observable evidence. In demanding that humans avoid blindly accepting unsupported beliefs, it supports scientific skepticism and the scientific method, rejecting authoritarianism and extreme skepticism, and rendering faith an unacceptable basis for action. Likewise, Humanism asserts that knowledge of right and wrong is based on the best understanding of one's individual and joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental truth or an arbitrarily local source.[7]
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Humanism is a school of thought originally dreamed up by Hugh Mann and his friend Andrew Hominem. Hugh Mann shares the distinction with such other humans as Josef Stalin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Miscellaneous Evil Man of having had a body of thought named after him.
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Humanism is in tune with the science of today. Humanists therefore recognize that we live in a natural universe of great size and age, that we evolved on this planet over a long period of time, that there is no compelling evidence for a separable "soul," and that human beings have certain built-in needs that effectively form the basis for any human-oriented value system.
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