Teaching Humanism to be mandatory in all Welsh schools

Thommo · **#21** by **Thommo** » Jan 28, 2019 9:56 pm

scott1328 wrote:I guess if the government is going to mandate the teaching of an ideology, then Humanism is superior to any extant religion.

I think it's a mandatory addition to the syllabus for RE, isn't it? They are teaching about it, rather than teaching that it is correct.

scott1328 · **#22** by **scott1328** » Jan 28, 2019 10:44 pm

Thommo wrote:
scott1328 wrote:I guess if the government is going to mandate the teaching of an ideology, then Humanism is superior to any extant religion.

I think it's a mandatory addition to the syllabus for RE, isn't it? They are teaching about it, rather than teaching that it is correct.

Don't like that much either. I hate the false equivalency such an approach creates.

Thommo · **#23** by **Thommo** » Jan 28, 2019 11:14 pm

I'm not a fan of mandatory RE at all, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

An equivalency between humanism and other (supernatural?) religions?

scott1328 · **#24** by **scott1328** » Jan 28, 2019 11:22 pm

Thommo wrote:I'm not a fan of mandatory RE at all, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

An equivalency between humanism and other (supernatural?) religions?

Yes.

Thommo · **#25** by **Thommo** » Jan 28, 2019 11:23 pm

I see, thanks.

laklak · **#26** by **laklak** » Jan 29, 2019 3:00 am

Y'all are missing the point here. "Humanism" in Wales is sex education. They're trying to keep the lads off the sheep.

Keep It Real · **#27** by **Keep It Real** » Jan 29, 2019 4:43 am

As if Wales is in some way backwards and retarded in its introduction of this measure. What must they fuck in the states I wonder.

Keep It Real · **#28** by **Keep It Real** » Jan 29, 2019 5:19 am

Oh dear, sense of humour failure. Again.

Cito di Pense · **#29** by **Cito di Pense** » Jan 29, 2019 5:50 am

Thommo wrote:I'm not a fan of mandatory RE at all, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

An equivalency between humanism and other (supernatural?) religions?

So, religion is only religion if it invokes something supernatural. Scholarship (i.e., opinion) on this matter is diverse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_religion

If we listen to Stackhouse (we don't have to, of course), we settle on "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral visiion'", and humanism certainly fills the bill, there.

Instead of banal recitation of dictionary definitions, consider the etymology, which gives us something like "binding back together". It's ironic, because religion is so divisive, but I guess most people crave this sense of being bound together. Kinky, isn't it?

RE's constituency is chiefly those who make their livings teaching or administrating (!) RE. It's like the Mafia, but without the armaments. Some students enjoy it because it gives them a break from thinking (that seems like work to them).

Agi Hammerthief · **#30** by **Agi Hammerthief** » Jan 29, 2019 7:03 am

laklak wrote:Y'all are missing the point here. "Humanism" in New South Wales is sex education. They're trying to keep the lads off the sheep.

fixed it for you :smile:

Australia, where Men are Men and sheep are nervous.

Hermit · **#31** by **Hermit** » Jan 29, 2019 9:38 am

Agi Hammerthief wrote:
laklak wrote:Y'all are missing the point here. "Humanism" in New South Wales is sex education. They're trying to keep the lads off the sheep.

fixed it for you

Australia, where Men are Men and sheep are nervous.

You've quite obviously never been to Straya. The sheep are not nervous at all. On the contrary, they love every minute of the tender attention they're getting. I'm speaking from personal experience.

After I finished school in 1972 I was at somewhat loose ends. "What to do next, what to do?" I agonised at the Do Drop Inn. Some barfly overheard. "Get a job as a jackaroo," he said, "There's plenty of work available on the stations." "But I don't even know how to ride a horse." I replied. "Stone the crows and starve the lizards." exclaimed the barfly. "What rock have you been living under? These are modern times. Nobody rides horses any more. They'll give you a dirtbike to round them sheep up with, and when you get promoted to station manager you get around in a helichopper." Ohhhhh. Dirtbike. I love riding dirtbikes. And getting paid for hooning around all day on a dirtbike... what's not to like?

Finding a job was easy enough. Before the end of the week I found myself on a 20,000 hectare station 270 kilometres west of Wollongbarabranatta. Unfortunately, the reality of the job fell way short of my expectations. It's one thing to spend an hour or two pissing up and down the dunes at Kurnell riding a 450CBR. It's another riding a 250cc two-stroke that kept breaking down once or twice a day, eating dust, breathing in flies and getting encrusted by sand that attaches itself to your sweaty body ten hours per shift day after day. And the pay was lousy! Worst of all, the station was in the middle of nowhere. No sheilas within coee. Hooking into Wollongbarabranatta turned out to be a waste of three hours on corrugated tracks. The town, if you can call it that, consisted of a petrol station that multitasked as post office, a general store, 20 cottages, a pub and a road leading back to civilisation - eventually. Oh, and the general store got nailed up seven years earlier when the proprietor died, half the cottages had been abandoned, and the pub's clientele consisted of ancient ex-stationhands who had become too alcoholic to find their way out of this mess.

So, not a single sheila to be seen. As a source of fun and games Wollongbarabranatta was out. But what else is there? Anywhere? At all? I asked the station's cook, a sweaty fatso, well past middle age. "Fun? What fun do you have in mind?" he enquired. "Ah, um, I'm a strapping, young, hormone-infested lad, you know? Um, fun, you know, fun that..." I stammered when he interrupted me. "Right. Of course. Listen mate. After you knock off next Friday, scrub up and head for the top paddock. The rest of the boys will tell you what to do next."

The top paddock was not what I had hoped for. Instead of a bunch of nubile nymphs that had magically appeared out of thin air, all I could see were the other four jackaroos, the cook's helpmate and a couple of dozen sheep. "What's the go here? I asked. "Simple, mate," said Kev, you grab a sheep you like the look of and have your way with her."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Really. Go for it"
"You won't laugh?"
"Naw. We won't."
"Promise?"
"Yeah, promise. Now have a go, ya mug."

I grabbed a sheep and pumped her up good and proper. She loved every second of it. I could tell because she kept bleating at the top of her voice. That's what I mean about "not nervous". She loved it all.

Problem, though, was that everyone laughed at me. So much for the promise, but being a strapping young lad, hormones blah blah, I could not stop immediately. When I was done I asked why they broke their promise. Bruce pointed at my sheep. "We tried not to," and struggling to stop laughing, continued: "but you didn't have to pick the dead set ugliest one."

zoon · **#32** by **zoon** » Jan 29, 2019 1:16 pm

Keep It Real wrote:
Andrew Copson Chief exec Humanism UK wrote:Today we learned that after years of hard, consistent work with the Welsh Government to improve the national law on Religious Education, we have achieved our goal, and from 2022, the law in Wales will require humanism to be taught about in all schools.

Keep It Real wrote:https://iheu.org/about/humanism/the-amsterdam-declaration/
1. Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others. Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations. Humanists believe that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others, needing no external sanction.

scott1328 wrote:
Thommo wrote:
scott1328 wrote:I guess if the government is going to mandate the teaching of an ideology, then Humanism is superior to any extant religion.

I think it's a mandatory addition to the syllabus for RE, isn't it? They are teaching about it, rather than teaching that it is correct.

Don't like that much either. I hate the false equivalency such an approach creates.

My problem with Humanism (I think scott1328 is saying the same by describing it as an ideology?), is that the equivalence with religion is not false at a crucial point, since Humanism starts with a number of assertions which are not based on evidence? From KIR’s quotes above from the Amsterdam Declaration, Humanism starts by asserting that “Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others. Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” These are unsupported assertions, in spite of the attempt to claim scientific backing in the next sentence: “Humanists believe that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others, needing no external sanction.”

There is indeed plenty of evidence that “morality is an intrinsic part of human nature”, and also that it doesn’t need external sanctions from gods or spirits. All functioning human societies set up rules which are accepted by consensus, and these rules are enforced by sanctions: individuals or subgroups who break the rules are punished by the rest of the group acting as a cooperative unit. The sanctions are internal to the society, though external to the misbehaving individuals or subgroups.

As with many religious writings, it’s the implications which are false, rather than open claims. They say that it’s moral to affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual, and also that morality evolved. This implies either that the vast majority of moral systems “affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual”, which the authors of the Amsterdam Declaration know very well is not the case, or, alternatively, that there’s some source of moral authority external to evolved human beings, at which point we’re back to the God which Humanists deny. For example, if morality is being defined as an evolved trait, then there’s no reason to deny the moral status of historical religions or ideologies which claim firmly that some races are of greater value than others - see the article quoted below linking collectivism to some protection from infectious diseases.

I do think Humanism makes claims which can reasonably be defended as relevant to the modern world if Humanists didn’t fall into the trap of trying to make them absolute. In particular, I think the implied claim that evolved moral systems all have to be the same fails to hold up. The success of humans in taking over the planet is at least in part due to our ability to adapt, to set up different rules for different circumstances. For example, moral systems where infectious diseases are rife and ongoing precautions are needed tend to be less individualistic than moral systems in societies where infectious diseases are not a common danger*.

In the modern world, where thousands of millions of people need to cooperate globally if we are not to blow ourselves up or degrade the environment catastrophically, it makes sense for the principles in the Amsterdam Declaration to be used as underlying guides at least to the rhetoric of international relations. Weakening the claims so that they are merely taken to be useful rather than absolute would, I think, make them stronger in that they could then be defended as not going beyond the evidence.
?

*For example, a 2018 study published as open access in Nature here provides evidence that individualistic values are related to more outbreaks of infectious diseases, while collectivist values, favouring the ingroup over outgroups, have a protective effect. Which is somewhat worrying if values favouring the ingroup are also more likely to lead to wars. Humanism, judging by the values given above in the Amsterdam Declaration, is firmly individualistic. The abstract and the first paragraph of the introduction to the Nature article are below:

Abstract
Collectivist versus individualistic values are important attributes of intercultural variation. Collectivist values favour in-group members over out-group members and may have evolved to protect in-group members against pathogen transmission. As predicted by the pathogen stress theory of cultural values, more collectivist countries are associated with a higher historical pathogen burden. However, if lifestyles of collectivist countries indeed function as a social defence which decreases pathogen transmission, then these countries should also have experienced fewer disease outbreaks in recent times. We tested this novel hypothesis by correlating the values of collectivism-individualism for 66 countries against their historical pathogen burden, recent number of infectious disease outbreaks and zoonotic disease outbreaks and emerging infectious disease events, and four potentially confounding variables. We confirmed the previously established negative relationship between individualism and historical pathogen burden with new data. While we did not find a correlation for emerging infectious disease events, we found significant positive correlations between individualism and the number of infectious disease outbreaks and zoonotic disease outbreaks. Therefore, one possible cost for individualistic cultures may be their higher susceptibility to disease outbreaks. We support further studies into the exact protective behaviours and mechanisms of collectivist societies which may inhibit disease outbreaks.

Introduction
Numerous studies and reviews have addressed the question of why countries and cultures differ in their tendency to prefer collectivist versus individualistic values and lifestyles1. Collectivist values are characterized by moral frameworks and social behaviours which emphasize the group and its interests and therefore favour in-group interests (such as communal, societal, or national interests) over the interests of its individual members, and further favour the interests of in-group members over those of out-group members. Individualistic values, on the other hand, favour the interests of the individuals over the interests of in-group as well as out-group members; they therefore value the independence, self-reliance and self-realization of the individual over communal, societal, or national interests2.

tuco · **#33** by **tuco** » Jan 29, 2019 1:29 pm

Just a side note, after reading the article, there are alternative explanations, autocorrelation is one of them.

Worrying, well, just get then ingroup. What do we need groups for? Tie them economically, politically and socially .. oh wait.

---
edit: we need the textbook, else we can speculate endlessly

Keep It Real · **#34** by **Keep It Real** » Jan 30, 2019 6:11 pm

I look forward to digesting and replying to your post on the weekend zoon. I'm so wrapped up in my projects ATM I can't do it justice right now, so won't try.

Keep It Real · **#35** by **Keep It Real** » Jan 30, 2019 6:22 pm

ETA, scanning through I'll "digest" Hermit's apparently comical riot for now : )

Keep It Real · **#36** by **Keep It Real** » Jan 30, 2019 6:27 pm

It was worth it :rofl:

Keep It Real · **#37** by **Keep It Real** » Feb 01, 2019 6:15 pm

Thommo wrote:
scott1328 wrote:I guess if the government is going to mandate the teaching of an ideology, then Humanism is superior to any extant religion.

I think it's a mandatory addition to the syllabus for RE, isn't it? They are teaching about it, rather than teaching that it is correct.

Humanists UK wrote:This week we expressed delight that the new white paper on education in Wales has promised significant legal reforms. These mean that humanism will be taught about in all schools in Wales alongside religions as part of Religious Education. A big Humanists UK win.

This is a huge advance for rational thinking and awareness of humanism in Wales, and for our Wales Humanists section, and its volunteers and activists, in particular.

Keep It Real · **#38** by **Keep It Real** » Feb 01, 2019 7:08 pm

zoon wrote:My problem with Humanism (I think scott1328 is saying the same by describing it as an ideology?), is that the equivalence with religion is not false at a crucial point, since Humanism starts with a number of assertions which are not based on evidence? From KIR’s quotes above from the Amsterdam Declaration, Humanism starts by asserting that “Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others. Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” These are unsupported assertions, in spite of the attempt to claim scientific backing in the next sentence: “Humanists believe that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others, needing no external sanction.”

They may technically be unsupported assertions, but they are surely laudable sentiments by most people's radars and are at least devoid of claiming unerring divine timeless accuracy. There's nothing dogmatic in Humanism; it's a work in progress and will remain so, as the Amsterdam Declaration specifies:

5. Humanism is a response to the widespread demand for an alternative to dogmatic religion. The world’s major religions claim to be based on revelations fixed for all time, and many seek to impose their world-views on all of humanity. Humanism recognises that reliable knowledge of the world and ourselves arises through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision.

zoon wrote:As with many religious writings, it’s the implications which are false, rather than open claims. They say that it’s moral to affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual, and also that morality evolved. This implies either that the vast majority of moral systems “affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual”, which the authors of the Amsterdam Declaration know very well is not the case, or, alternatively, that there’s some source of moral authority external to evolved human beings, at which point we’re back to the God which Humanists deny. For example, if morality is being defined as an evolved trait, then there’s no reason to deny the moral status of historical religions or ideologies which claim firmly that some races are of greater value than others - see the article quoted below linking collectivism to some protection from infectious diseases.

Human nature does not necessarily imply purely genetic evolution and can imply cultural evolution.

zoon wrote:I do think Humanism makes claims which can reasonably be defended as relevant to the modern world if Humanists didn’t fall into the trap of trying to make them absolute. In particular, I think the implied claim that evolved moral systems all have to be the same fails to hold up. The success of humans in taking over the planet is at least in part due to our ability to adapt, to set up different rules for different circumstances. For example, moral systems where infectious diseases are rife and ongoing precautions are needed tend to be less individualistic than moral systems in societies where infectious diseases are not a common danger*.

It doesn't imply that to me. The concept of individualistic freedom is tempered by recognition that the needs of society at large are of at least equal importance in the AD (lolz at AD being a contraction of the Amsterdam Declaration).

Keep It Real · **#39** by **Keep It Real** » Feb 02, 2019 3:53 pm

This is interesting - taken from the Center for Inquiry, which recently merged with RDFRS, forum users agreement:

(5) In the opinion of CFI and for the purposes of this Forum, “humanism” is to be interpreted broadly. Anyone self-identifying as a humanist should be so considered. Discussions as to which Forum members are humanists is discouraged, and continued denigration and harassment of self-described humanist Forum members in that light is considered disruptive to CFI’s mission and to that of CFI’s Forum.

Lapsed Lurker · **#40** by **Lapsed Lurker** » Feb 16, 2019 10:02 pm

Agi Hammerthief wrote:
Keep It Real wrote:"Would not a Rose by any other name smell as sweet?"

This hints at the importance of monolithic titles methinks. One word.

humanism sounds very species centric.

It's the only species signing up to the class.

Teaching Humanism to be mandatory in all Welsh schools

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