How I Learned I’m a Secular Humanist

I don’t like to advertise that I’m atheist. Not because I feel threatened by religion, but because the loudest atheists, like Richard Dawkins, give the rest of us a bad reputation. Rather than battle conservative Biblical literalism, New Atheists typically stigmatize religion wholecloth.

But not all secular people are like this. As Dr. Philip Kitcher described in his lecture “Religious Progress and Humanist Hope,” there is a need to decouple morality from religion, and a way to not be a New Atheist about it.

IUPUI’s department of philosophy facilitated this lecture as part of a series of groups and lectures on secular humanism for the past three years.

Secular humanism is an umbrella term for secular beliefs that have grown in response to dominant Christian perspectives. The most prolific secularists are the New Atheist type: doggedly, obnoxiously concerned in proving belief wrong.

“What other secular humanists are doing, and Kitcher is one of them, is they try to reconcile more progressive strains within Christianity and other mostly monotheistic religions and combine them with a more secular viewpoint,” Dr. Cornelis De Waal, professor of philosophy at IUPUI, explained. I had never heard this term before.

I found Kitcher’s lecture to be comprehensive and a lot to take in. In essence, it’s fine to believe in and worship a creator, but uncritically following tenets written millenia ago is dangerous.

Kitcher compared a literalist fanatic to a commandant in a fascist regime. He said that ancient “tribal” gods, like the God of the Old Testament, were “vindictive narcissists” who sanctioned slaughter and slavery. Moral standards cannot be pulled from these texts.

Kitcher’s model for how religions “progress from, not progress to,” was interesting. As believers accept religious diversity, they shift away from ancient texts and start “using a filter to screen out the bits that violate their moral sensibility.” Flexibility, nuance, and tolerance eventually arrive.

Kitcher decried New Atheism as privileged and unconcerned with structural inequality that stems from religious-based morality, like homophobia and misogyny. They also