The Humanist Imagination
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countered the pope’s charges of the frailty and baseness of human life in order to celebrate the dignity of humans. Scripture itself is insistent on the distinctive status of human beings created in the image of God.sings to God: (^5) The Psalmist
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?Yet you have made them a little lower than God
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them?”Throughout much of its history in the West, humanism has meant a and crowned them with glory and honor.(Psalm 8:3–5)
celebration of human freedom, creativity, and autonomy. Behind these values were a set of images of what it means to be human and how human life ought to be freely lived in order to manifest and achieve the human good. Those images or pictures of existence are the products of the humanist
imagination. Below, we will explore some of these metaphors about human freedom and flourishing.to define. Typically, scholars trace the lineage of humanism to the Renaissance Yet what does one mean by “humanism”? The term is notoriously difficult 6
and the origins of the study of the “humanities.” More important for our inquiry than the historical question of the roots of humanism is the debate about its main types. Corliss Lamont, an advocate of naturalistic or secular humanism, writes that for the “humanist,” the “chief end of human life is to
work for the happiness of man upon this earth and within the confines of Nature that is his home.”“Humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.” (^78) In a recent “humanist manifesto,” one reads, Lamont is even more adamant. “Passing to the
New Testament,” he contends, “we see plainly that its theology, taken literally, is totally alien to the Humanist viewpoint ... New Testament ethics is based on the assumption that the most meaningful and worthwhile part of man’s life lies in the realm of immortality.” (^9) Religious humanists, conversely,
challenge the idea that the human good is limited to the “confines of Nature.” The scope of human transcendence and human destiny reaches beyond the domain of natural life. As previously noted, religious humanists make their case from within a specific historical religion or in spiritual and speculative
forms. None of them accept that human beings by their own power can “save” humanity.