Wednesday, September 26 2007

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GREAT BLACK HOPE: Democratic presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Obama seen by many in America as the first real African American to be a serious co...

THE EDITOR: The Trinidad and Tobago Humanist Association would like to use World Humanist Day (celebrated on September 21) to reaffirm that the only thing humanists want is to transform our society, designed to benefit a few chosen elite groups, into a nation organised and run on rational and ethical principles that would benefit all its members, with particular compassion for the disadvantaged.

The Association would also like to refute several untruths propagated by individuals and organisations who may feel threatened by free, responsible humanist values. Humanists are falsely accused of promoting a society without morality when, in fact, all humanist tenets are based on tolerance — surely the most important moral principle for a plural society.

Humanists respect other people’s beliefs, values and lifestyles as long as they do not harm others.

Humanists promote ethical values — ie values that are based on the Golden Rule. “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others” but reject authority-based moral values which cannot be defended on logical and ethical grounds — eg the “moral” principles that a woman should be stoned to death for committing adultery; or that homosexuals should be denied civil rights because they are attracted to persons of the same sex; or that persons should be jailed for saying that a certain book is not the word of God. Humanists do not want to eliminate religion from society.

Humanists simply argue that irrational religious beliefs should not influence public policy and that religious organisations should play by the same rules as everyone else. With laws that, for example, grant tax-free status to multi-millionaire pastors who extract ten percent of their followers’ monthly earnings (a figure the Family Court might be reluctant to order a recalcitrant father to pay towards the upkeep of his own children) and politicians who allow religious mores to create an abstinence-only policy which has been proven to be ineffectual, it seems clear that religious organisations are given unwarranted advantages in the public sphere.

This is one factor which prevents us from being a developed nation, with the low crime and poverty rates which come with that status.

But we humanists will persist in striving for a rational and just society, since, as humanists, in human tolerance, understanding, patience, compassion and love we trust.



TT HUMANIST ASSOCIATION

www.humanist.org.tt