Secular Humanism, Threat and Challenge PDF Download

Author: Robert E. Webber
Publisher: Zondervan Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Author: Robert Webber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780310366713
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Author: Paul Kurtz
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615926402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A spirited defense of secular humanism against fundamentalist critics.

Author: Eric Matthews
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780951821909
Category : Humanism
Languages : en
Pages : 15

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Author: Herbert London
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594032777
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
In this timely and wide-ranging book, one of America's leading public intellectuals explores the rise of radical secular humanism as a religious experience. London shows that while secular humanism has it's saints, sinners, and even its quasi-religious rituals, it is too anemic and self-centered a philosophy of life to serve America and the West in its battle against the threat of radical Islam.

Author: Philip Kitcher
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300203438
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Offers a positive argument for secularism as a way of providing for human needs and giving meaning to people's lives, thus filling the role of relgion, and offers a vision for successors to religion.

Author: Deborah G. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Faith and reason
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Author: Stephen Law
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199553645
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Summary: Philosopher Stephen Law explains why humanism--though a rejection of religion--nevertheless provides both a moral basis and a meaning for our lives.-publisher description.

Author: Norman L. Geisler
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1597522996
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
An academically respectable description and evaluation of secular humanism is available at last. The diversity within humanism receives full recognition in this book, as does the fact that not everything about humanism is bad from a Christian point of view. Indeed, the author continues, there are many emphases within humanism that are compatible with Christian beliefs, a thesis to which he devotes an entire chapter. Part 1 summarizes in turn eight prominent forms of humanism: Huxley's evolutionism, Skinner's behaviorism, Sartre's existentialism, Dewey's pragmatism, Marxism, Rand's egocentrism, Lamont's culturalism, and the coalitional form present in the humanist declaration and manifestoes. Emerging from these chapters are both the differences between humanists and the consensus that binds them together. It is this humanistic consensus, writes the author, that most radically conflicts with Christian beliefs and that is the number one problem in the United States today. After the chapter on the helpful emphases of secular humanism, part 2 details this movement's comparative inferiority, internal inconsistencies, religious inadequacies, and philosophical insufficiencies. The final chapter demonstrates that, while Christianity is consistent with the central principles of science, philosophy, epistemology, and ethics, humanism is not. There is no rational justification, the author concludes, for being a humanist.

Author: Marcello Pera
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594035644
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The intellectual and political elite of the West is nowadays taking for granted that religion, in particular Christianity, is a cultural vestige, a primitive form of knowledge, a consolation for the poor minded, an obstacle to coexistence. In all influential environments, the widespread watchword is “We are all secular” or “We are all post-religious.” As a consequence, we are told that states must be independent of religious creed, politics must take a neutral stance regarding religious values, and societies must hold together without any reference to religious bonds. Liberalism, which in some form or another is the prevailing view in the West, is considered to be “free-standing,” and the Western, liberal, open society is taken to be “self-sufficient.” Not only is anti-Christian secularism wrong, it is also risky. It's wrong because the very ideas on which liberal societies are based and in terms of which they can be justified—the concept of the dignity of the human person, the moral priority of the individual, the view that man is a “crooked timber” inclined to prevarication, the limited confidence in the power of the state to render him virtuous—are typical Christian or, more precisely, Judeo-Christian ideas. Take them away and the open society will collapse. Anti-Christian secularism is risky because it jeopardizes the identity of the West, leaves it with no self-conscience, and deprives people of their sense of belonging. The Founding Fathers of America, as well as major intellectual European figures such as Locke, Kant, and Tocqueville, knew how much our civilization depends on Christianity. Today, American and European culture is shaking the pillars of that civilization. Written from a secular and liberal, but not anti-Christian, point of view, this book explains why the Christian culture is still the best antidote to the crisis and decline of the West. Pera proposes that we should call ourselves Christians if we want to maintain our liberal freedoms, to embark on such projects as the political unification of Europe as well as the special relationship between Europe and America, and to avoid the relativistic trend that affects our public ethics. “The challenges of our particular historical moment”, as Pope Benedict XVI calls them in the Preface to the book, can be faced only if we stress the historical and conceptual link between Christianity and free society.