CADRE Comments

I had been going to springboard from my original post on the third edition of the Humanist Manifesto, into a broader discussion of its principles and the logical coherency thereof; but when I read a recent review of the 1980 film Wolfen ( here on AICN ) by someone who had never watched it before, I thought... hey! Halloween's coming up, we should do a Halloween post, right? And I'm a big fan of both the film and the book (by Whitley Strieber). And the reviewer makes explicit a point about the movie that always rather bothered me in the background. And, hey!--that happens to tie into my recent post on the Humanist Manifesto and the logical coherency of its principles thereof! I love it when providence comes together. {gggg!} And then I got sick with the pseudo-flu and missed posting it, not only for Halloween, but for several weeks. I did manage to get it posted in time for Thanksgiving weekend! Barely! I’ll try to make some relevant connection to that later. So: first,...

This is a bit of a cheap shot, as I'll explain later. But I thought it might be an interesting way of opening a discussion on the philosophical merits of the third edition of the Humanist Manifesto--which returns to the optimistic outlook of the first version, without the numerous specific 'doctrinal points' of the first (1933) and second (1973) versions. Most notably, the third version eliminates language intending to thus start a new secular "religion" (which probably wouldn't fly well with the common secular critique of the bloody abuses of 20th century atheistic regimes on the ground that they had become secular "religions"); and the promotion of this new "religion" through classroom indoctrination of children. (A quick resource for links to SecHum documents and their history, can be found here on Wikipedia .) The new edition, released in 2003 by the American Humanist Association, is admirably brief; and will be printed below--with an u...