Re-Imagining Humanism

I consider myself multi-religiously humanist.

Labels such as these are power tools. Sometimes they can get the job done quickly, but one moment of inattention later, bodies can be torn apart. A label can quickly communicate and miscommunicate simultaneously. I’m using it anyway, in case there might be others who may find this label a helpful way to start conversations and to find one another.

Labeling myself multi-religiously humanist is short-hand for making a commitment to adopt “a way” or live from a world-view and ethical framework that is:

• Woven upon values, not dogma
• Intentionally global, multi-cultural, and multi-religious
• Explicitly against inhumanity: oppression, exploitation, violence, brutality
• Explicitly for humanity: kindness, and living from a sense of belonging to one another and interdependence with the whole of the Universe
• Practiced
• Epistemologically humble

Epistemological humilty means assuming that:

• “We” are human. We can only know what is humanly knowable.
• If the Universe were all of poetry, we are haiku, expressing what we fathom of the whole with specific minutiae from lived experience.
• And even this Universe may be just one of an infinite many!
• When we use words, our imagination is constrained by the inherent limitations of any language and its specific history and its dominant cultural contexts.