Self Portrait 365|93 • The Humanist Creed

The Humanist Creed

Following my post about no longer believing in God, Miss Weller and I had an interesting discussion about how to speak about our beliefs without being negative or argumentative. This send me looking for a philosophy that expressed what I believed, rather than what I didn’t.

I found an article about Secular Humanism which articulates exactly how I feel. I hereby present The Humanist Creed.

1. I believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.
2. I am deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. I want to nourish reason and compassion.
3. I want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
4. I am concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
5. I am engaged by the arts no less than the sciences.
6. I believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
7. I believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.
8. I respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise their reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health care, and to die with dignity.
9. I deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
10. I believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

This is the code by which I try to live my life. I will strive to embody these important principles.

Do you agree with these beliefs?
Is there anything missing you would add?