So it would seem another organization has drunk the SocJus kool aid and is now fully participating in the Victim Olympics, and its especially sad since this is an organization/philosophy that I hold dear to my heart. Yes, Humanism has finally caught the Social Justice Virus, and I'm afraid it'll only be a matter of time before that virus eats it from the inside out. What was once a philosophy that brought us the Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment has fallen victim to the same kind dogmatism that it once fought against.
To those of you who may not be in the loop, the American Humanist Association launched 3 new initiatives as of last week. The LGBTQ Humanist Alliance, the Feminist Humanist Alliance and the Black Humanist Alliance. You may be thinking, well whats the big deal here? The big deal here is that social justice and humanism are fundamentally incompatible. Humanism was supposed to be a movement that welcomed all walks of life to explain life in a way that is free of the superstition and dogma of religion that is based on reason and evidence. It was an ideology whose adherents dared to question everything, which makes it that much worse that the American Humanist Association has chosen to align itself with the kind of people who present "rape culture" and "institutional racism" as unquestionable truths. That kind of talk is a blanket term, much like how the black death was blanketed as spirits and ghosts back in medieval times. Its this kind of reductionist reasoning that gives us the blanket statements like "all men are rapists" and "all white people are racist," neither of which belongs in this philosophy.
Where humanism seeks universality for all human beings Social Justice divides us by race, religion and gender, and places value over certain races and religions over others. This kind of division can only weaken people in the long run. Don't believe me? Just look at what happened with Atheism+ and the skeptic community, or even more recently video games and geek culture with the whole #GamerGate thing. I mean you'd think that when history starts skipping like a broken record we'd care enough to fix it right?
But no, I've seen this pattern before. A host group gets infiltrated by crazies who see racism/sexism/-phobia in everything, with everything meaning literally everything except the people crying racism/sexism/-phobia. As a result, people lose jobs, reputations get damaged and many others get bullied into submission. Which leads to the inevitable death of the host community through sheer depopulation, and what follows is typically a feeding frenzy of arguing over who is more oppressed.
It takes a special kind of spinelessness to hand an organization over to a collection of ideologies that are antithetical to the Humanist core values of rationalism, empiricism and human agency on the fear of being labelled racist and sexist. Humanists do not and should not, accept any kind of dogma without question, and Dogma is all social justice seems to be. In case you're still confused I'll allow Mr Bean to explain to you what Humanism SHOULD be about.
Humanism and skepticism is not just about questioning religious beliefs. It is about questioning ALL beliefs, religious or otherwise. This can only end one way, with the absolute erosion of the humanist secular values that this philosophy was built on. But I'm hoping we'll all be pleasantly surprised.
