Who-Manist?

To make up for the dull and drudging horror of yesterday's update, I thought I would chuck more words at you, in the hope that the dreadfulness of The Candle Boys will somehow dilute in extra text.

So undoubtedly you are all wondering minute-to-minute about my philosophical position on life. You are scratching at the doors of your minds, carving questions into the tables with a (hopefully metaphorical) bread knife. This agitation is quite understandable, your psychologist will agree, as he presses the silent red button under the table.

The answer is, of course, that like most reasonable people I'm not entirely certain yet. People who are entirely certain about things generally underestimate the complexity of everything, like a squirrel ruining a difficult equation that happens to have been laid out in acorns.

Essentially, though, I have a few beliefs based on sense and evidence. For instance, I am pro-equality for demographic differences. I believe that men, women, middle-class, working-class, upper-class, all stripes of skin colour, homosexual, heterosexual, group-sexuals, grope-sexuals, soap-sexuals, metro-sexuals, Petri-sexuals and so boringly on ought to be treated based on their personalities and individual traits rather than on their survey-enabling groupings. Anything else is somewhat nonsensical and tends to be based on hard-to-translate prejudice hanging over from other religious or ethical leanings dispersed by parents, peers or authority figures. It's widdle in the hot-tub of life.

So based on this, I am an egalitarian. How dull, right? Right. I just bored my own eyes out. Any typos in the rest of this blog are frankly going to go unnitoced.

Anyway, about 4 months or so ago, I came across humanism. And I thought: HEL-lo... in the manner of an intrigued archaeologist uncovered a knife in the back of a long-dead king. Not like this.

As it turned out, humanism shares a lot of my deeply-held tenets. Rejection of faith in favour of rationalism and evidence-based belief; the egalitarian principles that I mentioned above; philosophical consideration of issues; a cool name that sounds like it's from Star Trek.

Intrigued, I asked for a subscription to New Humanist magazine for Christmas (the irony was not only not lost on me, but positively warmed my belly on chilly days. Irony is better than hot chili soup and a battery acid bun). It was a delight to find a magazine that actually raises fascinating points and seeks not simply to inform but to stimulate. Not just on religion (although a lot of it does cover that) but on a wide variety of topics that are genuinely fascinating, and usually well-researched. This was as pleasant a discovery as when you dig around in a litter tray and find a golden nugget. Although I'm not sure what you're doing digging around in litter trays. You should be ashamed.

True, every so often the articles are seriously silly, but even they give you the chance to exercise critical thinking and consider the reasons why they are wrong. And sure, it can come off a little smug at times, but I'd rather read something that was smug but making reasonable points than something that was humble and shit. Better a peacock than a broken sparrow. Better a Ferrari than a bucket of wee (unless you're putting out a housefire).

The way I came to this is a healthy and natural one, I feel. I have developed my beliefs and now come to a discipline with which they align. I was not embossed with a belief system as a child and then had my ethics tailored to match it. It's like me growing up to decide that I quite like the colour green, rather than being told that I love green and should treasure it above all the other colours because I've been told I should. And that it died for my sins.

So now I identify myself with humanism fairly strongly, albeit a certain strain of humanist. For instance, I agree with its placing of people first (putting the 'human' in 'humanism', you dolt) in terms of humanity: while I don't think that human life - and comfort - is sacrosanct, I do think it is of paramount importance. This is why I am for medical testing on animals. And comfy sofas.

However, I don't believe, as many humanists appear to, that humans are necessarily 'special'. We have this magnificent ability, donated little by little by evolution, to process and create and compare, but it is as much a product of natural and sexual selection as anything else. An electric eel's zappy power is astonishing and incredible too, but that doesn't mean it is somehow elevated above animals that can't imitate the Emperor. Incidentally, The Emperor? Half eel, half Duracell Bunny. You heard it here first.

Anyway, that's where I sit in the great hot-tub of life: in the corner, nervously scratching my nads and hoping that what the other guys have just released into the water came from a joke shop and is just very realistic-looking.