Religious beliefs, humanist principles may overlap

In the past 50 years or so, Jeff Strang has been a churchgoer, an agnostic, an atheist and a humanist. If anyone knows what these words mean, he should.

Yet even he admits to some “fuzziness” around the terms.

Strang has his own working definition: “A humanist is an atheist or an agnostic with a social conscience,” he says.

But then he can’t help adding some fuzz: “Some people say there’s room for religious humanists, too.”

As religious and secular values clash in the Middle East, in Iraq and in our own country, what we believe – or whether we believe – often becomes a point of conflict.

But the very words we use to characterize our beliefs sometimes seem to mean more – and less – than we imagine.

A humanist is an adherent of “any system of thought or action based on the nature, interests and ideals of humanity; specifically, a modern, nontheistic, rationalist movement that holds that man is capable of self-fulfillment, ethical conduct, etc. without recourse to supernaturalism,” Webster’s says.

But, as Strang, who is president of a humanists group based in Portland, observes, people may have religious beliefs and also subscribe to key humanist principles.

An agnostic “believes that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God or an ultimate cause or anything beyond material phenomena,” according to Webster’s.

But some people use agnostic to mean that, while they now are personally uncertain about the existence of a God, they are seekers after such knowledge.

Many humanists see themselves as atheists, people who believe that there is no God.

Dave Silverman, a spokesman for American Atheists, based in Parsipanny, N.J., has heard atheists described as “stubborn” agnostics and agnostics characterized as “wimpy” atheists.

“People don’t know the difference,” he says. “Atheists equate all gods and deny them all. God is equal to Zeus is equal to the Easter bunny. It’s a definitive statement.”

An agnostic argues that whether or not there is a god is unknowable, while atheists, Silverman says, are certain: “It’s knowable, and it’s not there.”

Silverman says many groups of atheists, agnostics and humanists work together to support humanitarian causes such as blood and food drives and to advocate tolerance.

Still, he says, “There’s no way to overstate the amount of prejudice” that atheists face, adding: “We are the last group that it’s politically OK to discriminate against.”

“Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, an associate sociology professor at the University of Minnesota.

Edgell says preliminary results of a study she led, which included a sampling of attitudes in more than 2,000 households, showed many respondents associate atheism with a range of “moral indiscretions” from criminal behavior to “rampant materialism” and “cultural elitism.”