We met at the Harvard Club in Boston. We started off with a discussion of mental health, and the dualistic fallacy indulged in when people claim that a problem is not mental because it is due to a chemical imbalance.
In fact, all things mental correlate to things going on in the brain. So all mental activity, whether we would judge it healthy or otherwise, is due to something physical. That does not say we would deny reduce the mind entirely to the brain. The mind is not identical to the brain, but it is an outcome of the activity of the brain.
We discussed that it feels good to be together and be able to openly express skepticism about religion, which we naturally repress in “polite company” even here in the secular New England states.
We discussed humanism and its relation to atheism (again). Humanism is beyond the atheist vs. believer debate. It’s about trying to figure out how to live, based on what we know to exist. This could include evoking spiritual feelings, since the existence of spiritual feelings is an observable fact, as opposed to the supernatural world, which is not.
Many religionists assume that atheists must be immoral, because the morality they learned comes from a book that god is said to have dictated. Humanism is a moral or ethics system, but makes to claim to certainty. Since we have no holy book, we often disagree about what is ethical (e.g. libertarian vs. left-of-center views of the free market) but we try to base our ethics on reason, observable facts, and some intuitions which seem self-evident.
We talked quite a bit about Buddhism, as some of us have practiced meditation at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. Insight meditation is a somewhat secularized version of Theravadin Buddhism that feels pretty compatible with humanism, though not perfectly so. Even Buddhists who eschew supernaturalism and downplay doctrines like rebirth tend to assume the correctness of Buddhist traditions that are not supernatural (Confucianism too is not supernaturalistic, but its highly traditional, and not evidenced-based in the modern sense).
In humanism, by contrast, everything can be challenged, and must be defended with evidence. We did agree that aspects of Buddhist practice and philosophy that are naturalistic and can be supported by evidence are compatible and welcome in humanism.
We also got into a discussion of categoricalism and consequentialism. While neither is perhaps inherently antithetical to humanism, we all came down on the consequentialist side. Categoricalism holds that certain rules are so important that they should be followed no matter the consequences. But that seemed dogmatic to us, and how can you know if a rule is correct or not unless you analyze the consequences? We agreed that while religion tends to encourage dogmatism, non-religious people can also get dogmatic, especially when they get emotional about a subject