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    Positive Humanism: A Primer
    Positive Humanism: A Primer
    Positive Humanism: A Primer
    Ebook63 pages45 minutes

    Positive Humanism: A Primer

    By Bo Bennett

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    About this ebook

    Positive humanism is an applied secular humanistic philosophy based on the scientific findings of positive psychology that focuses on personal, professional, and societal flourishing. As an applied philosophy its focus is on ideas that lead to increased well-being. As a secular humanistic philosophy, there are no appeals to the supernatural, the magical, or the mystical. The philosophy is founded on reason and critical thinking. The philosophy is science-based, meaning it is void of the unsupported and/or exaggerated claims and the constant confusing of correlation with causality often found in the self-help genre. The philosophy is grounded in the theories of positive psychology, which is the study of the positive side of the mental health spectrumâ human flourishing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456623555
    Positive Humanism: A Primer

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      Book preview

      Positive Humanism - Bo Bennett

      ~~~~~

      Preface

      Positive humanism is an applied secular humanistic philosophy based on the scientific findings of positive psychology that focuses on personal, professional, and societal flourishing. As an applied philosophy its focus is on ideas that lead to increased well-being. As a secular humanistic philosophy, there are no appeals to the supernatural, the magical, or the mystical. The philosophy is founded on reason and critical thinking. The philosophy is science-based, meaning it is void of the unsupported and/or exaggerated claims and the constant confusing of correlation with causality often found in the self-help genre. The philosophy is grounded in the theories of positive psychology, which is the study of the positive side of the mental health spectrum—human flourishing.

      Positive humanism is not anti-religion; it is however anti-anti-humanism. There are many aspects of religions that are anti-humanism, such as denying gays’ rights to marry, the belief that humanity is sinful and worthy of eternal punishment, the denial of science on religious grounds, and several others. However, it would be fallacious and unreasonable to be against an entire religion or worse, against religion itself, because of its anti-humanistic elements without considering its pro-humanistic elements, as well. There are many atheistic philosophies that take a hard approach by attacking religion and calling attention to its harmful elements. This approach has its purpose, but this is simply not what positive humanism is about. Positive humanism’s focus is almost entirely on promoting positive humanism and defending it when necessary, but avoiding attacking religion (i.e., avoiding making aggressive arguments against religion). Abstaining from all arguments against all aspects of religious belief is not always possible, especially when such arguments are necessary to understand arguments for positive humanism. As a positive humanist, when I do make such arguments, I am committed to representing the religious argument as accurately as possible, and avoiding ridicule or other rhetorical devices that might otherwise reasonably offend.

      Positive humanism is not for everyone. Having been a believer for the first 38 years of my life, and a non-believer going on five years now, I can say from personal experience that my overall well-being has increased significantly in that time. There are countless others with similar experiences who have celebrated their new life of reason. However, from a sociological and psychological perspective, it is clear that not everyone can benefit as I and others like me did from such a life change. For example, people from highly religious families or communities can be ostracized by intolerant family members and friends, lowering their well-being significantly.

      My goal is to provide an evidence-based, secular philosophy of well-being for the rapidly growing number of people leaving religion and embracing reason, or just contemplating a more secular worldview, who want a higher quality of life than they had under their religious world view.

      Positive humanism is not the same as positive psychology. In the simplest terms, there are parts of positive psychology that overlap with humanism. However, there are also parts

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