h.u.m.a.n.i.s.t.

In my quest to find humanists, I came upon a few organizations:

1. British Humanist Association - seems to be the most active in the news, fervently trying to separate state and religion in the U.K. They claim that humanists form 36% of the British population.

2. SL Humanism - This is a group in Second Life and has weekly discussions. Since Second Life is basically an online chat tool, this seems to work well for discussions. They are also supposed to have an Action wing to actually undertake humanistic projects according to their founding leader Torin Golding.

3. The Humanist Church (THC) : relatively new, still in formative stages. The founder Dwight envisions a humanist church which encapsulates the structural and community set up of a church albeit without a God. His contenion is that it is a lack of such a structure that humanism has not taken off and widely adapted even though there are many humanists scattered around. He aims at solving that through THC. It is an interesting concept to say the least, if it can get past the defining stages and progress to formation.

4. The Rational Responders : This group seems to be extremely active in the United States and has gained significant attention after their youtube "Blasphemy Challenge" around December 2006. Founded by Brian Sapient, Rook Hawkins and a group of core members, this is primarily an atheist group trying to confront irrational theist beliefs. They have a live Stickam on their website and I joined one where Sapient and Kelly were online discussing/answering quesitons.

5. Humanism.org - This site gives the basis of humanism very simply and has a contact email for more info. I liked the simple design of the site, but not sure who runs it or what they do. Have not contacted them yet.

6. American Humanist - All I know is they exist - I have not researched the organization and their activities yet.

There may be more, but from the ones I have run into, what I find is most of these organizations define Atheism as the foundation or basis for humanism. While this is a difficult argument on whether a theist can ever be a humanist, too much focus on theism vs Atheism leads to misguided organizations that just define themselves with respect to theism and therefore lose sight of what humanism should really be - the unifying factor of all humans, that we are all one.

Theism is so deep rooted, that trying to uproot and discard it before pursuing "true" unification of humans is far fetched in my opinion, or atleast not happening in the forseeable future. As long as humans are mortal, fear of death, fear of the unknown will keep the search for a God/belief in a living God alive in one form or the other. So while these organizations may gain prominence by the noise they make, I am not sure they are about to achieve any lasting and tangible change to human perspective.

At the same time, theist beliefs are posing a barrier between humans and religion is infact the basis of a lot of disharmony in the world. Therefore, unless humans get past religious beliefs, achieving true human unity is out of question.

Hmm... its a real catch-22 situation, and I am not sure what the right approach is.

The objective very simply put : Humans should have a core understanding that we are all one as a layer below all other beliefs. This core should drive our world view such that our other beliefs do not violate this core understanding.

What is the approach that can lead us humans to this state of mind?