Director's Note

Humanists understand beauty and morality, too

I was at the Aspen Institute’s Conference on Religion + Society yesterday, and one of the speakers said – as if it was an unassailable fact – “you can’t write great literature without a sense of the sacred.” 

I stood up in the front row – don’t worry, I raised my hand and they called on me – and said, “I think Kurt Vonnegut would disagree with you on that.” As would Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, Phillip Pullman, Douglas Adams, and Albert Camus.

People are desperate to tell humanists we can’t understand beauty or morality without a belief in God. And yet we keep creating beautiful things anyway. And yet we keep doing good anyway. Because those are things that all humans have the capacity to do.

I even heard it from the Pope this week. 

On Wednesday, the Pope’s latest catechesis warned against “post-Christian” and “atheistic humanism.” (Hey, that’s us!) That it is only “in [Christ] that [humanity] finds full truth and freedom.” That “by denying the relationship with God, the possibility of affirming the transcendent value of the human person is also lost.” 

I was really starting to like this Pope. I find his courage compelling. He’s spoken about the shamefulness of warmongering and violence as an assault on human dignity. He’s boldly spoken up about the reckless development of AI and the need for technology to serve humans, not the other way around. He’s called for Catholics to focus their energies on meeting human needs. As a humanist, I’m always going to applaud religious leaders who encourage their tradition to focus less on story and ceremony and more on helping others. That’s what we believe matters most, too. 

And then there was Wednesday. 

We see this all the time – that without God, we can’t ever fully appreciate what’s good, right, and true. This idea that we can sometimes arrive at the right answers but never for the right reasons. 

I hate it so, so much. 

Because the logical conclusion to the idea that we can’t know truth or value others is that we can’t be trusted. The dangerous and uncharitable part of what Pope Leo’s saying is the part he didn’t say. It’s the impolite part that radical “trad Catholics” like JD Vance are happy to say out loud: “atheists and agnostics…have no real values system.” It’s the reason people still say, including in this week’s Politico poll, they won’t vote for an atheist. It’s the reason Pete Hegseth talks about secular humanism ruining the military. It’s the reason our legal center gets intake calls from people who’ve been discriminated against at work for not being religious. 

And we know it isn’t true. We’ve seen throughout history how our values have called humanists to make incredible contributions to human welfare, not by accident, but because of our deep belief in human dignity. I refuse to believe that Jonas Salk or Albert Einstein had defective senses of truth. I refuse to believe that Eleanor Roosevelt or Dr. Spock were deficient in their abilities to appreciate and affirm the transcendent value of humanity.

We humanists believe that human dignity is not some immutable cosmic truth. It is a value. It is something we choose. It is something we must continue choosing every single day and every single moment. We must build communities that celebrate it. We must pass laws that protect it. We must defend it because there is nothing except our own active and continuous choice that will do so. And it is the courage and sacrifice of people who choose to value human dignity in the moments where it is most challenging, not because there is some external force obligating us to but because we recognize it is the only way to build a better world, that we find beautiful, meaningful, and transcendent. 

Catholics see human dignity differently. I recognize that, and can appreciate it too. My best friend is Catholic, and he breathes more truth and goodness into the world most days than I can manage in a week. I would never presume that he is incapable of knowing the full value of humanity because we derive it from a different set of proofs. It’s a shame the Pope isn’t there yet – especially because there are so many ways I’d like to see us partner with progressive Catholics to defend human dignity and democracy, and I’d hate to see this weaken those bonds.

We don’t yet have an audience of 1.4 billion (the current membership of the Catholic church, give or take) for our weekly newsletters. So it means we have to be a little louder to be heard. All we can say is this: our humanism has been a wellspring of great beauty and courage, has compelled us to choose the path of lifting up and acting with dignity towards our neighbors with no fear of punishment or sense of reward, has caused us to be more curious about and reverent towards each other, and I am proud that it has done this, and I am proud to be one of you, and no one can take that away from us no matter how much they’d like to try. 

For humanity,

Fish

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