Humanism, Religious

Within the discipline of anthropology, the subfield of humanism focuses on reason, logic, and scientific explanations for human existence, being skeptical of purely religious interpretation. Proponents of this approach, such as T. Willliam Hall, in the text Religion, state, “This interpretation of human existence dispenses with belief in the supernatural, considers the good of humanity on earth the supreme ethical goal, and applies the methods of reason and science to solve human problems.” Following this same logic, Miles Richardson, in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, adds that humanism “emphasiz(es)scholarly reading, as opposed to divine revelation, as the path to knowledge.” Religion is then a construct of the human mind, not an unknowable fact.

It is a construct capable of scientific exploration, hypothesis testing, and theory verification.

Anthropologists who study religion from a humanistic perspective would include such notables as Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Joseph Needham,Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, and Ernest Gillner. They apply a rationalist approach to the study of religious values, actions, and beliefs. Their approach to religion is as a cultural system that exists and can be rationally explored and understood. Religious systems are a part of a society's total tapestry, a social reality that is constructed and explained, using the same methods and theories as the culturally constructed systems of politics, economic, kinship, subsistence, and art. When anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes in The Interpretation of Cultures that “religion is humanity,” this statement can also be stated in the reverse: “Humanity is religion.”

A religious humanistic approach to anthropological cross-cultural research can be described as being anthropocentric (human as center of existence). Existence external to the individual or group is viewed as not being constructed and maintained according to a divine supernatural plan, with rewards and punishments for various thoughts and deeds, coupled with the perpetuation or violation of specific culturally predetermined, etiquette-established guidelines. Religion, as a necessary human cultural construct, is open to logical realistic explanation, using guidelines that judiciously explain fundamental shared human dilemmas, associated with basic everyday existence. Searching for answers to what cannot be explained by contemporary science in times of fright or confusion reinforces the need for religious beliefs. Religious explanations are provided to offer answers to the basic questions of life that science currently cannot. What is existence? Why do I exist? What is the universe? Why do things beyond our control happen? Why do we have to suffer? Why death? What is the relationship of humans to other species? The humanists would acknowledge that these cannot be answered but that the search for concrete rational explanations is a more worthwhile and potentially gratifying endeavor than the passive acceptance of religious dogma. They believe that it is possible to eventually discover reasonable and logical explanations for phenomena or at the very least believe that exploration remains open-ended and tentative to allow for additions of new factual conceptualizations. Religious practices and scientific explorations are believed to be complementary.

Religion from a culturally based, humanistic perspective has a strong cultural relativist approach. Each society constructs its own unique approach to religion, depending on its own unique and dynamic physical and social environment. There is a continuing desire to maintain existing functional cultural order and also to attempt to restore equilibrium in the inevitable times of chaos. Anthropologists search for the unique social qualities and attempt simultaneously to tease out the individual social threads from the larger tapestry of life. Each thread represents a different but complementary component of religious life:belief systems, functions and structures of myths and legends, use of symbolic objects and language, rituals including offerings, prayers, sacrifice, feasts, and causes and motivations for change. The expectation would be that morally based religious factors would necessarily vary across time and space in a dynamic world and that solid, well-guided research [Page 1247]could uncover motivations and explanations for community-specific similarities and variations in religious practices.

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