I happen to ascribe to the way of life centered on human interests or values; especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual’s dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason. There is more to Humanism than just science, though and it’s not all just magicians. There is also more than just CFI. There is also AHA and other Humanists groups. You’ve hardly scratched the surface.

You can choose to ascribe to any philosophy you wish, but personally, I get a bit tired of someone criticizing it without anything really substantial.

Being old enough to remember the 60s pretty well, and a lifetime subscriber to leftist magazines, I’ve always gotten propaganda from “humanist” and other groups of that kind. I noticed that starting in the early 60s the come-ons began to become increasingly hysterical, warning about the dire consequences of people not being strict materialists, the sky was falling. Well, those groups have been at it since then, and CSICOP ratcheted it up considerably. And they’re still hysterical about the rising levels of belief in pseudo-science, etc. Seems to me that they’re a flop, PR wise. Maybe it would be a good idea to try something a bit less absurd, something that hasn’t been a proven failure by their own standards. That’s what you can expect when an ostensibly “scientific” group is run by magicians and other show biz folk a failed philsopher or so and a bunch of ideological cranks.

I got another one just Monday. Heavy on name dropping, skimpy on reasonsing.

It’s time for the adults to take over or things are going to keep going down hill, we’ve wasted fifty years on this nonsense.

So, you don’t have any problem with shamanism, animism, Jainism, etc.

I won’t say much about Jainism, for I only know what Hemant said about it, but the others deal HEAVILY with the supernatural.

humanism

3 : a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual’s dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason

Merriam Websters Online Dictionary.

So, you don’t have any problem with shamanism, animism, Jainism, etc.

Evolution doesn’t belong to atheists. Stop being so greedy.

But evolution doesn’t deal with HOW the ingredients of life got here. It pretty much says, “These things were here, and this is what happened to them”

If you mean the origin of life, then yes, evolution doesn’t deal with that. Many fields of science do deal with how the ingredients of life got here. How life came about, is unknown, there could be no evidence of it left, we may never know. That’s not what people were saying in these comments, they were talking about evolution.

I can see why people are opposed to evolution. The “made in God’s image”, “man above the beasts”, “God’s chosen people”, seems even more absurd if you think that we don’t even have to be here.

That leaves room for some sort of deity, if one chooses to believe that is how it all started. Yes, it is god of the gaps, but it is a way to rectify both a belief in a god and support of evolution.

Now, I am a strong atheist who believes that there is nothing supernatural that exists in our world, but I can see how some people can effectively support both science and faith.

I can’t, it’s like they say “well these things, I’ll use rationalism, scepticism, and science, and these other things I’ll use wishful thinking, supernaturalism, and superstition”. It’s all just apologetics for the premises they arrive at through religion or wishful thinking. With the absence of evidence contrary you can successfully rationalize any premise, even God. That’s also unicorns, space teapots, and the flying spaghetti monster.

All our knowledge is filtered through our senses, and all our thought processes are rooted in the biological nature of our brain.

I believe the first one, though I don’t think it’s proven, the second one is widly assumed by materialists but there is no way to prove that all our thought processes are rooted in the biological nature of our brain. I doubt that it can be proven because you can’t do any science about things that aren’t physical so it would be impossible to know what to look for. There is the added complication that we don’t know if there could be no incompatibility between a physical motivation and a non-physical one. All of these are open questions, I don’t understand why allged “free thinkers” are so eager to shut the lid on them.