Journeys to Humanism, theHumanist.com’s regular series, features real stories from humanists in our community. From heartwarming narratives of growth, to more difficult journeys, our readers open up about their experiences coming to humanism.
Bennett Barouch
San Francisco, CA, USA
There is a building in Manhattan, on the edge of Central Park, that was a sacred place for me during my elementary school years. The cupped wearing of its stone steps bore witness to the hundreds of millions of people who had made the pilgrimage to and through this holy place.
Education endorsed it with an endless stream of field trip footsteps sounding through its huge, echoing hallways and display rooms. Students endorsed it by excitedly flocking from one exhibit to the next, or by standing in front of a single display in quiet awe, or with a gasp and a paused, pointing finger. My mother endorsed it by taking me there sometimes when school did not.
The society that built the American Museum of Natural History imbued it with the respectful grandeur of over-sized doors, cathedral-height ceilings, and visitors’ hushed, library voices. The latter was sometimes punctuated by sounds of childhood enthusiasm, which also spoke well of the place. Its old-world style and its sheer size showed me that the idea of it was cherished before the reality of it existed.
They had to make it, because they so valued exploration, knowledge, learning, science, and human achievement. It was a temple to those things, a disseminator of both knowledge and attitude, an inspiration to generations. It was the most special reason I felt lucky to grow up in New York City, and in America, and to be a human. I was positively romantic about it.
In addition to public elementary school, I attended a religious school, and went to worship services both weekly and on various holidays. I was romantic about this too. I loved my religion and felt deeply grateful to be born into it. Whether in my local Jewish sanctuary or in the science sanctuary on the edge of Central Park, I was always more serious about trying to understand ultimate truths and the human condition than any kid or adult I knew.
Because of the close attention I paid to these things, by the time I was seven years old, the honeymoon among them was sadly over. Science, religion, and my observations of people around me began to conflict, and that conflict escalated over subsequent years.
I was unable to understand how most people were passionately, viscerally attached to their religion, yet satisfied to live as if they had only flipped through the picture-book version of it in a pediatrician’s waiting room. It seemed to me that if it were truly their religion, they would know more about it and live up to it more fully.
Some of the people I knew were more religiously informed and observant. Like everyone else, these religiously attentive people thought of themselves as intelligent and rational. Who doesn’t?
But here’s the rub. A conventional religionist holds that 54,999 of the world’s historical religions are wrong, that almost every single person who has ever lived has been wrong about the most important thing there is, yet they are so lucky that their religion – which they almost universally acquired simply as an accident of birth – is the one out of tens of thousands that is uniquely right. When the subject is their religion, they just know that the physical sciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, archeology, and logical thinking are invalid or irrelevant, and that bringing them up is unconscionably rude or even evil.
I don’t think that’s what being intelligent and rational looks like.
Over time, in bits and pieces, some people quietly let me in on a big secret. According to this quite popular but usually unvoiced secret, keeping religion and rationality in separate compartments is okay, as is picking and choosing the bits one happens to like about a religion. It’s okay because it’s really about culture, custom, and comfort, and not about the alleged absolute truths the religion claims, unless one happens to like this one or that one.
Although this position is offensive to traditional religionists, at least it intends to be candidly honest. But if this was someone’s genuine position on the matter, why were they still less than humble about their own beliefs and choices, and less than welcoming of the beliefs and choices of others? They seem to have entirely missed the generosity of “Love thy neighbor as thyself” even in the midst of admitting that they themselves are just sort of muddling along.
I “became” a humanist by discovering that I was one. I was from the outset interested in actual facts and how humans relate to them, actual morality and how humans should act on it. The pretense to knowledge and to morality presented by religion requires willful ignorance and knowing immorality. There was no choice to be made, only discovery of the obvious and undeniable.
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