The American Humanist Association has been taken over by Marxist revolutionaries who advocate a Utilitarianism philosophy, which inevitably degenerates into hedonism in practice. I am not a member of their organization and I refuse to be one.
Like other atheist groups, the American Humanist Association spends its time in anti-religion social activism, such as suing the American Legion for displaying crosses in cemeteries. As I have previously written, this kind of bullying is a waste of resources that could otherwise be used for charitable causes and achieves nothing constructive for humanity.
The bigger issue is that American Humanist Association advocates outright Marxist ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory. For example, on their call to action page they call on their members to support the American government to bestow “reparations” to the descendants of African–American slaves. who lived during the 19th century This is deeply problematic because the idea of reparations they are advocating for is heavily intertwined with the concept of blood-guilt, which is an inherently racist concept.
American Humanist Association Advocates for Racist Ideas
Let me explain. No one alive today in the world was a participant of legalized slavery in the United States. This means it is only the current generation of American citizens who pay taxes, which the US government would use to fund any such reparations payments. This means it is the tax money of the citizens who live in the USA today — none of whom participated in the events taking place over 150 years ago — that would be used to pay these reparations. The repartitions would also not be paid to anyone who has actually been subjected to slavery, either. This means the idea of repatriations is based on the notion that people who live today owe a debt to the descendants of those who were wronged — that is what a blood debt is. It’s the literal definition of a blood debt. And blood debts beliefs are racist ideologies.
Furthermore, the reality is that American government administrations have spent the past 150 years providing reparation in the form of social programs. Immediately following the end of the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed to protect the rights of freed slaves, and then followed by the Enforcement Acts. While it is true that pushback from Southern Confederates made it challenging to enforce these laws for several decades, inevitably the federal government strengthened to enforce its will on the ex-Confederate states. There were certainly failures by the federal government to impose these policies on the ex-Confederates but it was not for lack of trying, and the Freedmen’s Bureau operated at a federal level which provided reparations to the freed slaves in the form of clothing, food, shelter, loans, property, family relocation, education services and so on. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was specifically passed to address the injustices that were occurring during Reconstruction and Andrew Johnson’s veto of the bill was over-ruled by Congress — which is rather significant if you think about it. Clearly, the majority of the representatives of the American people were not racists and were doing everything in their power to end racism in America spread by the minority. People like to focus on Andrew Johnson’s efforts to sabotage Reconstruction but they also ignore that he was never voted into office, and became President when Lincoln was assassinated. Johnson was impeached in effort to remove him from office for his sabotage and he was not re-elected by the American people. Instead, Ulysses S. Grant was elected to the presidency, who mobilized the military to enforce the rule of federal law in the ex-Confederacy states and crushed the Ku Klux Klan. The only reason racist Democrats gained control again over the Southern states is because of the Compromise of 1877 to avoid a second Civil War, which was in hindsight not the best decision made by the Republicans but it was not motivated out of a desire to oppress African-Americans.
And after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the creation of financial aid programs that expressly only allow African-Americans to apply for them, along with other elective programs such as affirmative action for university attendance, have existed as well. All of these programs have significantly benefited African-Americans, whether or not they actually descend from an ancestor who was a slave. This of course is not the form of reparations that advocates are desiring; they want a flat sum of money to be given to them to be spent on whatever they wish to spend it on. This is of course money they did not earn and do not therefore deserve, and much like lotteries have not been demonstrated to be useful tools for wealth redistribution, it is objectively the case that paying large sums of tax money to millions of people for simply being the descendant of someone who was wronged is not going to improve anything, either. When receiving a lump cash of money does not improve the lives of the people who receive it, they will ask for more. This is the problem with making a population too dependent on handouts and government assistance programs; these social programs should ideally be used to buy time until actual meaningful actions are made. Welfare is not a long term solution for addressing issues of economic inequity and it instead promotes more poverty.
While I do think the social programs which have been in use for decades have not necessarily been the most effective means by which to improve the socio-economic plights of minorities in the USA, I do believe they are something people tend to earn in part with merit. Even if an affirmative action policy at universities gives priority to minorities, the applicant still has to meet the enrollment standards and then complete the coursework in order to earn a degree. As they are tied to merit, these are arguably more effective programs than dumping a money hose at people simply for belonging to a certain ethnicity. Merit is important, as merit promotes excellence and without the drive to be excellent people don’t contribute constructively to their communities.
Besides this, to claim that the US government of 2021 is the same US government that permitted the slave trade and is therefore responsible, is an absurd belief not rooted in objective facts. It is instead rooted in racist ideologies and conspiracy theories of oppression and privilege which are not systematic at a national level. The reality is that since the events of the Civil War, the US government has radically shifted to be the least racist government in the entire world, that works harder than any other to rid the world of racism. While there are certainly outlier individuals, as a collective represented by its actual laws and policies, the US government of today is the least racist government in the entire world and arguably, all of human history. Over 360,000 soldiers died to defeat the Confederacy and ensure slavery ended in America and 99.9% of these soldiers were Caucasian men. This is objectively a historical fact, just as it is that 100% of the politicians who were in office who passed all of the civil rights bills over the past century into law were Caucasian men — especially the first round in the 1960s. All of these social policies and rights that outlaw racism by the state and its agents were enacted by people who had been voted into office to represent the will of American public, to remedy the problems of the past and they have indeed largely succeeded in remedying those problems. It is the embracement of the Common Humanity philosophy that led to these remedies, not the Common Enemy mentality advocated by the anti-racist zealots of today.
No one who has been born in the past 57 years has known a segregated America. That is, the vast majority of the present American population has never known segregation. Even prior to the 1960s, most of the US did not practice segregation and it was constantly being championed against in those states it was short lived in. 14 states never at any time had segregation laws of any kind whatsoever. It was a major point of contention until the passage of federal rights laws in the 1960s that took the matter out of state hands.
Every politician who voted for the civil rights bills over the past century were elected by the majority of the American public in their districts. To claim that America is some kind of ‘systemically racist’ government despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is absurd. And that evidence is plainly demonstrated by reading the civil rights laws that were drafted and voted into law by predominantly Caucasian male politicians, who themselves were elected into office by a primarily Caucasian male voting population. Civil Rights Act of 1964 and all of its subsequent amendments was passed by Caucasian men; the same men who had also passed the Equal Pay Act. It is intellectually dishonest to ignore these facts. It is a lie as I’ve ever seen one to suggest the present America is systematically racist, and it is a dangerous lie because it causes people to turn against their neighbors.
So in contrast to other groups which engage in historical denialism, Chivalric Humanism is absolutely opposed to any and all ideas that advocate racist ideologies. Period. This includes the concept of blood-guilt and by extension, the idea that reparations should be paid to the descendants of those who were harmed by injustice. It’s impractical, achieves nothing useful and is in my personal opinion just a means for racist people to justify wealth redistribution — the similar kind that took place in South Africa over the past twenty years and has not actually ended racism, because instead different ethnic groups of South Africans prioritized some receiving land grants over others. South Africa is, unfortunately, a failed state and its racist behavior during and post apartheid should not be emulated by other countries such as the United States.
The American Humanist Association Is Pro-Abortion
The American Humanist Association also advocates for the so-called “Do No Harm Act”. This is a bill that seeks to prevent companies from being able to hire, fire, or deny certain benefits of employees based on religious beliefs of the corporate owners. The bill is problematic because it could effectively mean that employers will have no right to refuse to hire employees based on moral viewpoints, nor to be able to fire based on moral viewpoints. It also means that employees can use medical benefits for absolutely any elective procedures they want, such as abortion, even if the owners of the company find it morally reprehensible. I mention abortion because this is predominantly what the bill is actually about. Being forced to pay for something like abortion when the owners find it morally reprehensible is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of a fair and democratic society. Yet, the American Humanist Association, as a largely Marxist sympathetic organization, is a strong advocate for abortion.
I, personally, am not entirely against abortion, and I believe there are cases where it can be a valid choice. However, I am most certainly not in support of forcing employers to have to pay for elective abortions when they find the practice abhorrent. This is a key issue that I disagree with the American Humanist Association on, and I think anyone else who looks at the principles of Chivalric Humanism would arrive at the same conclusion. This is because elective abortion in cases where there is nothing medically wrong with the child and the pregnancy does not pose a risk to the mother means that new human life is being killed purely for hedonistic reasons and is directly opposed to the highest principle of Chivalric Humanism, which is to promote the survival of the human species. While I can personally agree that it is better for a child to not be born into a world where its own mother does not want it and would be placed into our over-burdened foster care system instead, that does not mean I believe elective abortion is morally good. I think it is not. Therefore, I believe that tax payer money should not have to pay for such procedures and that employers most certainly should not have to either if they find the practice immoral.
This is the difference between the hedonism advocated by other forms of humanism popular today, and the Chivalric Humanism of my philosophy. I am interested in advancing and celebrating human excellence and achievement; they, instead, have adopted a misanthropic viewpoint which celebrates hedonism and racist ideologies. They may be a secular organization but they are not a virtuous one.
The American Humanist Association Promotes Pseudo-science
The last area I will point out that is problematic about the American Humanist Association is their definition of ‘Scientific integrity’ is anything but. The American Humanist Association believes that sociology and its many branches, the so-called ‘social sciences’ are legitimate scientific disciplines. Objectively, they are not. This is not to say they are completely useless but it is undeniable that the so-called ‘social scientist’ does not actually strictly adhere to the scientific method in their research. There is instead a heavy reliance on creative story-telling and narrative construction that utilizes facts to weave these narratives together into a conclusion. Many of the subjects that are purported to be studied scientifically, such as people’s thoughts in psychology and systems of governance in political science, do not measure natural forces of the universe. Most of what they study is people’s ideas, which are simply not consistent enough to be regarded as part of nature to the degree the scientific method can be strictly applied to them. This problem is widely known amongst sociologists, which is why Positivism was developed as a philosophical theory to underpin sociology and its many branches. Alarmingly, over the past few decades many in academia have sought to redefine sociology to be a subset of the “social sciences” instead of its primary category, which is blatantly incorrect. Every single “social science” studies the function, development and structure of human communities and it is only that certain subsects of sociology study specific parts; such as psychology studying the human mind and behavior, economics studying the distribution of wealth and production within communities, and political science studying the way communities administrate governance. Anthropology is the study of human history through recovered artifacts, such as remains, tools, fossils and so on.
All of these disciplines cannot strictly apply the scientific method to the subjects they study, and often the research cannot conduct a controlled experiment the same way that, say a chemist or physicist can. It is often the case that the only part of the scientific method that can be applied in a sociological field is the information gathering and hypothesis formation phases of the scientific method, and the sociologist instead presents their information gathering as an experiment and the hypothesis as a conclusion formed from an experiment. This is a pseudo-scientific and it is the primary reason why the vast majority of sociological research is not reproducible. This is a well known thing in academia and it is known as the Replication Crisis. It is the reason why political scientists, climatologists, epidemiologists and other sociologists have all failed to accurately predict the future using their methods. They are useful tools in the absence of genuine scientific research into the subject, and their findings can serve as useful information for developing hypothesis, but they are not a science. When they are confused for being a science, tragedies occur; the best known example among the general public is the eugenics movement of the 19th century that devolved into racist fanaticism. Less known by the general public is that most of the poor methods of data collection and analysis used by the eugenicists are still widely used by many sociologists today.
In Chivalric Humanism a distinction is made between science and sociology. They are not confused for being the same things, unlike is commonplace among other atheist groups such as the American Atheists and American Humanist Association. This is why what is meant by them when they discuss ‘scientific integrity’ is not what is meant by the Chivalric Humanist. The sociological fields can of course arrive at truthful statements without the scientific method just as another form of reasoning has the possibility to do, BUT they are not sciences, and that is important to distinguish. This is because many beliefs formed using sociological methods have proven to be absolutely untrue and worse, incredibly destructive to human society. To this day the field of anthropology still promotes racist ideologies, the field of psychology promotes a metaphysical and flawed model of the human mind with pseudo-scientific treatment of disease, and so on. This causes enormous suffering in the world that need not exist and arguably would not exist if these fields were not mistakenly labeled sciences when they are objectively not.
A Secular Humanist Organization Should Actually Be Secular and Humanistic
One of the reasons why I chose to publish the Book of Chivalric Humanism instead of continuing to develop my philosophy silently is because I believe organizations such as the American Humanist Association promote a worldview that leads to the collapse of human communities. While their humanism is not entirely incompatible with Chivalric humanism, the fact remains they promote hedonism and misanthropy, and they assist pseudo-scientists with masquerading as scientists. They have become the mainstream representation of humanism in the absence of any alternative challenger and I am seeking to change that. Someone must advocate for virtue and excellence, and discourage people away from the hedonism that has proven repeatedly throughout history to lead to societal collapse.
A more in-depth discussion about the limitations of sociology and the problems with labeling its branches to be sciences is described in the Book of Chivalric Humanism.
I hope that after people read my book that they will come to understand why Chivalric Humanism is a better path to creating the kind of equitable world for humanity that the American Humanist Association claims it wants to create, but fundamentally has not and cannot create because it advocates for actions that undermine that kind of equity.
