What is a humanist?

Answer 1

A Humanist is essentially any person who has a high view of human beings. Some Humanists are people of faith and some are not. The basic idea is that there is "good stuff" inside of human beings which should be valued and utilized for the betterment of all.

The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation (15th-16th centuries) were produced by a kind of Christian Humanism, so it was a Humanism spring-boarding largely from Christian values and Biblical theology.

Later, in the eighteenth century, an entirely secular form of humanism emerged, producing the French Enlightenment. That Humanism was optimistic and held that human beings are valuable apart from religion, and independent of any deities, and people can and should control their own futures - promoting the notion of "human-progress," and "human-improvement."

Philosophers such as Voltaire and others engaged in a concerted effort to remove God from the Humanist equation, insisting that REASON ALONE was sufficient for human development, thus producing what we now know as "Modernity" and the various forms of secular humanism that spun out of that line of thinking.

Today we find both optimistic (a relic of a Christian memory) and pessimistic Humanism (the product of Voltaire's brand of Humanism), because with the removal of an ultimate source for Human goodness, such as a "good"Creator, all so-called goodness, value, progress, or improvement, is entirely arbitrary. That is, people assert they are good, without any proof or foundation for such attribution other than personal conviction - thus arbitrary and entirely subjective. It can, for those same reasons, assert equally that human beings are evil, worthless and meaningless. Who is to say whose view is correct, if there is no foundation to support the assertion?

The only form of humanism that holds together philosophically is Christian humanism, which asserts that a good and rational God created humankind with similar attributes, therefore humans are essential good and are thus intrinsically valuable. Jewish scriptures echo this sentiment in the Psalms - "What is Man that Thou art mindful of him. Thou has made him a little lower than the angels, Thou hast crowned him with splendor and honor. . .", and so forth.

Answer 2

A humanist is someone who places value on human beings, both individually and collectively. They prefer to see evidence and think critically rather than to follow religious beliefs.