Reese Humanising Religion

This started out rough, as a sort of three-part humanist manifesto (little h, little m).  He differentiates humanism from some unnamed assailant.  He has three first points, that what you think is, by nature, and of course, your own and highly personal and not really provable because its based on your own experiences and yours alone and that you can then test your outcomes and if your outcomes are good, then you should be proven valid.

From there, he gives Humanisms three fundamentals, that you must follow the evidence, even if it contradicts your beliefs, that you must think critically about what you believe, a radical viewpoint of freedom and that competent leadership is mandatory, and lastly that cooperation will do better than competition.

For the next few pages, he talks about the humanization of religion.  Here I think I am lost in that he is criticizing something that I have no first-hand knowledge of.  I think he’s saying that the non-thinking Church of years past needs to go and be replaced by a church with goals in mind that go beyond eschatological (the enhancement of the human estate) but I can’t quite follow him.

So, there are really good parts of it, but this whole thing really rubbed me the wrong way most of the time.  It seemed to have a real superiority complex toward “ancient” religion, as though because these folks thought the earth went around the sun, they couldn’t figure anything at all out.  Sure, I agree with the premise that a movement in church toward lived theology with intentional outcomes that transcend escatology is a good thing, but to think that you can tell what was happening in ancient church communities based on their ritual is like saying you can know what’s going on your church by reading the order of service. 

And the on page 25, he says that there are no higher and lower impulses, even though he just spent a lot of time cracking sprirituality and embracing ambiguity.

I can’t say I disagree with his oucome, but something about this rubs me wrong.  Humanism is an acknowledged blindspot for me.  Maybe it should be an area of inquiry for my final work for this course.  I wonder if the agitating attitude I’m reading into this work is something commonly felt by current readers or if its just my impatience.