Absolute Thinking in an Inabsolute World

[Ethos]

While it is essential that we remain skeptically aware of our many failings and foibles, we should not deny our incremental advancements, our ethical aspirations, or our potential for goodness and nobility, imperfect as these may be. At the very least, to deny such advancements is to negate the contributions of those whose lives were devoted to promoting a precious self-fulfilling prophecy of human decency and justice, regardless of power, class, culture, skin color, or metaphysical stance. At the worst, it is to frame a dismal world and a self-fulfilling prophecy where power alone is the greatest “good,” where we are forever consigned to an original sin of destructive judgmentalism without hope of improvement, and where all “religious” people and phenomena constitute a uniform evil that must be obliterated without a trace. I had thought that humanism represented a repudiation of such thinking, but perhaps I was mistaken.


http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=pasquale_20_3&back=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.secularhumanism.org%2Flib%2F list.php%3Fpublication%3Dshb

I've posted the final paragraph because it is not only a summation of the full writing, but a superb statement on its own. There is much made of society in a more pessimistic light, however it is often important to recognize how far we have come, even if we also understand how far there is yet to go.

Ethos

[Atticus]

Moreover, the article seems primarily to pick at the basic tenets of postmodernism--that everything can and should be seen through the prism of power relations.