The idea of a ‘mind’ is a useful concept as such. It allows us to discuss an extremely complex collection of mental and physical phenomena going on in the brain as if there would be just only one single issue of a 'mind'. In the end we are talking about the products of incredibly varied and complex brain-processes when we discuss any area of human behavior.

Of course, the birth of an idea of a single indivisible ‘mind’ is caused by the fact that there is always the conscious 'me' on the very topmost level. This conscious 'me' processes the finished end-product of all of the incredible activity that going on under the hood in a human brain all the time.
Between the conscious or the ‘me’-part of the brain and the immensely diverse and highly active subconscious part, there is a web of complex gate-keepers. They keep out from the conscious part the multitude of continous routine-processes that are always going on beneath in the subconscious part of the brain. (See http://eagleman.com/eagleman-blog/135-the-mystery-of-expertise-full)

Without all this gate-keeping that is going on without a single pause for the duration of our life, the conscious part of the brain would be overwhelmed in seconds. Millions of years of human evolution have decided which is the right level of information that we need in the conscious level, and which information can be left to the subconscious part of the brain to deal with. This naturally varies incredibly at different situations.
Some of these processes keep our body alive. They do it by detecting when our body needs things like oxygen, water or food. Some of the follow our mental state. Some of them follow what happens around us. These are things that the brains of all living creatures share, as they are necessary base to stay alive if you are a mollusk or a human.

On the other hand, comparing the human brain to a simple computer is also utter reductionism in the other direction. We have not been able to produce computers that could even challenge the immense complexity and most of all immense flexibility of the human brain.

A human brain is not a computer, but one can say that it consists of hundreds or thousands of immensely effective parallel processors. They are constantly activated and de-activated on ad-hoc -basis to solve the current problems and tasks.
All these processors have unlimited parallel access to nearly endless amounts of working memory and nearly as endless amount the storage space for their results.

According to recent figures human brain has also around 100 billion neurons. The real secret of the brain is that all of these neurons are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons and creating continually new networks.
In the end, it was the subconscious part of my brain that did come up with the idea that I should write this little essay. I did not control this original though-process on a conscious level. However, I did finally analyze the idea on the conscious level and decided to write it out here.

It is easy to understand how the early people could not understand the workings of this subconscious part of the brain at all. It is also easy to see how they could have seen as these ideas and thoughts as they would be coming from somewhere outside themselves.
In fact, many of them clearly thought that their ideas were coming from some kind of 'deity' or 'spirit'. If you look at oldest literature armed with this idea, you very soon see what I mean.

The same phenomena do explain also the amazingly common ideas among believers that they are constantly in touch with their chosen deity, and this ‘divine voice’ also guides their lives in many ways.
However, I’m afraid that instead of any divine voice, they are listening to the subconscious part of their own brain. As it does process things in its own pace and answers can surface even quite unexpectedly.

Again; the idea of a ‘mind’ was invented to simplify handling of a phenomena that was all too complex for the early people to comprehend at all.
They just could not even imagine how there could be a vast number of parallel processes going on in every living brain in every single second. All they knew of and understood was the final output that reaches the conscious part of the brain, which can be even extremely restricted at times.

We have inherited from tens of thousands of generations of our ancestors a vast number of reflexes, models of behavior and trains of thought that affect our life every single second we live. There is also a extremely complex collection of social brain-processes that fire up in the brain when we mix with our fellow humans. There is always a biological base for these things also, but these processes are also changed by evolution of the human culture.
However, we are not normally aware of their presence on a conscious level. They just inevitably change the way we see our environment and most of how we see all different social situations.

On top of all this we slowly build an individual psyche. It is always different from that of anybody else who has ever lived. This psyche is a molded by all good, bad and irrelevant things that happen to us.
Of course, this individuality rests on a very strong base of inherited traits and features. However, our individual life-experiences will always produce a different end-result for every single human. Let me repeat: explaining all this with a concept of ‘mind’ is simply reductionism at its worst.
There are also inherited traits and brain-processes that different cultures have learned to use to reach new ends. For example, the brain functions that handle speech have according to some theories been developed further by development of music, which still touches the raw emotion-systems in the brain through this channel.

Language itself was developed to use these brain-processes when one species of the great apes learned to use sounds in dramatically new functions. The fact that several people can with the use of language share the contents of their brain with other people is unique to humans.
As far as we currently know, the human species is the only one that has developed a complex enough language to convey even the most abstract contents of their brain to other members of their species.

The invention of language did also change the way how humans themselves think that they use their brain. They normally see just the end-result which is formulated as language. The very basic processing of raw information happens as it happens in other animals, also without language. We just are not aware of these underlying processes, because they now feed their results in the form of language to the conscious part of the brain.

Subconscious part of the mind does not work independent of you, as it IS you. It holds all of your experiences, hopes, dreams and ideas. Subconsciousness stores our life and uses it as a tool to inspect and analyze all of new things that we encounter. The results of this process are then processed in the conscious mind.
The conscious part of our mind, however, makes all the decisions. On the other hand, in very fast situations we must rely on the gut-reaction or the results of only pre-processed information that has not been checked in the conscious part of the mind. This is one of the reasons why fast decisions are so often faulty.

The slow conscious processing of data on a conscious level does give better results in many cases. The The subconscious part moves more on the level of emotions, feelings and using old examples for new action. Conscious part of the mind adds reasoning and rational analysis to the picture. The development of language-using machinery into our mind has given us the possibility for logic and rational reasoning.
These qualities are of course also the things that made possible all human inventions. This development of a language-based conscious mind is the very basic thing that separated humans from other animals. It also gave humans this tremendous advantage over all other animals that we now enjoy.

Human brain was already a very complex organ at the time when we parted ways with the other great apes. However, mainly the development of language has created an incredible explosion in the complexity in the ways of how human brain can work.
No other species has undergone such a transformation as the birth of language did cause in human species. However, under all this complexity there is still the third species of chimpanzee. They just try to control also their natural impulses and emotions with this newly perfected brain of theirs.
The human brain started really diverging from the brain of a dog or a cat with the birth of language. It becomes possible nearly immortalize some contents of the brain with the invention of writing.

Only the birth of language made it possible also to develop abstract ideas like the ‘mind'. The development of the human brain has been a process that has taken an incredibly long time. The development of the first nerve cell was naturally the very first step that was followed by the development of the nervous system and finally the first precursors of brain.
An extremely hard question is at which point of evolution did animals become fully conscious of themselves. Most of all it is hard define at which point of human evolution did humans develop something that can be called a 'mind’ as this idea is commonly now understood. Even amoeba knows where it ends and other amoeba starts.
There still is no definite answer to this question, as the whole thing depends on how you define ‘mind’ and many traditionalists are prone to claim that only humans can have a ‘mind’.

Lions make conscious decisions when they choose a suitable prey from a flock of antelopes. A lion looks for certain signals that may make some of the prey easier targets than other. Then it makes a conscious decision that is based on the information it has obtained, just like humans do. The difference is that this decision is made without expressing it in language in lions.
The big step that humans did take was not development of a ‘mind’, but just the new ability to express its existence through the use of language.

It has been established without doubt that all mammals do share a very similar basic brain-structure with humans. It is quite certain that they all also have a very similar vast collections of brain-processes that is called ‘mind’ in humans for reasons of simplicity and tradition. The only real difference is that other mammals just can’t express themselves in a language that we could at least yet interpret.

On a little lighter note, I personally believe in ‘minds’ that exist outside the brain. I have hundreds and hundreds of them stacked on shelves of my book-case. The invention of writing made it possible to preserve some of the contents of a human brain permanently.
Every book is a little window to the contents of the brain of its writer. Some of course tell very little of the true thought of the writer, but some great books can act as true gates to another human mind.
When I press these little buttons to produce symbols on this screen to be transported over the vast oceans to my friends in Philippines or America, I am, in fact, extending my brain to reach other people. Boggles the mind, sometimes.

The study of how the human brain works has seen a fantastic rise in knowledge. We know immensely more of every single facet and function of the brain than we did 50 or even ten years ago.
Neurobiology, neurology and all other fields of research of the brain and mind have advanced in bounds and leaps. We have seen an amazing rise in understanding how our brain works in a very few years with the coming of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other techniques.

Added 31.1.2012; Julian Baggini must have been reading this blog......

Similar rise in understanding is sadly lacking in philosophy. It femains all too often often stuck in the old trenches that were dug ages ago. So, if you want to know and understand more how human brain or ‘mind’ works, you nowadays won't find help in philosophy at all, but in science.
One of the main reasons for this apparent lack of development is the strange ancient belief in immortality of some kind of 'soul' or 'mind'. This idea has made also many philosophers supportive to ideas that would make it possible to retain this ancient belief.

This belief is, of course, an old one. According to some anthropologists it is based on the fact that the memory of a dead person persists in our mind as if he would be still alive in our minds. On the other hand, the written word has made it possible to preserve the contents of the human mind and make it 'immortal'.
On the other hand, if you believe in a thing like immortal soul, you need to first renounce evolution. If you believe that a 'soul' is a purely human property, you need to believe that humans have existed always just as they are, or you end up in trouble.

The very first mammals were rat-sized four-legged creatures. Did they have a 'soul' that was reborn in other little mammals? If you resolve that hurdle, in the end you need to go all the way and to decide if also the first one-cell creatures also had a 'soul', or was just the idea of a ‘soul’ developed with the birth of the spoken language?
The answer is inevitably the latter. The idea of a ‘soul’ is a similar attempt to simplify a complex issue as the idea of a ‘mind’ is.

One thought still; the idea of reincarnation was quite natural one in the times when there was no idea of genes and genetics. Suddenly there just was this spitting image of the demised uncle as the new nephew.
Nobody knew how different features pass differently and can jump over generations and so on. The idea of reincarnation was just an easy way out of a problem. The sorry fact is that the less you know about biology, the easier it is to retain these ancient beliefs, and the more you know, the more difficult it becomes.

However, in fields like biology and scientific research of the brain and human cognition there are things that we can be even extremely certain of. Of course, we learn more all the time. This new knowledge will inevitably always change also the existing ideas that are stored in the brain.
During the whole recent explosion in our knowledge of how the human mind works, there has never been presented new scientific ideas or findings that would in any way support the alleged separateness of the ‘mind’ and brain.

On the contrary, it has become possible to explain processes and features that were quite in-explainable a few decades ago. In fact, we start to understand now how all of the main function of the brain like emotions, thoughts, reflexes are created and handled in the brain.
There still are these old belief-systems whose followers want so dearly to believe that an invisible part of a human does not die at the death of his body. They are ready desperately to grab any idea that would allow them to retain their belief in that mind is somehow separate from the brain.
However, no reliable evidence of any such thing has ever been presented. When the brain dies permanently, your brain and your ‘mind’ do cease to function and in practice cease to exist, even if your body is kept going artificially.

PS. This little essay is based largely on work done by Steven Pinker. However, there are also dozens of lectures, articles and books by many other people working in the field of studying of the human mind that have had an influence.

(This piece was extended and totally refurbished at 22th of January, 2012)

Comments

One of the most fascinating phenomenas in economic downturns is that many people really can still be lead to believe that the unwillingness of unemployed to work is causing the numbers of unemployed to swell.
Of course, the right-wing conservatives are here just out to change the real source of blame from non-working economy and enterprises to those who are laid off and unemployed, who are the real victims of every economic downturn.

However, it is fantastic always to see how any person could fall for this kind of trickery, but there really are people who fall for this.
It is just pure and utter idiocy to claim that in slumping economy all the people who are currently unemployed would find jobs if they just would want. There just not are such jobs anywhere. However, it seems for many too hard to get this simple fact.

Turning the issue of unemployment upside down, to something that is wholly caused by the people who do not want jobs, is just utter idiocy. Of course, there are also many lazy people. However the great majority of people who get laid off in all economic downturns cannot simply be made of lazy people, as they get employed again when things get better and there are job-openings again.

There are qualities in the human mind which do make this black magic possible. We have a tendency to think about individual issues through real-world examples. As the human mind is restricted in its capacity we also tend to see issues though just one kind of example at a time.
When a social conservative tells us about all of lazy people who do not just want to work, we can easily create a mental image of neighbors lazy nephew why just lives in a sofa watching tv and playing video-games.
When it is fed with enough vigor, this mental image can push all other possible images concerning the same issue from our minds. We are not given the opportunity to replace it, for example, with the image of hard-working welder who was laid off after 25 years in the job, because his job was transferred to China, which just could be much more typical case.

However, the most difficult part here is the secret envy. A big part of working people are employed in jobs that give them no real satisfaction, just money. Its extremely natural that they envy people who don’t have to follow time-schedules that hang on as a heavy burden on them.
On the other hand, when people are taught from day one of their lives that work is the only valuable thing in life, they often cannot admit the burden that work places on them even for themselves. This kind of ambivalence can then find an outlet in the hatred of those who do not currently have work at all and who are also free of this burden.

The most fantastic thing is how some people seem to live in a completely history-less environment, where there is no past or future; just the present. They judge people only on the basis of what they are just now.
They just don’t realize that, for example, the majority of the nine percent of the work force of the United States who are just now unemployed are not unemployed because they would not want to work, but because nobody wants to employ them.
If somebody needs to be punished, would we rather not want to punish the employers who will rather hire people in China and India than in their home country?

If unemployment rises because people do not want to work, how could one explain that it always goes down when new jobs are created in the economy? Why in earth people would be lazy only in the economic downturns.
Western societies have sailed through unscathed the last 70 years, when they have supported their more unfortunate members when they have gone through a bit tougher times. Times will so often get better and most of all so many people can and will eventually change.

It is amazing to hear time after time from social conservatives how people are what they are and we should never hope for the better. In western nations millions of people deemed to be unsocial scum have changed their lives. They have married have kids and jobs, even if they have gone through tough spots at some point of their lives.
Leaving people in trouble without the possibility to survive without retorting to crime at rough times would be just plain idiocy and extremely bad policy for society.

PS.

“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”

- right-wing US presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.

Dear reader, how does this sound to you? In fact, when read literally, it would mean that losing your job could become a death sentence, as you die if you are not given any food. Do you think that it would be just fair to kill off all lazy people? One is lead to think also what kind of panels would do the judging? It would of course be interesting to know, how long would you need to be without work before you would be left to die without food?

Comments

For me, the greatest military and political leaders are those who have won battles and wars with cunning and strategy or who have avoided war altogether, but most of all those who have had the bravery not to go on fighting lost wars, but who have had the guts to seek peace at the right moment.
On the other end of this spectrum are the villainous military leaders, who will not accept defeat and who will fight to the last of their supporters.

The latest example of this hideous group of people is of course Moammar Qaddafi, who was given ample opportunities to retire to foreign shores to spend the rest of his life in exile. However, he declined and in the end caused the needless destruction of large areas of his home country and also of his own home town, Sirte.
I don’t know why many people have trouble in recognizing the extremely plain evilness of not giving up of an armed combat in those cases when it has been clearly already lost.

The answer is of course part of the perverse logic of the war, where most of the normal values that humans hold dear in everyday life are reversed.
In matters concerning war foolhardiness is praised, stupid, unneeded deaths in the act of bravado are hold in high esteem, and all too often even acts of stubbornly seeking the death in pointless and unneeded last stands are admired as acts of great courage.
This thinking is so deeply embedded in our society that I think that many of the people reading this have trouble understanding that there would be anything wrong with it.

However, the military or political leaders who refuse to give up a clearly lost cause do all too often immense damage to their own home countries and cause immense suffering and pain to their fellow countrymen, even if also needless blood is spilled on the other side too.
Hitler is, of course, an all too easily picked candidate to this group, but the Japanese leadership which let the American firebomb all of their major cities to ashes without blinking an eye, is of course a major war criminal in this respect. If we go further in the history of the human race, for example the horrid and utter destruction of large areas of Central Europe in 30 Years War was a direct result of either side being unable to accept defeat and accept any kind of compromise.

A much harder thing to accept for many is that the real reason why the Vietnamese people had to live through over 15 years of horrid, continious warfare that did cost the lives of between one or three million people was because the Communist leaders of North Vietnam saw any kind of loss of life as acceptable, if they just could reach their political goals.
A group of leaders who will lead several million of their fellow countrymen to their deaths just to gain more political power and reach a Utopian economic goal just cannot be seen to have done anything praiseworthy.
Admiring the stubbornness of the Vietnamese leaders is like admiring a father who lets his family starve to death over a long fight over grazing rights, just to show that he was right.

In a similar vein, it is a fact of life that Afghanistan has never been really subdued by an another state, but admiring the Afghan leaders for their unwillingness to ever to seek peace or any kind of compromise with their adversaries is extremely odd thing to do.
It has been even said that in the recent wars in Afghanistan the Afghans have been somehow 'morally superior'. However, I think that the stubbornness and inability of their leaders to seek peace on any reasonable terms does not make them morally superior in any way.
It just tells about the inability of these leaders to make compromises because of an ideology that they have adopted.

In fact, a moral view of the Afghan conflict would be to say that to inflict tens of years of continuous war on one of the poorest nation on earth is a highly immoral act to do.
Of course, this poverty is also one of the central reasons why this war has been going on for so long. If the Afghan society would have been more economically developed, the disruption that is caused by a war would have made its continuation very difficult after a certain point,

However, in a poor agrarian society all new possibilities for living on war and the money lavishly given by foreign donors and gotten from the drug trade did offset the immense hardships that were inevitably brought about by war.
The Afghan nation as a whole has not benefited and will never benefit in any way from these wars, even if the religious and tribal leaders have grown their power and stature even immensely.

At the same time, there is a whole generation now who does see that the normal way to earn a mans living is to trade in drugs and blow other people up. It is terrifying even toimagine in what kind of moral void the tens of thousands young men do live, who have never seen anything other than war in their whole lives.
They have all too often nothing else but their misogynist, repressive and morally corrupt local Jihadist version of Islam to turn to. If someone claims that this ideology is morally more advanced than, in fact, any other religion-based moral system humans have invented, he does simply not know what he is talking about.

In the end, nations do not win wars because they are somehow morally more advanced than others or most of all because they would be carriers of a truer ideology. Nations who start wars want to subdue other nations to their will in some respect or they simple want to have something that the other nation is not willing to give them voluntarily.
A feeling of moral superiority can of course help the war effort even greatly, and at modern times the party that has been attacked often has a definite edge over the attacker in this respect.

However, in the end all wars are won by the nations which are more capable or enduring in the battlefield. Short wars seem to be won by parties who can muster more powerful or technically advanced forces to the battlefield.
On the other hand, long wars seem to be won by those or who can make their followers endure longest the hardships and suffering that are inevitably brought about by the war. If we put it more bluntly, they are won by the party who does care less for the true well-being of their own countrymen.

PS. This piece was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker and his fine book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes" that I am currently reading.

Comments

I am about the delve into a thorny issue that has been topmost in my mind for a while, but on which I have not dared to venture. It is about how art can distort reality. I know that just uttering this sentence will send many or even most of my readers on their hind legs, as saying a thing like this just is blasphemy for very many people.
The problem is that a thing like this will cause a defense mechanism to be activated. If one is a friend of art and culture, it so easily happens that all critique of art is unconsciously seen as an attack on ones basic values.
The sorry result of this can also be that any real analysis of the critique itself becomes impossible. Still, I will boldly try to convey my ideas even is a thorny issue that can so easily backfire.

The worst form of lying is the telling of just one side of a complex story. This is at its worst in fiction, when a successful novel can transform the view of a whole generation on an issue.
The writer does not need to lie consciously, he or she just needs to omit mention even the possibility that there are other very different ways to see the issue at hand. In such a case, the writer is not lying, but the result can be a complete distortion of reality.
I know that I am not saying anything very original here, as anybody can see this thing happening all around them all the time. However, it is strange how rarely this issue comes up in public discussions.

I think that there is an subconscious process going on. The danger could be that this would work both ways; also those works of art that support my own pet ideas and ideologies would be scrutinized if looking at the factual trustworthiness of works of art would be more common. I suspect that this is one of the hidden reasons why there is so little talk about this area.
Is it also so that the 'freedom of artist' creates so strong protective cover around their works that people do not dare dispute the one-sidenedness of so many works in the fear of stepping on the artistic freedom of other people?

I think that first and foremost we need to preserve the freedom for all people to write or paint or film just whatever they would ever want. However, I also think it should be balanced with the strong will to point out the factual falsehoods and one-sidenedness also in the fields like literature, cinema or theatre.
I must again and again stress that all artists must always have the freedom to create whatever they want. I don’t want to mess with that very basic right at all. I just want to remind that all works of art are always subjective windows to the world.
The more different windows one does take the pain to look out to the world, the more complete our view of the world will be. We just need to remember that we can see only a small slice of the world out of a single window.

Admittedly, great art is rarely born out of 'on the other hand and on the other hand' -thinking. It is just too bad that reality is built in that way and all great art will inevitably distort reality; the more forceful and more poignant art is, the greater also the distortion can be.
I think that this eternal problem will never be solved. In fact, it does not need to be ‘solved’, as in practice people just need to be aware that art is not life, but all to often just life with its true complexity and vagueness taken away.

Art imitates life. However, to make interesting (and most of all sellable) art you so often need make life more interesting, more straightforward and more uniform than it really is. The very simple act of following the conventions of an art-form will very often distort the view of reality that is in the end presented, even if you real aim could be just telling your story as faithfully as you can.
For me personally, however, the real problem are the artists who have a hidden agenda, that they will never admit aloud. It pains to see stories whose real purpose can be seen from page one, but the writer never admits it.
I have no trouble with art that has a real purpose and an agenda, when the purpose and agenda of a work are clearly to be seen, the problem for me are just the stealthy ones.
For me at least, best art is born out of a wish to change people or society in some way, or just to drive an important point home. This need and will just need to be visible, as the distortion of reality that is involved then also becomes more clear.

There is still one more danger. There is the danger that a great artist is seen to have powers and wisdom that he or she does not and, in fact, cannot ever have. A vague enough and multi-layered enough way of saying things can make people believe that you have found answers also to questions for which, in reality, you just cannot have any kind of real answers.
The very skillful use of language can hide away the fact that the answers are just opinions, guesses and shots in the dark. An artist can have exceptionally good opinions and he can make wonderful guesses, but it is too easy to foreget that they are still just opinions and guesses, even when they are extremely skillfully expressed.
People love certainty and the danger is that a great artist can offer certainty also in areas where none can ever exist. I know that many people find this comforting, but there is the danger of making the reality conform to these imagined answers.

The Stochastic Motivational Analysis that I have spoken before in this blog may help even in analyzing the works of art that we meet. Basically you just need to try answer these questions:

1. What kind of personal ideological connections the artist has to the issues at hand?
2. Why is an artist interested in just in the one idea he or she is presenting?
3. Why does the artist want us have just that piece of information, but not some others?
4. Do the institutions or country that the artist identifies with have some kind of special relationship with the issue? Can this relationship affect his or her ideas on it?
5. Can financial considerations be a reason why an artist is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
6. Is the artist just following some current, popular trend?

Comments

Human kind will never be united under any single ideology of any kind. However, I think that the central ideas of humanism can with time creep in from the windows left even a little ajar and from the cracks even in the closed doors everywhere in the world.
Humanism will never take over the world and the followers of humanism will never even rule anywhere. However, exposure to the humanistic ideas and ideals can slowly cause smallest of changes in the people who rule the nations and the world. In fact, this extremely slow change has already been going on in the west for hundreds of years already.

The central ideas of humanism have already changed the zeitgeist or “the spirit of times” dramatically. Thanks to quite universal spreading of humanistic ideas of the common human value of all human beings, things like feudal rule over serfs or slavery are not publicly accepted in any form anymore, anywhere.
However, humanism is never something that is paraded victoriously on the streets to the sounds of the trumpets. It is something that is learned by reading a wise book for a moment before going to sleep.

Humanism really is not a conquering ideology, but it is just an attitude and a way of thinking that can change people for the better. It will not transform people in a flash of light, but it can change peoples attitudes towards other people a little bit by a little bit during many, many years of learning.
There will never be a world that would be ruled by humanism, but we can slowly and tediously crawl towards accepting and respecting people who are different from us.

However, humanism is not a fixed ideology like a religion. It will always live and change when our societies and their needs do change. Humanism is for me personally also about striking the right balance between the need of the society and the needs of an individual; even if this is not included in the normal definition of it.
Where this delicate right balance is to be found depends on the current state of the society and the status of individuals. No universal answer can really exist.

The important thing is that one must be able to base ones ideas on a solid foundation and for me humanism offers this foundation. However, humanism will never be a vehicle for achieving personal power and glory for its followers.
As far as I can gather, humanist parties have never won elections on a purely humanistic platform. I highly suspect that such a thing will never happen.

The greatest single thing about humanism is that it can make all other ideas and ideologies softer and more human. Every ideology can be softened and pacified by a dose of humanism.
A hundred years ago capitalism was saved from itself by western socialism that was dosed in the ideas of humanism. By making the capitalists share the dividends of capitalism even a bit more evenly, these movements created the new mass-markets that the capitalism needed to expand and also the already lurking dark social crisis was averted.

To solve the current crisis of capitalism, the new rise of humanism just could be the medicine again. Moving the zeitgeist from the current glorifying of open greed to sharing, taking care and being members of communities just could make a world of difference in the long run.
As always is the case with humanism, there will not be a revolution, but just the slow evolution of zeitgeist towards a more healthy direction if all goes well.

ps. Here is my guide for stepping away from reality in 10 easy steps

1 step away :
Actual industrial production.
2 steps away:
Retail and wholesale of actual products.
3 steps away:
Actually financing the industry and trade.
4 steps away:
Marketing of actual products.
5 steps away:
Creating international brands
6 steps away:
Selling and buying of industries to form international conglomerates.
7 steps away:
Creating financial tools to facilitate takeovers and selling and buying of industries.
8 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess corporate profits.
9 steps away:
Creating financial markets for excess capital that is not needed in actual economy or in other words tools for just betting on the performance of actual economy.
10 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess capital that has been created from winning bets by the extensive betting on the real economy. There is just is so excessive amounts of unneeded capital that soon one needs to place bets on the bets that are placed on the bets.

ps. This little essay was originally inspired by a Facebook-chat with Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who is an Iraqi humanist currently living in Malyasia. He is also the admin of Facebook-page for Global Secular Humanist Movement at http://www.facebook.com/GSHMP

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Apparently the Greek philosopher Epicurus did produce over 300 books, treatises and studies during his lifetime. Of these, only three short private letters and a few fragments does remain. On the other hand, of the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle there does exist hundreds and hundreds of pages of speculation on all kinds of things between heaven and earth.
Similarly, nearly all of the works of Anaxagoras, who dramatically revolutionized Greek philosophy, have been lost, but the works of Plato have been extremely well preserved.

Why is that? The simple answer is of course that the Christian Church which took over the Roman empire in the fourth century did like Aristotle and Plato, and it did dislike Epicurus and Anaxagoras.
Christians did strongly dislike also many other Greek philosophers, of whose works there often remains just small fragment or even just mentions in the works of those Greek philosophers that were sanctioned by the church in the worst cases.

Of course, much of this material would have been lost anyway. In those times the old books just needed regular new copying, when the old versions started to decay. One can well argue, that only the ones that would be of interest to somebody would have been preserved anyhow.
But here comes my point. If Christians would not have taken over the Roman Empire and they would not have thoroughly erased all other religions and philosophical schools from its realms, there would certainly have been a extraordinarily different situation concerning also many of the earliest documents which did contain the seeds of rational thinking.

This is of course just pure speculation, but if Epicurean communities would have been allowed to continue to exist even after the onslaught of Christian domination in the fourth century, they would undoubtedly have existed for much longer time.
In fact, nobody can honestly say if some of them would exist today. These communities would also have had an extremely strong interest in preserving the words of their master and other thinkers who supported a similar way of thinking.

The main reason why this did not happen was of course the total intolerance of the victorious Christians. In hundred years they totally eradicated the old Roman religion and dozens of other religions and philosophical schools.
They did it such with such force, that these ideas were not left lingering even in the remotest villages in the corners of the empire. All competing belief-systems were just annihilated from the Empire of Rome. This includes of course all of the earlier, rival versions of Christianity.

The victorious version of Christianity then promulgated their favorite Greek philosophers or Aristotle and Plato as ‘the great Greek philosophers’, while most of the others were hardly seen as worth a mention.
This idea was cemented during the following millennium of Christian rule in Europe. The idea of Aristotle and Plato as the special ‘great philosophers’ was funnily enough eagerly adopted even by the Muslims, who soon saw how the ideas of these philosophers could support their religious ideology, but the ideas of the most of the modern Greek philosophers did not fit in as neatly.

It was in the end the work of the Christian Church to promote Plato and Aristotle and belittle almost all other great Greek philosophers of the Greek Golden Age. As we have no access to the works of Epicurus and many others, we simply can not know how they would have outshone these favorites of the Church in the eyes of the modern man.
The other unfortunate consequence of all this is that the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies soon did become the things that all other ideas were compared with, even if they did contain same extremely flawed thinking.

In the end, they were promoted to the position of the official philosophers of the church. Of course, some of their more incompatible texts needed also to be hidden away.
Luckily for the Church they were among the extremely rare breed among the Greek philosophers. Their philosophies did namely include an idea of god in a way that was nearly compatible with the ideas of the Church, if and when one stretches things a bit. This kind of thinking was, in fact, quite rare among the first-rate Greek philosophers of the time.

All this did lead to a situation where this, in fact, quite rare way of thinking was seen as a norm also in the field of philosophy, even if the idea of an omnipotent god found favor among very few of the best minds of the Golden Age of Greece.
Of course we can just speculate how and where the history of philosophy would have turned, if the major works of some of the greatest Greek philosophers would have been preserved. However, one can safely assume that the role or Aristotle and Plato did play in the later development of philosophy would have been very, very different.

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One of the strongest forces that does make people act in generally approved ways is the very basic human need to belong to a group. This need leads people to act in a way which this group does approve of. The central problem with sociopaths and psychopaths is they do not have this kind of social restrains.
On the other hand, many religious people think that a religion is needed to create the moral inhibitors that prohibit people from doing bad things.

However, the real big thing here could,in fact, be the creation and maintaining of groups that can create the need to act according to what is seen as appropriate by members of this group. In fact, it can be of quite secondary importance what exactly is the ideology of this group, as long as the need to belong to it can cause a pressure to behave in a generally approved way.
So, the main function of, for example, Christianity in this respect could, in fact, to be a tool in the creation of strongly binding groups in which people really want to belong. The need to be accepted by this group could be the real force that does keep people on the narrow road.

However, a similar drive for group cohesion can be created around any kind of ideology. This is the reason why belonging to an atheist, agnostic, deist or even Epicurean community can often have a similar effect in the behavior of people than belonging to a religious community can have.
In fact, the very act of identifying oneself with a group that is strongly disapproved by a majority can create an even stronger need to act in a righteous way.
Members of an minority can come to look at themselves as public representatives of this community. Because of this they can be at times extremely conscious of a need to act in an exemplary way. They just might not want to blemish the reputation of the community if they do feel a strong enough need to belong to it and protect the reputation of this community.

So, a person who is drifting in some kind of ideological void can benefit even enormously from identifying oneself with an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean community. So, even if many Christians seem to think that atheists are immoral, the simple act of strongly identifying oneself with an atheist community can, in fact, have even a strong effect. People can in such situations really become more conscious of how their actions will affect their surroundings.

On the other hand, when people take any kinds of conscious steps towards assuming a new worldview they normally do confront ideas that are not necessarily confronted headlong in everyday life. A person who is inching towards, for example, atheist or epicurean world-view normally reads and thinks about the big issues in life in a quite different way that people do in normal situations. Things like morality, responsibilities or ideas of why we love and hate can be processed in a quite new fashion.
Atheism, agnosticism, deism or epicureanism is not normally accepted in a way religion is so often accepted as part of the cultural package that is inherited from parents. A fact of life is that religion are often learned in a quite automated way, without people ever really thinking what it is all about at all.

So, the thing that really often differentiates an atheist from the big mass of religious believers is that he or she has very often devoted much personal time and thought to think about the ‘big issues’ in life. The big thing here is that the very process of thinking over these ‘big issues of life’ often does make a person more aware of their meaning and importance.
When a person is more aware of the importance of keeping up things like social cohesion, he or she is more prone to act according to these ideas in real life too.

So, choosing an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean world-view does not mean at all that a person would become immoral, but in fact, often it does mean that a person becomes much more sensitive to moral issues than before this transition. Of course, there are bad and immoral atheists also, just as there are bad and immoral Christians or Hindu’s.
However, I am just saying just the process of challenging of one’s worldview in any more adult stage of life can really make a person more responsible and caring or in other ways 'more moral'. In this situation, people are simply forced to think through some of the very basic questions in life, that can have remained unexplored and unanswered in the flow of everyday life before that.

Quite another thing is that accepting a rational world view often does make people take a hard look at things that are labeled moral or immoral by different religions. A rational person does not, for example, normally accept the ideas that using contraceptives or masturbation would be immoral.
Religious people can, of course, have great difficulty in understanding that many of the things that are taught in their religion to be highly immoral, are immoral only in their own religion. They can can have hard time in understanding that these things are not part of any kind of universal morality, but just culturally produced, even if often ancient ideas of how humans should behave themselves.

The prohibitions against stealing, killing people and lying are quite universal, as they really are needed to keep any society going. However, religions have often succeeded in making their followers believe that all of the sexual restrictions that these religions have marketed would be somehow be part some kind of a ‘universal morality’.
When an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean rejects the religions as a source of morality, they do not reject the importance of having a moral code in a society, but they just reject one source that does claim to be a source of such code.

However, it is, in fact, quite understandable that this rejection is interpreted by the religious people as a rejection of morality, as they have generally been taught all their lives that there cannot be morality without religion.
Before they can accept that people can be quite moral creatures without religions, they need first to understand that the need for having a moral code is a feature of all human societies that are quite independent of religions, even if religions are generally used to enforce this code.
Most of all they need to understand that most humans (excluding sociopaths and psychopaths) have an inbuilt moral grammar and all societies do provide the moral code that follows this grammar.

They need also to understand that in the field of sexual moral there are no such universal moral codes. The area of sexuality is, in fact, the field of human life that is most tightly tied with the culture and cultural ideas of ideal behavior.
The ideas that concern accepted forms of sexuality do differ wildly from society to society and even inside the same society from time to time. The hardest thing to understand maybe is, however, that rejecting the restrictive sexual moral ideas of a religion does not mean at all that a person could not have a strong moral code in all other fields of life.

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For once I have an easy question in the headline. The very simple answer is that theology is not science, as it is a just study of the basic principles of a religion and the study of its ‘holy’ writings. It has, in fact, very little in common with the normal scientific study of history, for example, even if modern theology can well use methodology and terminology that are borrowed from the world of real science.
The biggest difference between theology and real science is that some of the basic claims in Christian theology, such as the role of religion as a source of morality or the position of the Bible as divine revelation, have to be accepted as unmovable and unchanging basic premises.

It is simply impossible to think that a theologian could work in an official capacity, if he would reject the Bible and claim that the real source of wisdom is in the Koran.
In real science there simply cannot be such unmovable and unchangeable basic assumptions. In real science one must be able to test and also reject all claims that are being made, if the need does arise.

Of course, there is also scientific study of religions, but it normally is not made in the theology departments, but in a separate field of religious studies that are normally not connected to any kind of religious ideologies.
In the real scientific study of religions also the Bible can be studied as a historical document which does give light to the world where its writers did live and of their hopes and expectations.
On the other hand, in stark contrast to religious studies theology basically just tries to find suitable questions for answers that are already known, which is the exact opposite to how real science does work.

Scientific study of religions uses scientific methods to study all religions. It does also study Christianity, but Christian theology is looking for new justification for holding up this religious ideology and it also trains workers for the religious organizations.
If Christianity would have withered away some time ago, it is quite certain that theology would not be studied anymore in our universities, but the scientific study of religions would go on as it is now.

On the other hand, If a Marxist world-revolution would have taken place, we would quite probably have scientific study of Marxist dogmas in our universities. This field of study just could be extremely similar to the modern theology, even if we know now that Marxism is not science, but just an ideology.
Of course, people study and learn many things in the field of theology also that are quite scientific in their outlook, but the basic reason for the very existence of theology is always an ideological one, not scientific.
We have no other discipline of science that would have been founded to study and most of all support just one form of ideology, which happens to be a religion in this case.

Theology was born to train new workers for the religious organizations that are forwarding the Christian religious ideology. This fact is not changed by the fact that theology has adopted many of the scientific methods, as its ideological nature has not been changed, as these scientific methods are not used in an objecticve way that they are used in other disciplines of science.
Admittedly, there is a lot of real scientific study that is done in the theology-departments throughout the world, the more so, as the religious organizations also want real and reliable information of the impact of their work and how the world that surrounds them does develop.
However, deep down the whole discipline of theology does exist only to serve one religious ideology and its needs. Because of this fact theology is not real science as it stands now.

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