a researcher on cumbey's blog said "though the Humanist movement
was huge and went back to the 1930s, every library I checked only had
reference to Humanism in the Renaissance in the card catalog. Librarians
didn't know what I was talking about. I could only go the Humanist
magazines, get their Manifestos that included signers I was aware of
the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies because of the connection
with Great Books. I also went to the Encyclopedia of Associations. Yet
somehow librarians knew nothing about Humanism" sounds like the New
Age could also be defined not only as spiritual and occultic plus politics,
but as a mix of the foregoing and secular humanism, which is usually
atheistic and rationalistic and not interested in spirituality or occultism.
politics, however, yes. Note the Great Books reference.




I was handed this mini library the Great Books when I was a teen. I read
Freud looked for phallic symbols like telephone polls and decided he was
full of crap. (Even Freud had to admit that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
of course that's before Bill Clinton used an unlit cigar as a dildo on Monica
Lewinsky who wanted sex I guess, but he was avoiding that to avoid adultery.
hmmmm. well it might not have been full on adultery he did, but it qualified
as cheating.)




I noticed Karl Marx in the bunch. Why is this there? I wondered. he was
supposed to be bad, so why is he in "great books," aren't "great books"
supposed to be good? (I later found out by "great" they didn't mean valuable
so much as of great influence not greatness in the sense of goodness.)




I read Aquinas, too complicated I quit. I read Augustine Confessions and
City of God that was an easier read, a hilarious critique of paganism and their
"select gods" and in general made some good points. The City of God if I recall
right argues that the two cities, of God and of man or of the devil the world the
flesh whatever is wrong in action and/or orientation though it may have some
appearance of good at times and "cities" in a metaphorical sense, coexist until
the Second Coming when the City of God will take over and roust the other one.




I thought Augustine was a jerk for kicking out his woman (worse I later found
she was mother of his son) instead of making it legal, worse his mother Monica
who was praying for his conversion wanted his concubine gone so he could
marry some classy woman she had line up as a socially useful marriage. This kind
of thing probably didn't go over well with God Who took a while to answer her
prayers for Augustine's conversion and when He did so, Augustine went for
monasticism and not marriage. So much for Monica's ambitions. Augustine's son
however was raised by Monica so she didn't leave her grandson motherless she had
some decency. The concubine left saying that no one could ever take Augustine's
place in her heart. What a mess. This was of course after the legalization and later
state religion status gaining of Christianity, so a lot of people joined who were
nominal and focused on the world and the flesh in their less obviously sinful
manifestations. It is one thing to weaken social rank problems by Christianizing
them, its another thing to make them the priority in a technically Christian context.




Augustine went on to shut down Pelagian heretical arguments, but created some
problems on his own that didn't bear fruit until the Calvinist disaster in the Reformation.
(Pelagianism denies original sin or ancestral sin has any impact on the individual, and
that one could live a virtuous life and gain paradise without Jesus Christ's work on
the Cross for us. Presently Orthodoxy is plagued with pelagian tendencies about
original sin, mislabeling it as personal guilt for Adam's sin then denying it, but in fact
it is about inherited result, the warp that came into Adam and Eve and passed to us.
A few deny even this, and say it is about the influences around us that lead us wrong.
Jesus Christ is the light that enlightens everyone coming into the world, so apparently
we have some kind of divine enlightenment to start with but because of our sin second
nature sooner or later turn from this to some extent. The Theotokos, the Virgin Mary,
apparently managed to not manifest this sin nature in action and is called immaculate
in that sense, not that she was free of it altogether, by us Orthodox, the transmission of
original/ancestral sin needed only to be blocked in Jesus' case or her womb cleansed
just before the Incarnation, no need for her to be born sin nature free. If that was
needed in order for Jesus to be "prelapsarian" then likewise her mother would need to
have been immaculate back to Eve. Perhaps recognizing this, and instead of rejecting
it as the absurdity it is accepting it, some have argued that the sin nature is only
inherited from the father. what you have you can pass on. if it is limited to a gene on
the male chromosome then no woman has the sin nature so how come all are sinners
to some extent, some very evil ? this is nonsense. The Council of Carthage appeals to
original sin in referring to infant baptism.)


The Secular Humanist movement and Theosophy and a range of stuff all worked in
the same general direction,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_Manifesto
and you can find the specific contents online. The general tone is that man is the
measure of all things and God is optional at best.