c. 1999 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) _ More than 100 academics and intellectuals, rejecting the irrationalism of the right’s fundamentalism and the left’s postmodernism, have called on humanity to “embrace its adulthood” and “leave behind the magical thinking and myth-making that are substitutes for tested knowledge of nature.”

The call comes in a new statement, “Humanist Manifesto 2000,” drafted by philosopher Paul Kurtz and signed by more than 100 humanists, including entertainer Steve Allen, author Arthur C. Clarke, anthropologist Paul Leakey, former Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., and nine Nobel laureates.

“Most world views accepted today are spiritual, mystical or theological in character,” the manifesto says. “They have their origins in pre-urban nomadic and agricultural societies of the past” and are not appropriate to the “post-industrial global information culture that is emerging.”

While humanism has often taken on religious fundamentalism, the new manifesto is also critical of so-called “postmodernism,” a philosophical movement rooted in liberal universities and seminaries “questioning the basic premises of modernity and humanism, attacking science and technology, and questioning humanist ideals and values.”

Still, some of its sharpest rhetoric was reserved for its theistic critics.

“Theological moral doctrines often reflect inherited, prescientific conceptions of nature and human nature,” the statement says. “Contradictory moral commandments can be drawn from this legacy, and differing religions frequently hold widely differing views on moral questions.

“Theists and transcendentalists have been both for and against slavery, the caste system, war, capital punishment, women’s rights and monogamy. Sectarian religionists have often slaughtered each other’s adherents with impunity. … We do not deny that religionists have done much good; what we deny is that religious piety is the sole guarantee of moral virtue.”

The new manifesto is the fifth major declaration issued by humanist intellectuals since the first, controversial statement in 1933 recommended a form of nontheistic humanism as an alternative to faith-based religions. Others came in 1973, 1980 and 1988.

Issued by the International Academy of Humanism, the new document calls for a shift _ both philosophical and practical _ to an all-encompassing, planetary outlook.

“As we enter the new millennium, we should not worry about Armageddon, but rather should untap the tremendous potentialities for human progress in the next century and beyond,” said Kurtz, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry, the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism.

In what could be the new statement’s most controversial section, the humanists call for a new planetary system of government, including the formation of a World Parliament they said would be a stronger and more effective version of the United Nations. Representatives would be elected on the basis of world population rather than national identity.

It also called for a transnational environmental monitoring agency to reduce planetary pollution and a transnational system of taxation that would include a tax on the gross national product of all nations to assist the underdeveloped areas to stabilize population growth and assist economic development.

Other proposals called for regulating multinational corporations and state monopolies, toughening the World Court and ending the veto in the United Nations’ Security Council.

The core ethical principle, according to the statement, is “the need to respect the dignity and worth of all persons in the world community.”

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“No doubt each person already recognizes multiple responsibilities relative to his or her social context: persons have responsibilities to family, friends, the community, city, state or nation in which they reside.

“We need, however, to add to these responsibilities a new commitment that has emerged _ a responsibility to persons beyond our national boundaries. Now, more than ever, we are linked morally and physically to each person on the globe, and the bell tolls for all when it tolls for one.”

Adherence to the core principle, the signers say, necessitates the “gradual de-emphasizing of national boundaries,” as well as the multicultural separatism they say is engendering hatred.

SE END ANDERSON