Why are there no humanist funerals?

[Valin]

Religion and Other Curiosities:

Peter Berger

1/10/13

 

On December 29, 2012, the New York Times carried an article by Samuel Freedman, who is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and who regularly writes in the religion column of the Times. The article is entitled “In a Crisis, Humanists seem Absent”. It dealt with the strong religious presence in the aftermath of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. At the interfaith service attended by President Obama there were clergy representing the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Baha’I faiths. The families of all the murdered children requested funerals under religious auspices.

 

Freedman asked a simple question: Where were the humanists in all of this? He made clear that he was not charging some sort of discrimination: An interfaith service rather logically did not include people without a faith, and the bereaved parents obviously had the right to decide on the type of funeral for their children. But the question suggests itself given the religious demography of America, especially as it has recently been reported on by the Pew Research Center (an organization whose findings are competently arrived at). According to Pew, about 20% of Americans reply “none” when asked their religious affiliation, a figure that reaches about one third with respondents under the age of thirty. “Humanists” is one term often used to refer to the “nones”, who are a very mixed group. They include a large number of people who are quite religious (about 80% say that they believe in God, and many of them regularly pray), but who have not found a church in which they feel at home. “Humanists” are also described as a category embracing both atheists and agnostics – respectively, people who are sure that there is no God, and people who don’t know. These are very different positions. Be this as it may, if one subsumes all the “nones” under the category of “humanists”, there are certainly more of them than Jews or Muslims, not to mention Baha’is. Why don’t people think of turning to them when seeking comfort in the midst of grief?

 

 

(Snip)

 

Where is Epstein wrong? Yes, of course a religious community can offer comfort of the same kind as any other community. But religion offers something much more central than community in the abstract: It offers a community gathered around the message that death is not the final word about an individual life and nothingness not the final destiny of the universe. At any rate this is the message shared by the Abrahamic faiths that came to Newtown. Whether this message is true or not, humanism in the sense of “no faith” cannot offer a plausible alternative.

 

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Why I'm not a humanist?

 

When a humanist can explain in small words why this is beautiful...then then I'll give them a shot.