There was a philosophy that came to be called deism which provided a very good cover for any atheist who wanted cover because it basically said there probably is a god. But he or it or whatever doesn't enter into everyday human life. There's no direct everything in that real world and in our lives goes on separately from that. And so of course, if you're an atheist, but you don't want to say so because being explicitly atheist was quite dangerous still,. I really was very dangerous, still forget human to all sorts of trouble if you directly challenge the idea of the being a god at all.
Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.
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Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.
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