Word: humanistically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pivner, the all-too-common man, is a try at redoing Joyce's Mr. Bloom. While some shreds of humanist culture clung to Bloom, Pivner's brain is a sheer pulp of newspaper headlines, self-help manuals and radio commercials ("Hi, gang! Your friend Lazarus the Laughing Leper brings you radio's newest kiddies' program, The Lives of the Saints, sponsored by Necrostyle ... Don't forget, kids, Necrostyle, the wafer-shaped sleeping pill...
Said Psychologist Knight: "To the humanist, moral behavior is primarily kind, disinterested, self-transcending . . . whereas to the Christian, moral behavior is behavior in accordance with God's will. Of course, in nine cases out of ten, it comes to the same thing in practice, but the sanctions are different. And I must say the humanist sanctions seem to me much better, much more reasonable, and much easier to put across to children. If we tell a child that he mustn't knock smaller children about, that he wouldn't like it if others...
...think the central difficulty of [humanist] moral teaching is its danger of self-righteousness. You know the story of the man who set out to correct his moral slackness. He watched himself for a month, and honestly tried to be more thoughtful, more helpful, more honest and all the rest. And then he found he was jolly well pleased with his progress. And he thought: 'Good heavens, I am becoming a prig! I must learn humility.' So he concentrated on humility for a week, and at the end of it he gave himself...
...Humanist Barrenness. As the debate wound up, the British press continued to argue about the BBC's propriety in airing Psychologist Knight's anti-religious opinions. "The attacks on Mrs. Knight do Christians little credit," editorialized the conservative weekly Spectator. "It is not Christians, but her fellow scientific humanists, assuming that there are any, who have reason to be distressed by her broadcasts. They can hardly relish having the utter barrenness of their beliefs formulated and widely publicized . . . The BBC deserves congratulations for these broadcasts. The churches must press for as many more of them as possible...
Bossy Female. Although some of Britain's most eminent newspaper editorialists started swinging at Mrs. Knight, philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, have been saying the same things for years. Clergymen and letter-to-the-editor writers soon joined in. The issue: Should the government-owned BBC have given Humanist Knight...