History & overview · every faith gets one
One life, no supervision, and the whole of the responsibility.
The organised non-religious stance: no god, no revelation, no afterlife, and ethics built from reason and human sympathy rather than command. It has a founding document revised twice, an international federation of more than 120 member organisations, and — the part most people never hear about — a licensed clergy in all but name, conducting weddings that are legally valid in Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Jersey and Guernsey and legally invalid in England and Wales.
Why it is filed this way
Whether humanism is a religion is a live argument that humanists themselves take both sides of. The 1933 Manifesto called it one deliberately; the 2003 successor does not. United States courts have treated it as one for constitutional purposes — Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) lists Secular Humanism and Ethical Culture among religions that do not teach belief in God — which humanist bodies use when claiming equal access to chaplaincy and resent when opponents use it to argue that state schools teach a religion.
The founding
A group of Unitarian professors and students at the University of Chicago who had moved away from theism organised the Humanist Fellowship in 1927 and began publishing The New Humanist. In 1933 thirty-four signatories, among them John Dewey and a row of Unitarian ministers, put their names to A Humanist Manifesto, which called humanism a religion and said so repeatedly. The American Humanist Association was formed in 1941 when two of those ministers, Curtis W. Reese and John H. Dietrich, reorganised the successor body.
No single founder — Secular Humanism accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. A natural universe, knowable by inquiry, with no purpose supplied from outside.
The divine. No god, and no substitute installed in the position. What the Amsterdam Declaration puts there instead is responsibility: since nothing external supplies meaning or rescue, the obligation to act well falls entirely on human beings, now, without appeal. Humanists are emphatic that this is a positive commitment and not merely the absence of belief, which is the distinction they draw between humanism and atheism..
Death and after. None. Humanist funerals are explicit that this is the end, and are designed around that rather than around consolation..