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Quix, Thanks for this. Even though a lot of it is Blue, I read it! I'm even going to print it and try to issue my own interminable comment.

With respect to "humanism":

I think this is a case where popular usage has drowned out a more precise technical usage. The popular usage I mean includes "secular humanism" or even "atheistic humanism."

Largely because of cruddy edumication, people aren't aware of the use of "humanism" to describe a kind of thinking that could be said to have begun to blossom around the 12th or 13th centuries and in response to some very inhumane sorts of thinking.

I do not mean by what follows to be defining humanism or even to be hitting its high points.

But suppose you have a bunch of people who think that humans are intrinsically evil and the such things are eating and sexual intercourse can never be less than so dreadfully evil that to be "perfect" one should abstain from both.

Or suppose you have a religion threatening Catholic Christendom from the east, the south, and the west. And suppose it teaches that the righteousness of God is so unrelated to our perception of righteousness, that our minds are so desperately far from any perception of the True and the Just, that God could command that one give oneself up to disobedience of him and to the consequent damnation, and that one would have a duty to obey that command, because God willed it. And suppose that both these groups taught that the idea of the Incarnation of God in human flesh was not only blasphemous but preposterous.

One response to those lines of thought would be to assert that, as part of Creation, man was good ab initio, and the by the Incarnation and the work of Christ generally man and all of creation had a hope of a future righteousness, goodness, and even holiness in which they (or some of them) participated on a very small and derivative scale right now.

And the response might also affirm that there was a real, valid, informative, and useful connection between the mental functioning of humans and the Truth of God, so that even the gentiles have SOME clue about what truly is beautiful, just, and good.

All these contentions work toward asserting a fundamental as well as eschatological dignity to mankind. Therefore, they are called "humanistic," although they hang on not only the law and the prophets, but also on the revelation of God in Christ, and in His Most Holy Word.

-- Man has a dignity (which he has mostly squandered) because God made him to have it. --

Now I will "work a problem" on the basis of Christian humanism:
Some years ago I drove into Charlottesville. A few minutes after I entered the bustling metropolis, the car in front of me swerved, and then continued on its way. This caused a little adrenaline dump and I was very alert, which is good, because a split second later I looked to my right and saw a toddler in nothing but pampers walking in the middle of a side street.

The question is what should I do? What does that toddler "deserve" and why?

What would you think of me if I said I was busy and went about my business. Or maybe I stopped at a pay phone (I didn't have a cell phone in those days.) Or maybe I called 911 from my cell -- as I could have done if this had happened less than a decade ago.

And if the toddler had been run down, well hey, I called 911, didn't I? Wasn't that above and beyond? It wasn't MY kid, after all ...

I would say that, unlike a squirrel or chipmunk, the right thing for me to do was to pull over and get that kid out of the street. And it was right because that kid, being made in the image of God, was due a kind of reverence, a kind of honor, a kind of care that was of a higher level and more demanding of me than what a chipmunk's "due" would be.

But if you answer that I am a sinful SOB and worse if I don't pick up that kid and get him off the street, then we have ethical problems and political problems that make my head spin.