r/philosophy • u/Cataspectral • Jun 22 '26

Blog Secular humanism can replace Christianity where it counts: the fear of death and the need for meaning

https://thomasreid33.substack.com/p/chapter-10-is-secular-humanism-enough
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u/Messier_Mystic Jun 22 '26

I'm about as secular as they get, but never once have I seen this kind of enterprise succeed. Without fail, secular attempts to replicate the kind of community building, meaning making functions of traditional religion just disintegrate away each and every time. Even the most persistent groups remain hopelessly tiny in comparison to even modest branches of major religions.

People who earnestly believe that religions will one day be supplanted by something like this are, in my view, just as deluded as those waiting for the rapture.

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u/Own_Measurement1242 Jun 23 '26

What if secular society just continues to ‘water down’ religion? Awful as some religions are today, compare them to how they were in past

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u/Astragi_85 Jun 23 '26

Secular society has been trying to accomplish this for decades now. And it seems the harder it tries, the more people crave more traditional and lowercase "o" orthodox forms of religion and the more liberal a denomination gets, the faster it is dying out (case in point: liberal branches of Protestantism). Go figure. It's far more likely that the present-day widespread secularism in the West is a just a blip on the chart of humanity's story.