Talk:Secular humanism

Adherents
Those who call themselves humanists are estimated to number between four and five million people worldwide.

I don't know what this intends to mean. People who call themselves "secular humanists" first and foremost? People with an actual SH tattoo? Or just the T-shirt?

If you broaden this out to mean people who would at least somewhat identify with this philosophy, you could easily find 4-5 million in Canada alone (and probably each of Holland, Scandinavia, and Australia/New Zealand, too). &mdash; MaxEnt 20:56, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree; 4 to 5 million seems rediculously (and embarrassingly) low. What's the source and date for that figure? — Preceding unsigned comment added by SmarterAlec (talk • contribs) 14:24, June 25, 2021 (UTC)


 * The sources are in the body. Both were dead links but I found internet archive urls for them. One failed to verify (the term "million" doesn't appear on the page), the other (from 1997) does include the 5 million figure, but it's explicitly only referring to how many members belong to organisations affiliated to Humanists International (well, its precursor). I fixed and tagged the refs in this diff, and may go ahead and remove those numbers in the future if nobody is able to find better sources and/or more accurate figures. Jr8825  •  Talk  16:32, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Ethics and pseudoscience
Currently, we have "a philosophy or life stance that embraces ... ethics". But what philosophy or life stance doesn't? Unless we can specify what is distinctive about secular humanist ethics beyond what the rest of the sentence implies (by "philosophical naturalism while specifically rejecting religious dogma" etc.), best to leave that out. As for "rejecting ... pseudoscience", this is pointless since there is no philosophy that accepts "pseudoscience". It means something to reject religious dogma, supernaturalism and superstition because there are people and philosophies that accept all three. Srnec (talk) 02:20, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I think that pseudoscience can go. Concerning "ethics", I have found and added a link to secular ethics.Editor2020 (talk) 02:31, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Criticism section needed?
Evangelicals represent a significant portion of the US population, and they tend to be critical of secular humanism. In order to give the article a sense of balance, it feels like it would be good to have a Criticism section that outlines the main points of evangelicals and others who are critical of secular humanism. --Westwind273 (talk) 19:22, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The US population represents just over 4% of the global population, and we take a global perspective. Ghmyrtle (talk) 19:49, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Criticism sections are deprecated. Any criticism should be naturally worked into the article. &mdash;  The Hand That Feeds You :Bite 17:53, 28 October 2021 (UTC)