What caused humanism to fail?

during the rennaisance. what disadvantage caused this?





simple answers please its for an essay thanks
What caused humanism to fail?
appathy
What caused humanism to fail?
Organized religion.The reason for this, it seems to me, reduces to meaning. For all that Christianity talks about the infinite nature of God, it is not this aspect of the divine that is important to people. Instead, the lives of Christians are imbued with meaning by the personal nature of their God. If the Christian God was supposed to have been infinite and infinitely distant and utterly unconcerned with mortals, I doubt that the religion would have been so successful in the struggle against other worldviews. Instead, though, the Christian God is supposed to have incarnated as a person to save us all from our supposed sins. Thus, the cosmological and the personal are, in Christianity, commingled into one cohesive (if relatively absurd) scheme, and a Christian becomes an integral and important part the universe. Other traditional religions provide similar sources of consolation for humans beset by finitude and misery.





Secular humanism also has a coherent (if dynamic and evolving) account of the world, stitched together out of scientific cosmology, evolutionary biology, history, and moral philosophy. However, in the humanistic worldview, these strands are not commingled: though the universe is significant for the existence of people, it is also entirely indifferent to their wellbeing. For humanists, all meaning and purpose in human existence is provided on a human scale. Humanists have faith that we can provide all the meaning we need ourselves, from our concerns, out of our own ideas and philosophies. In the face of the infinite, however, these meanings and purposes dissolve into absolute and utter insignificance. The humanist's universe might provoke dizzying awe, but it is a distant awe compared with the more limited but also more intimate awe of the religious.





Perhaps some of us feel a certain exhiliration when contemplating the universe as revealed to us by science, a universe that is vaster and more complex and more empty of meaning than we could possibly have imagined. For most people, though, such chill vistas are not enough. The decay of the old religious certainties has left a void, a vacuum of meaning, in the hearts of many modern men and women. We are living in an age without a central narrative that shapes lives and weaves them as essential threads into the tapestry of the world. Instead, people desperately search for meaning, for the feeling of being truly alive, for anything to keep the warmth from bleeding away into the cold emptiness. For many, this search is for the ephemeral thrill of vivid experience. Others seek personal growth or the attainment of some brand of perfection. Still others try to wrap themselves in the fake consolations of a spirituality that remakes the world as a smaller, cosier place. There are many ways to hide: we have become good at inventing distractions.





Humanism has failed. It has failed because it does not give people a vital place in the universe. It has failed because people care more about where we are going than whence we came, more about morality than reality, more about meaning than facts, more about "why?" than "how?", more about warm emotion than cold reason. Until we who are without gods and demons and heavens and hells can provide those things, our worldview will remain marginal. The losses of the old faiths will not be our gains. Furthermore, in painting this picture we must not cheat by softening the findings of science or including meaning and purpose by sleight of hand. Our worldview must not just feel authentic, but must be authentic.





Fortunately, we live in an age in which this is possible. We have two advantages over humanists of previous times. Firstly, we know that it is possible for life to influence the evolution of the universe in deep and pervasive ways. Through sufficient wisdom and determination, we can thus make the human future coincide ever more closely with the future of first the Earth, then the solar system, then the galaxy and finally the whole universe. Secondly, we are living for the first time with the real possibility of great longevity and then effective immortality. Perhaps we will not achieve these things in our lifetime, but we know they are possible and we can strive for them with all our energies. Thus, our own personal futures could through our own efforts coincide with the human future and thus the universal future. If the religious worldview is characterised by the universe reaching down to imbue human life with meaning, the transhumanist worldview is characterised by something stranger and nobler. Human life will be the torch-bearer that sets the universe alight with the fire of meaning.