BHA have an “Are you a humanist” quiz doing the rounds at the moment. I scored 80% incidentally but I had to be playfully creative with the actual responses to get through it since there were too many questions (including the first one) where my answer was none-of-the-above.
I’ve been a humanist since before the BHA existed, and it makes a mockery of humanism to reduce it to a caricature of scientistic arrogance.
Hi Ian, it’s just a bit of fun which will hopefully spread awareness of humanism (which it is doing). It’s not supposed to be taken that seriously… hence the silly questions like the motorway one.
We’ve had people who were evidently previously unaware of the existence of humanism spending time on the website ‘about’ pages, learning about it. Not only new site visitors but emails, comments, tweets which suggest people who are basically humanist being happy to have found out about it.
I hope that makes you feel a little better about the quiz.
Also the BHA have existed 1896 in various forms… so you must be quite old now 😉
Ha yes, existed as a campaigning organisation in the blogosphere I guess I meant.
Obviously, I can see it was meant to be funny – but twitter and facebook are in the real world these days – and I’ve commented before that the BHA needs to up its game. Ridiculing religion is child’s-play, and even seriously campaigning against it is only half the story. Need to see more broadly what the humanists are and what humanism is “for”.
Would you be interested in helping rewrite the quiz?
Yes, I’d like to help. Sent a private email.