You many. I don’t mind answering it either. However, my husband isn’t a humanist because as he says, he doesn’t “like humans”. He is a non-believer and grew up not going to church. I, on the other hand, grew up in toxic religious beliefs. I grew up, left the Church of God, went to the Episcopal Church for about 14 years. They excommunicated my younger son at the age of 13, which caused all both my sons and me to leave the Church. However, I read the Bible cover to cover 4 times growing up, studied religion, philosophy, mythology, psychology in college, along with some other subjects and along the way I had an “epiphany” so to speak, which left me in a daze because modern religion is nothing more than rewritten mythology to specific cultures. Even Krishna was the “I AM”. Religion is nothing more than another human creation. However, deism, pantheism, even Native Americanism didn’t cut it for me. I journeyed on in my adulthood and stumbled again onto a Humanist magazine article with Gene Roddenberry, which I once read in my teens. It was a magazine I was reading in my room, when my mother walked in, unbeknownst to me, until she snatched it out of my hand and shouted, “THIS IS NOT CHRISTIAN!” I recalled reading the article as a teen so I researched humanism more in my 30s and saw Gene put a lot of that view into Star Trek, so in a sense, I was raised on humanism since I was a few months old. I watched it with my mother on her lap when TOS first came out. So, unbeknownst to my mother, I was, in a sense, raised by Gene and Majel Roddenberry on humanism, but it wasn’t until my 30s I acknowledged that I am a humanist. However, it was Gene who introduced me to humanism long before I knew how to talk. Just as I was raised in the Church, I was raised (influenced) by Gene and Majel.
While the third manifesto is OK, I prefer the second one. That said, I strive to better myself every day and to better society when I can and how I can. I treat the earth as my home and care for fellow animals, almost like I would my children- there are exceptions of course, because other animals, though distant relatives, are not humans. They are living beings though and one can find this stuff in the manifestos. I also strive to live my life using science, not mythology, though mythology can serve some purpose, just as Aesop’s fables can. I ascribe to the Roddenberry Philosophy, which is humanism. (Note: Humanism isn’t seen as much in Trek series after VOY. His influenced died out of it slowly after he died.)
I woke up to reality years ago.