David Breeden is speaking all week about Eupraxsophy.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and we are a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. And each week we go into some subject to think about how these things impact American culture, popular culture, where religious and philosophical ideas come from, and where they may be heading in the future. This week, we want to look at ways of being non-theistically moral. And these ideas go way back in time. I’m going to call it something that I have a hard time saying, and that is: Eupraxophy, which I won’t say three times fast because I can’t. But we’ll figure out why I can’t exactly say that in just a few minutes.It is a term that was coined by a secular humanist, Paul Kurtz, who was the first person to take the term secular humanist and really embrace it as a term that could be used in a positive way. He was already a humanist, and when the term was used in a court case in the mid-1960s and then began to be used by right wing preachers, television evangelists attacking secular humanism, which wasn’t a thing. So Paul Kurtz took the term and said, well, guess what? I like it. We will look a little bit further into how he dealt with that, even issuing a secular humanist manifesto at one point. But he did come up with this idea that I want to trace a little bit and how he came there.He later changed the spelling, by the way, Eupraxsophy. I’ll show you how the etymology is going to be working in just a moment. But the adding of the “s.” Does that does make a difference? Kurtz had this to say: “I think we will have to coin a new term in order to distinguish non theistic beliefs and practices from other systems of beliefs and practices, a term that could be used in many languages. The best approach is to combine Greek roots, and I have come up with the term Eupraxsophy. EU being the term “good,” the prefix for “good” in Greek, then practice, praxis, we still use that term. It never really became English, praxix, which becomes the term “practice” in the English language, meaning “to do” or “to embody” and then “sophy,” as in “philosophy.” Philosophy is the love of wisdom. This is “good doing wisdom” or “good practical wisdom,” maybe a little bit more English there. But that’s the idea that Paul Kurtz was going after: how to express some kind of a secular way of being, an affirmative, positive way of life. Here’s another of his books, called Exuberance: an Affective Philosophy of Life. I’ll talk later in the week about the foundation that he set up and how to get hold of some of his books, which are still available.Kurtz had this to say: “Eupraxsophy is a non-religious life stance or worldview, emphasizing the importance of living an ethical and exuberant life and relying on rational methods such as logic, observation and science rather than faith, mysticism or revelation toward that end.” So you see exactly where Kurtz is going. We discussed the idea of Deism last week, and we saw that in the very early days, back in the 1600s, Deists were rejecters of the idea of revelation from some kind of God out there into the human mind. This is carrying on with this idea as Kurtz is having it.Now, I should mention, this just came out recently, that Gallup issued the following news release: “US church membership falls below majority for the first time.” Here on Coffee and Wisdom, we’ve talked a lot about this. There has been some speculation that maybe the whole covid pandemic would bring people in the...