based upon humanist attitudes. They both believed that people could solve their own problems and promote their own material progress without the need of a supernatural guidance. The increasing acceptance of democracy in many countries, including Britain and France, implied that all people, or at the time all males, had the right and the ability to participate in politics. In the last while, last 50 years or so, few political or economical philosophies have any spiritual measurement. Most government policies all over are based on the belief that people can reorganize their society with accordance to an ideology such as liberalism, fascism, Communism, or capitalist democracy. Even our morals have strayed away from religion and we have taken them from what we believe is to be just. And even that justice has become secular, being based upon certain political philosophies -like John Locke, that has no reference to any of their original spiritual background. Humanism was really great in my opinion because it was able to abolish insane things such as slavery, where people actually could be treated as people. And the increasing acceptance of democracy was great because then people could all participate in politics and vote (well, besides women). But I do believe that now our morals should be brought back to religion, and not what we believe should be moral, but what our religion says is, whatever a country’s major religion is. But if one were to do that then you would still not be doing it for the benefit of everyone but for the majority, which is what humanism is all about - benefit of the majority.Individualism in the 16th/17th century had a great emphasis on individual rights, such as guilds or feudal privileges, and also those individual political and legal rights must be guaranteed. In France, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man stated that all men were born free and equal in rights and then detailed the rights which were to ...
