There's an interesting movement which has been afoot since the 1930s or so, called "Humanism" - and it's an affiliation of different community groups who are made up of very deep thinking people. The vision of the founders seems to have been to try to supplant the christian churches of the West through providing the same kind of social services and celebrations which churches provide. Today, it dawned on me that this might not work... and that in fact, both buddhism and christianity might have evolved, centuries ago, out of the failure of this very kind of group to ever really accomplish what it set out to do.

Religious people always try to trace their own history in a way that I believe is somewhat disingenuous. Religion serves a purpose in a community and that purpose and that niche has changed and evolved over time. Some people would say that Christianity started with the life of Christ, or that Buddhism started with the life of the Buddha. But honestly, I think it might be more accurate to say that there are people who wanted to form a tradition and a social group at certain junctures in history, and they drew on old stories and folklore which seemed to work for them as they pursued their goals of creating a civic group of a certain nature.

Somewhere back in 2000 or 2001, there was a fascinating article in National Geographic Magazine about Tibet. My impression from that article was that in that year, Tibet was one of the last very quaint and ancient civilisations still around. I think it has changed over the course of this first decade. China has made a lot of effort to integrate Tibet into the greater Chinese society. But one thing that struck me was that their religion would have been similar to what Christianity was a thousand years ago. Religion institutions were both the schools and the charity organisations of every town.

So this shows how religion's niche has evolved and changed over time in societies.

Anyway, my realisation this morning, to put it bluntly, was that perhaps the nurturing thinkers could not get the posturers interested in being part of a do gooder community where the nice successful man or woman was up there teaching about life's lessons. My thought is that perhaps these thinker/nurturers would have been encouraged by their experiences with children; they found a very excellent social dynamic that could be established as an adult leader of a group of kids. And then they tried to impose on adults this same formula of working with kids. And it didn't work. And so someone had the wild idea of taking a different tack: "Let's tell a story about a good smart caring person who suffered rather than succeeded." And that story piqued the interest of the townspeople.

It's an interesting commonality that both Buddhism and Christianity have as their central figure a very smart and charismatic figure who suffers. In the one case, the guy is put to death wrongfully - and in the other he voluntarily gives up all of the pleasures of this world, in a gesture of altruism.

So, all this leads me to a certain conclusion. I think that humanism is good as a group where people can gather who have common interests and passions, and a love for reasoning and acting in caring ways towards others. And it's also good to have groups like the TED conference where these kinds of thinkers show off their ideas to eachother. But in all of these things, I think it's best that we support eachother, rather than try to press our ideas into the minds and hearts of others.

Those people who themselves so value the power of independent and critical thought, should not be trying to think on behalf of other people, or they might end up with bad results.