Each of us could live a better life. With an approach to life based on humanity and reason, humanists recognise that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone. We value the truth, and consider facts as well as feelings in reaching a judgement. Humanists reject the idea of any supernatural agency intervening to help or hinder us. We retain faith that people can and will continue to solve problems, and that quality of life can be improved and made more equitable.
Humanists are positive, gaining inspiration from a rich natural world, our lives and culture.
Humanism encompasses atheists and agnostics, but it is an active philosophy far greater than these passive responses to one particular idea. Formal humanist theory has developed from Eastern and Classical philosophers writings. It had particular expression during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and in the scientific, social and political revolutions of the modern age. Many people are tacit humanists, reaching similar conclusions without meeting like-minded people or reading particular texts, because these ideas are founded on knowledge, not beliefs. Humanism defends knowledge and truth against attacks from relativism and post-modernism, and against the rising forces of irrationality and superstition.