Humanist Manifesto I, II and III

The first Humanist Manifesto appeared in 1933, drafted mainly by a small group of philosophers, educators and Unitarian ministers, Roy Wood Sellars and Raymond Bragg chief among them, who wanted organized humanism to state plainly what it actually believed rather than let outsiders define it by what it rejected. Thirty four people signed that first document, describing the universe as self existing rather than created and treating traditional theism as an idea whose time, in their judgment, had passed. Even some of its own signers later questioned whether calling the document religious was accurate, since it explicitly set aside belief in a personal God.

Forty years of history separated the first Manifesto from the second, published in 1973, and the gap shows in the text. The earlier document's confident predictions about human progress had not all held up, and the 1973 statement dropped several of them while adding explicit commitments to human rights, reproductive freedom and international cooperation that the original had never addressed. It also drew a far larger list of signers, spanning philosophers, scientists and writers well beyond the small circle that had produced the first version.

Humanism and Its Aspirations, the third Manifesto, followed in 2003, considerably shorter than either predecessor and restating humanism's core commitments to reason, scientific inquiry and human flourishing in roughly a single page. Read together, the three documents trace not a fixed creed but an organization revising its own public statement of belief every few decades as its membership and its historical moment changed.

Strip away the historical detail and the three Manifestos share a single organizing claim: the universe requires no creator to explain it, and human beings are natural beings within that universe rather than souls temporarily housed inside it. The 1933 document stated this directly, describing the cosmos as self existing and treating the traditional theistic account of creation as an idea organized humanism had simply moved past, a position considerably starker than most American religious statements of its era were prepared to make in public.

That naturalism carries a practical consequence the documents return to repeatedly: since no external authority hands down moral law, human beings have to work out ethics for themselves, using reason and accumulated experience rather than revelation. The later Manifestos extend that reasoning into specific commitments the earlier document never mentioned, human rights, environmental responsibility, and, in the 2003 version, an explicit embrace of scientific method as the most reliable tool available for understanding both the natural world and appropriate human conduct within it.

What stays constant across all three is the refusal to locate moral authority anywhere outside human reason and experience. Where a traditional religious statement of faith points upward to revealed authority, the Manifestos point inward and across, to what people can work out together using the only faculties the documents recognize as available, which is why the association treats all three as a single continuous declaration rather than three unrelated statements.