Some defining quotes for religious humanism

I can't find any comparable set on the web so I'll produce my own.

This is the religious humanism of Feuerbach and George Eliot -- the idea is that there is a fork in the road after Feuerbach: one fork leads this way, the other to Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, alienation, nihilism, 20th century wars etc. Religious humanism keeps the predicates -- the values, the attributes of 'God' -- but throws away the theology. Secular humanism throws away the lot, and liberal theology is nearly as bad, often keeping the theology but distancing it from the predicates.  That's why it's not quite the 'Sea of Faith'; anyway, I'm too much the Richard Dawkins class-7 full-on atheist for that.

So, you atheist, there is no God. What then?  How do you  explain religion?
'Theology is anthropology', argues Feuerbach; 'God is human perfection alienated from us,
reified and re-appropriated'.

"My only wish is…to transform friends of God into friends of man,
believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work,
candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians
who, by their own profession and admission, are 'half animal, half
angel' into persons, into whole persons. " - Ludwig Feuerbach

Notice the preference for work over prayer. A good Catholic (...well, OK, Lutheran; but definitely not Calvinist), in some sense, Feuerbach; and the poison in Christianity was, for him, very much to be found in the Christian's personal (and, of course, wholly imagined) relationship with God, and how it can stand in the way of relationships with other people. Religious phenomena, for Feuerbach, can be placed in two categories: the true, anthropological, (human, fellow-feeling, kind), and the false, theological, (self-absorbed, reflexive,  inhuman). Thus

"Most of my books have for their main bearing a conclusion without which
I should not have cared to write any depiction of human life: namely that
the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development,
social and moral, is not dependent on what is not man; and that the idea of God,
so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness
entirely human" - George Eliot

 ...who was also Marian Evans Lewes, the translator of Feuerbach's 'The Essence of Christianity', with which she 'everywhere agreed'. The positive aspect of religion, and the sense in which Christianity is the best religion, is what she and Feuerbach are about here: 'God is Love', which has now become 'Love is God' . Or, in the words which Robert Browning put in the mouth of St John the Evangelist in his poem 'A Death in the Desert',

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, and hope and fear, .... is just our chance of the prize of learning love."

Finally, one for the New Age - perhaps the richest quotation of the lot, simultaneously an affirmation of the value and complexity of human relations and a blast at those who think that such wealth cannot be fully of this world (and therefore also a trumpet-blast for science). There is no God; there is nothing outside this world. How dare religious believers stigmatize this as a position of spiritual poverty? We have the world and each other - would they insert 'only'?

"...all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that
whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however
exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and
tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains
enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions
and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life
as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever
fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured
article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the
dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories;
an outrage on our dignity."  - Joseph Conrad

This was in the Author's Note to his novella 'The Shadow-Line'  (a magnificent book), in response to suggestions that its content had supernatural elements. It's one of my favourite quotes for pinning down why supernaturalism is spiritually _poorer_ than humanism. I love that phrase 'mere supernatural'.

Niall MacKay, 2007