Mark Rowlands posted a piece at Secular Philosophy in which he argued that humanism is…
… in essence, a secular form of Christianity. The idea that humans are the most valuable animals in the world makes no sense when it is removed from a theological context in which that animal is created in the image of God.
I think that this is bullshit, frankly. While both humanism and Christianity are socially-constructed systems based on admixtures of faith, idealism, and pragmatism, the “image of God” idea is not something that they have in common. What follows is a slightly edited version of my comment on that thread.
It is reasonable to suppose that every creature has an innate bias in favour of the survival of its kin, simply because such a preference has strong survival value for its genes… [It]makes perfect sense for me to regard my child as the most important creature on the planet.
For simple creatures, this innate bias is expressed in a variety of behaviours: mating patterns, competition with non-kin, protective and even self-sacrificial ways of defending offspring. For thinking, social creatures one would expect a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms to emerge that would reinforce this same bias. Unlike instinctive behaviours, such mechanisms are more plastic, since they interact with and are affected by a wide range of other social forces.
How big is the circle of “kin”? This is a critical factor that we see in many social creatures, from termites to chimpanzees. Over human history the original kin circle of the nomadic group has been broadened under a variety of pressures: tribal, racial, national, and so forth.
So what of humanism and Christianity? They are similar in that both seek to exploit the “kin bias” instinct to advance a particular idea. However their objectives seem to be diametrically opposed. Christianity, and all religions, seek to inject a supernatural authority into a worldview, and declare that only those who accept this authority are “kin”. Humanism proposes that there is no supernatural authority, and that the only reasonable way of defining “kin” is in terms of the species homo sapiens. All other definitions have historically been exploited for sectarian, tribal, or racial purposes, and should be rejected because of this.