From Brint Montgomery, who teaches philosophy at Southern Nazarene University:

Humanism is a system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth. It gets its start, at least in the form we know it today, as a cultural and intellectual movement of the Renaissance, mainly as a result of the rediscovery and study of the literature, art, and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome. Thus, it has a negative and positive agenda. Down with religion; up with—well, whatever is otherwise understood to be the high products of human culture.
In some ways, humanism should now strike us as a very strange philosophy.
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From Brint Montgomery, who teaches philosophy at Southern Nazarene University:

The media has been reporting on a procedure that removes tumors from the parietal region of the brain and leaves the patient with a different view of their own spirituality—in this case, perceived self-transcendence (Field Notes, February 11, 2010). Typically a person’s viewpoint of their own spirituality remains constant over time, but Cosimo Urgesi, one of the study’s lead researchers, explains that “changes of neural activity in specific areas may modify even inherently stable dispositional traits.” So the quick takeaway is that the brain can be modified to produce spiritual experiences by means of surgical intervention on a particular area.
Fine. Of course, producing the phenomena of spiritual experiences by modifying localized brain states has seemingly been done before by Michael Persinger, who used a modified helmet that contained solenoids strategically placed over the brain’s temporal lobes. Although controversial, his apparatus apparently induces a kind of epilepsy (via magnetic fields). People who are psychologically disposed to process experiences in a particular way come away form the procedure having felt the presence of another entity. (It’s no big surprise that Richard Dawkins wasn’t one of them and Susan Blackmore was.)
People have rightly noticed that the physical modification of the brain, whether through an intervention like surgery or the passive electromagnetic force of waveforms, is not a sufficient condition for encountering the spiritual world. Even without techno-intervention, about 50 percent of people claim to have had at least one experience that they would describe as spiritual; but there are many reasons why a genuine spiritual experience causally originating from a transcendental plane or source of reality should be carefully differentiated from mere phenomena of such. (By analogy, the genuine experience of being chased by a polar bear should be carefully differentiated from when you merely dream it.)
Temporal lobe epilepsy, chemical imbalances in the brain, and other quite this-worldly chains of causation can certainly give someone the phenomena of a spiritual experience without it being the real thing. Suppose, for instance, someone were to surgically modify the V1 through V4 areas of the brain, or perhaps even passively influence them with a magnetic wave, vision-inducing helmet. If that person were to then have an experience like seeing a dancing pink elephant, this would say nothing about the existence (or not) of such an entity. It would merely show (in yet one more way) that manipulation of localized brain states have causal influences on changes in particular mind states. That some very specific brain states correlate with, and even cause, some specific and often peculiar mind states is hardly a radical claim. This kind of analysis has been well noted before now, so I want to push the issue in another direction.
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From Joe Laycock, a doctoral candidate studying religion and society at Boston University:

In 2003, Loren Coleman started the world’s first cryptozoology museum in Portland, Maine. Coleman’s International Cryptozoology Museum opened publicly in November 2009, and I recently made the trek north to see it. Cryptozoology—the search for animals not yet verified by Western science—is either a useful and legitimate zoological endeavor or a pseudoscience, depending on whom you ask. The media has focused intensely on the most legendary subjects of cryptozoology: the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Yeti. But aside from “the big three,” cryptozoologists claim a number of recent discoveries, including the woodland bison, the giant panda, the okapi (an African mammal related to the giraffe), and the coelacanth—a fish once believed to have been extinct since the Cretaceous period.
You cannot get a degree in cryptozoology. It is not a scientific discipline but rather a network of investigators (often using their own funds) with training in zoology, anthropology, or marine biology. Cryptozoology often resembles scientific research before the advent of professionalization, when discoveries were made not by research institutions but by “men of science” epitomized by individuals like Benjamin Franklin.
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From Brint Montgomery, who teaches philosophy at Southern Nazarene University:

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on religious independents. From the article:

According to the most recent American Religious Identification Survey, only 76 percent of Americans identify as Christians, down from 86 percent in 1990. But interestingly, while non-Christians are not choosing Islam or Judaism, neither are they choosing atheism. A poll done by Gallup in 2008 found that 15 percent of Americans—up from 8 percent in 1999—say they don’t believe in God, but they do believe in a “Higher Power” or “Universal Spirit.” More and more, Americans believe that the world was created by a spiritual being, but they reject the Torah, the Quran, and the New Testament as the explanation for it.

That article notes a well-known observation that, “Demographically speaking, the Religious Independents, like their political counterparts, are more affluent and well-educated than traditional God-believers.” More than one study has shown that people become less religious when they perceive themselves both as reasonably affluent and as much so as their neighbors. Moreover, a lack of income inequality and insecurity is a nice way to liberalize the religious outlook. Add a strong educational element and a pluralistic social environment, and that becomes a sure-fire formula against traditional religious affiliation.
Not surprisingly, such religious independents are also more likely to care about ethics and social justice than metaphysics and dogma:

Perhaps most importantly, 83 percent of Religious Independents say it is more important to be ethical than to be devout, compared to only 64 percent of traditionalists. Seventy-two percent of Religious Independents say that living a good spiritual life depends on how you act, not what you believe—compared with only 59 percent of traditional followers. In other words, Religious Independents have just as strong a desire for repairing the world, even as they reject the habits and practices of religion.
All this has substantial implications for American culture. Religious Independents don’t want to get involved in cultural wars or fights over Christmas crèches. They are focused on self-improvement, not evangelism. Without high priests of any sort, they’re more apt to resolve political and ethical questions on issues like abortion on a case-by-case basis, rather than with dicta handed down from on high.

That might be frustrating to advocates of institutional religion, since such an autonomous, case-by-case thinking style makes it difficult for such organizations to tell people what and how to think. Independent thinking on religious matters might merely be a corollary to the growing attitudes about privatization of religion. Indeed, for some time now, Americans have been sliding into a mode of privatized religion, one that see-saws opposite from their institutional religious loyalty. On the hit list of most likely to be privatized are men, whites, young Americans, liberal Protestants, and people of an indeterminate religious affiliation. Pacific and New England states also appear to be the most privatized. There is, of course, the subtle matter of teasing out the difference between independent thinkers generally and religious independents, for neither the latter nor the former entail one another. Still, both camps could present new kinds of difficulties for traditional religious institutions.
First, independent thinkers might come to decide that even if science never presents a complete and final explanation of the world, its method of encountering the world can, in fact, function as a fully satisfying, overall philosophy of life—something akin to the popular proverb that it’s the journey, not the destination that gives life meaning. In fact, there are even new kinds of collaborations in contemporary music that outright support this link between a scientific worldview and its unique, underlying aesthetic for human existence.
Second, religious independents might come to decide that large institutions are ultimately a corrupting force for true spirituality, and that such social structures are merely the dying relics from an age when kings and corporate titans were required to manage people. But human coordination now trends toward flat, highly networked models of teamwork rather than vertical models of authority. So, with the ever-growing connectivity of both technological and social networking, religious advocates can finally decouple themselves from the necessity (or perhaps even necessary evil) of large, managing bureaucracies and any  concomitant subordination to their autocracies of piety.