Human beings are responsible for their own meaning and purpose

Secular humanism affirms that human beings are responsible for their own meaning and purpose, that in the absence of a divine plan or afterlife to supply it, people themselves give value and significance to their lives through their choices, relationships, work, and ideals. Far from rendering life meaningless, humanists hold, this places meaning within human reach and responsibility: purpose is something created and pursued rather than received, and the finitude of life lends it urgency and worth rather than emptying it of value.

The movement's evolving self-understanding is documented across three successive statements: the original Humanist Manifesto of 1933, signed by thirty-four American thinkers including the philosopher John Dewey, which described humanism as a new, naturalistic religion for the modern age; Humanist Manifesto II (1973), which dropped explicitly religious language in favour of a more secular philosophical framing while retaining the core commitment to human self-determination of meaning; and Humanism and Its Aspirations (2003), also called Humanist Manifesto III, issued by the American Humanist Association, which restated the position in a shorter, more affirmative form. Across all three, the claim that human beings, not a deity, are responsible for discovering or creating value in their own lives remains the constant thread.

This affirmation is central to secular humanism, a life-stance that seeks to lead an ethical and fulfilling life on the basis of reason and human experience without religion. It follows from the humanist conviction that this life is the only one and that the universe is natural, and it grounds an ethics oriented to human flourishing here and now. The belief distinguishes humanism from worldviews that locate the source of meaning in God or a hereafter, and it is presented here as the affirmation humanists hold.

A related but philosophically distinct articulation of self-made meaning comes from atheistic existentialism, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, which argued that because "existence precedes essence," a human being has no given nature or purpose and must therefore choose and create meaning entirely through free action, famously describing humanity as "condemned to be free." Where secular humanism typically frames the absence of a given cosmic purpose as an invitation to a confident, rationalist, broadly optimistic ethics of flourishing, existentialist writers, Sartre among them, more often emphasised the anxiety, responsibility, and even absurdity such radical freedom entails, so the two traditions share a premise, meaning is made rather than given, while differing markedly in tone.