Originally a comment by Dave Ricks on Looking fixedly in the other direction.

In the James Rieger edition (1974/1982) of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Rieger’s introduction says this about Shelley’s father William Godwin:

Of all the tracts published by the Johnson circle, none had so great or enduring an impact as Godwin’s Enquiry considering Political Justice (1793).

Godwin argued that once the mind has been cleansed of superstition, emotionalism, and respect for custom, the free and rational man will necessarily perform virtuous actions, which will be socially useful and, at the same time, personally pleasurable.

Legislatures, courts of law, monarchy, marriage, and all other forms of “positive institution” with wither away, and the wise world will enter upon an era of benevolent, self-sustaining anarchy.

This passage is my bar for humanism. For humanism to be “Good Without a God” it should be self-aware of such naïveté, and do better than things like this.