Despite such appealing personalities and the pleasures of exuberant hymn-singing, the Religion of Humanity in general left an unfortunate legacy. Even today, a common view of humanists is that they just want to replace one religion with another and to make an idol out of humanity, looking down on all other species as inferior. These things were mostly true of Comte’s religious confection. But they do not feature in modern humanism, which rejects dogmatic systems of all kinds, and stresses its respect for non-human as well as human life.
