Secular Humanist Quotes

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

The goodness of people depends on the intentions of their brains and not on their religion or ancestry.

Secular humanists of every type may ridicule the Bible, but they cannot escape it; and in their obsession with change, calls for reform, doomsday warnings, and utopian visions, they continue to steal from it.

In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him….I didn't have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn't have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn't have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew. And it was his knowing that overwhelmed me…

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1

...The existence or non-existence of an undefined 'god' are quite pointless. [From 'Why I am a Secular Humanist']

It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble with their own eternal souls; however it's altogether not all right that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such self-rightous bravado, but I'm the one who lost.

Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact, this planet is more powerful than the human species.

Science Class Would you invent some irrational explanation for we lost souls that the glaciers aren’t really melting at all, that they are and will remain just as they always have been? Some rationale that claims the whole climate change scenario is really just a satanic plot, concocted by liberal secular humanists to trick the world into thinking that the glaciers have been melting for twice as long as the Bible says the Earth has been around.

For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.

On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant. The

Humanity, that's the title we should be most attached to, yet that's the title we are least attached to.

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. – Anonymous

Make humanity human again.

[T]he Black Church's inflexibility on same-sex marriage and homophobia continues to imperil the moral health and social capital of communities of color. It is for this reason that the Black Church has become largely irrelevant as a social justice organizer in the post-Jim Crow era. Consequently, secular humanists of color have an opportunity to enter the breach.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio could make Pepe feel as if he were a betrayer of the Catholic faith—as if he were a raving secular humanist, or worse. (Could there be anyone worse, from a Jesuitical perspective?) Father Alfonso and Father Octavio knew their Catholic dogma by rote; while the two priests talked circles around Brother Pepe, and they made Pepe feel inadequate in his belief, they were irreparably doctrinaire.

I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues. On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds toward various classes of people. None of which included skin colour or ethnicity or religion. Well—religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar right-wingers, but that passed, because I saw that in the end, they were just a different sort of victim.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

That this modern, adversary culture—spanning the century, 1865-1965—was hostile to bourgeois society was obvious enough. That it was also, in a deeper sense, hostile to secular humanism was not so obvious, even to many of those involved in the adversary culture itself. Yet in retrospect it is clear that, with hardly an exception, the leading novelists, poets, and painters—those whom we now call the “moderns” (Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, Proust, Picasso)—could not be enlisted in a secular-humanist canon.

Allow me to sum it up this way; if the Church allows this secular humanistic "social gospel" into its hallowed halls, then it is putting its very existence at risk, for it will subject itself to the government. And the Church must be subject to Christ---not the government.

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it. Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.

Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative. But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly won’t bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.

This is not a book about God; nor about intelligent design; nor about creationism. Neither of us is into any of those. We thought we’d best make that clear from the outset, because our main contention in what follows will be that there is something wrong–quite possibly fatally wrong–with the theory of natural selection; and we are aware that, even among those who are not quite sure what it is, allegiance to Darwinism has become a litmus for deciding who does, and who does not, hold a ‘properly scientific’ world view. ‘You must choose between faith in God and faith in Darwin; and if you want to be a secular humanist, you’d better choose the latter’. So we’re told.

Humans without borders, that's what the world needs - beings of conscience and courage, with no rigidity of religion, gender, nationality, or any other.

Intellect don't impress me much, Devoutness of doctrine repulses me. Have you ever made a stranger smile, Ever left your seat to the elderly!

If you can't find God in people, your God is dead. If you can't find holiness in people, your holiness is fake.

If you can't find God in people, your God is dead.

Be a human being and you'd automatically be religious, but if you try to be a scripture-worm then you'd be neither religious, nor human – you’d be a biological bag of trash.

salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular ver­ sion of this Christian faith.

Most of the modern human society has nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism.

The universal reason is love, The universal faith is love. All else is but a faint echo, Driving us away from love.

Some Buddhists have criticized secular Buddhism because they think it waters down Buddhism. I like to think of it as adding Buddhist flavoring to the sparkling water of secularism.

Humans are the only helpline that humanity has got.

Humans will be the hope to the humans – humans will be the help to the humans. That is the world I dream of and that is the world I work to build.

Faith can be unholy, science can be inhuman, none depends on the tool, all depends on the person.

You are modern humans of the civilized world. And modern humans rise beyond all laws and superstitions of the society. They help their fellow beings to rise from the ashes of ignorance, illusion and fear.

Interestingly enough, every time I corner a fanatic with scientific facts which they cannot argue or disprove, they either dismiss me as 'anti-God' and a 'secular humanist' or they start spouting reams of misapplied and irrelevant 'scripture' at me, like good little sheeple and like that will in any way, shape or form prove anything... Which just proves to me that common sense and actual reason doesn't come into it. Only hatred.

Interestingly enough, every time I corner a homophobic religious fanatic bigot with scientific facts which they cannot argue or disprove, they either dismiss me as ‘anti-God’ and a ‘secular humanist’ or they start spouting reams of misapplied and irrelevant ‘scripture’ at me, like that will in any way, shape or form prove anything… Which just proves to me that common sense and actual reason doesn't come into it. Only very blind hatred.

Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn.... No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.

No matter how many churches are closed or how humanistic a leader or a movement may claim to be, there will never be anything wholly secular about human fear. Man's terror is always "holy terror"-which is a strikingly apt popular phrase. Terror always refers to the ultimates of life and death.

The attempt made in recent decades by secularist thinkers to disengage the moral principles of western civilization from their scripturally based religious context, in the assurance that they could live a life of their own as "humanistic" ethics, has resulted in our "cut flower culture." Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.

what does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this raises the question of how to reach exclusive humanists. On the other hand, the question bounces back on the church: To what extent do we “believe” like exclusive humanists?

Man may not be the colossus some secular spirits would have him be, armed with the strength and wisdom of the gods, but he has partaken of ambrosia. He has squinted trough the veil and seen just enough of divinity to measure himself by it. The Humanist knows both the strengths and the frailties of man. He strives. But he knows the bounds of his striving....... Visions and ideals need a path, a way, a roadmap people can use as to arrive at those better, more permanent things that the wise are always seeing dimly whenever they strained their eyes. So man turned a mirror on himself, looked soberly, and-one day-began to write accounts of the discoveries made on the grandest odyssey of them all: the journey to the core of the human mind and soul. The grateful among us read them.

I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation. [Interview, Parade magazine, 24 November 1991]

When she mysteriously disappeared along with her son and granddaughter in August 1995, some assumed they had fled the country with the organisation's money amidst speculations of tax fraud. The gruesome truth of their disappearance would come to light several years later as it was discovered Madalyn, her son Jon Garth and granddaugher Robin had been kidnapped, extorted, murdered and dismembered by a former American Atheist employee.

The real gnostic does not attribute any "state" to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather--through an "instinct for holding back"--to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of "cosmic play" (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, "horizontal" beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, "humanists" that they are, below the vocation of man

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche described Christianity as ‘Platonism for the masses’ – an accusation that applies with equal or greater force to secular humanism. The faith that history has a built-in logic impelling humanity to a higher level is Platonism framed in historical terms. Marxists have thought of human development as being driven by new technologies and class conflict, whereas liberals have seen the growth of knowledge as the principal driver. No doubt these forces help shape the flow of events. But unless you posit a divinely ordained end-state there is no reason to think history has any overarching logic or goal. For Plato and Plotinus, history was a nightmare from which the individual mind struggled to awake. Following Paul and Augustine, the Christian Erigena made history the emerging embodiment of Logos. With their unending chatter about progress, secular humanists project this mystical dream into the chaos of the human world.

Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.

I'll tell you plainly - I don't believe in a supreme being, but if you do, and your belief helps you be a better human, I'll fight for your belief till my last breath. But if your belief is your excuse for intolerance and fanaticism, then you're my child, and I am your judgment. The same goes for those intellectual buffoons who take logic as licence to condescension. Militant atheists and religious fundamentalists are both animal retards - they belong in a museum of medieval and modern artifacts, not on civilized streets.

Self-compassion practice can be fruitfully compared to the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This is a highly respected form of treatment, with a considerable amount of evidence that it is effective for many individuals. An important aspect of the therapy, as described in the popular book Feeling Good by the psychiatrist David Burns, is challenging irrational thoughts. For instance, if you make an overly broad generalization, like “I’m such a loser,” you might dispute it by trying to recall situations where you demonstrated poise and accomplishment.

Where the individual feels free and responsible for his own fate, or among minorities striving for freedom and independence, humanistic religious experience develops. The history of religion gives ample evidence of this correlation between social structure and kinds of religious experience. Early Christianity was a religion of the poor and downtrodden; the history of religious sects fighting against authoritarian political pressure shows the same principle again and again. Whenever, on the other hand, religion allied itself with secular power, the religion had by necessity become authoritarian. The real fall of man is his alienation from himself, his submission to power, his turning against himself even though under the guise of his worship of God. Indeed, man is dependent; he remains subject to death, old age, illness, and even if he were to control nature and to make it wholly serviceable to him, he and his earth remain tiny specks in the universe. But it is one thing to recognize one's dependence and limitations, and it is something entirely different to indulge in this dependence, to worship the forces on which one depends. To understand realistically and soberly how limited our power is is an essential part of wisdom and of maturity.

Letter from God (An Autobiographical Sonnet) Some people chant Bismillah, Some people chant Bhagvan. Some people call me Lord God, I'm actually very much human. Seek me in church and temple, I shall elude you for time eternal. All churches are without God, But God cannot be without human. Above all hagiographies, human is real, There's nothing more divine than human. Godliness unfolds only through humanness, Only sin in the world is the sin of division. Secularism is not a rejection of religion, secularism is inoculation against fundamentalism. Religion is not the search for a mythical deity, but the realization of oneness within every human.

Atheism has never been the focus in any of my work. If your own exploration of nature and the universe makes you outgrow the influence of ancestral myths, that's great - if not, it doesn't matter to me one bit. So long as you are a decent human being, your psychological necessity of a personal deity or the lack of it, is irrelevant outside our personal life. If you stop believing in God, that won't magically make you a better person than you already are - in the same way - if you start believing in God, it won't magically make you a better person than you already are. Neither faith nor intellect makes a person good - if a person is good, they know how to use their faith or intellect for good. So, I repeat, what's needed, is not the end of religion, but the end of religious intolerance.

Few experiences rival a serious climb for bringing us into close contact with our own limitations. Part engineering project, part chess game, part ultramarathon, mountaineering demands of us in a way that other endeavors do not. After my trip to Cholatse, I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art or even, in its purest form, rugged spirituality—a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to “become what we are capable of becoming.” This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak—Rainier, Cholatse, Everest—the more it fires the imagination.

All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the “unaffiliated” box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and atheists and have rejected the conventional God. Others say they are spiritual but not religious. They still believe in God but have abandoned conventional forms of congregating. Still others declare themselves “done” with religion. They slink away from religious communities, traditions that once gave them life, and go hiking on Sunday morning. Some still go to church, but are hanging on for dear life, hoping against hope that something in their churches will change. They pray prayers about heaven that no longer make sense and sing hymns about an eternal life they do not believe in. They want to be in the world, because they know they are made of the same stuff as the world and that the world is what really matters, but some nonsense someone taught them once about the world being bad or warning of hell still echoes in their heads. They are afraid to say what they really think or feel for fear that no one will listen or care or even understand. They think they might be crazy. All these people are turning toward the world because they intuit that is where they will find meaning and awe, that which those who are still theists call God. They are not crazy. They are part of this spiritual revolution - people discovering God in the world and a world that is holy, a reality that enfolds what we used to call heaven and earth into one. These people are not secular, even though their main concern is the world; they are not particularly religious (in the old-fashioned understanding of the term), even though they are deeply aware of God. They are fashioning a way of faith between conventional theism and any kind of secularism devoid of the divine. In our time, people are turning toward the numinous presence that animates the world, what theologian Rudolf Otto called “the Holy.” They are those who are discovering a deeply worldly faith. Decades ago Catholic theologian Karl Rahner made a prediction about devout people of the future. He said they would either be “mystics,” those who have “experienced something ,” or “cease to be anything at all”; and if they are mystical believers, they will be those whose faith “is profoundly present and committed to the world.” The future of faith would be an earthy spirituality , a brilliant awareness of the spirit that vivifies the world.

I am human by birth, human by heart and human by action, I don’t need any other shallow identity.

Science is not more important than people - philosophy is not more important than people - religion is not more important than people - people first, then everything else.

Jephthah sacrificed his daughter because God helped him win a battle. (And God did not stop him.)–Judges chapter 11

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD.–Deuteronomy 23:2 (sins of the fathers)

Ontogeny is a branch of embryology that studies how very dissimilar organisms look similar in the developmental stages (e.g., fish, frogs and people).

The female is nature’s default setting (embryology). All fetuses are female at the start but at about eight-weeks, a sudden surge of male hormones comes from the brain that kills all of the female attributes.

Deism is a belief that focuses on nature, science and the world as it is.

No constitution in the world is worth more than human life.

I am human and I love humans.

Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their message to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview.

Battle Hymn of The Public (The Humanist Sonnet) Mine eyes have seen the glory, Of the rising of the Gods. We are fighting all the worry, Trampling authority of the frauds. We are awakening ourselves, Breaking the spell of tradition. Finally we are breathing free, Devoid of all segregation. We still have our prejudices, But we no longer bow to them. Biases may still prevail in us, No more do we submit to them. God ain't up there but here in you and me. Awake, Arise O Mighty Gods to die for the unfree.

I am human, that's why I prioritize rights over ritual.

If you stop believing in God, that won't magically make you a better person than you already are - in the same way - if you start believing in God, it won't magically make you a better person than you already are. Neither faith nor intellect makes a person good - if a person is good, they know how to use their faith or intellect for good. So, I repeat, what's needed, is not the end of religion, but the end of religious intolerance.

Over the years I have walked and explored various uncharted territories of integration, but for some inexplicable reason, I find myself drawn back to my psychological homebase - to my original intervention - the original purpose for which Naskar was born - the purpose of religious assimilation. That is why, atheism has never been the focus in any of my work. If your own exploration of nature and the universe makes you outgrow the influence of ancestral myths, that's great - if not, it doesn't matter to me one bit. So long as you are a decent human being, your psychological necessity of a personal deity or the lack of it, is irrelevant outside our personal life. If you stop believing in God, that won't magically make you a better person than you already are - in the same way - if you start believing in God, it won't magically make you a better person than you already are. Neither faith nor intellect makes a person good - if a person is good, they know how to use their faith or intellect for good. So, I repeat, what's needed, is not the end of religion, but the end of religious intolerance.

What's needed, is not the end of religion, but the end of religious intolerance.

It has been said that no matter how often the wisdom of the world fails, we run right back to the same people who have never had the answers. We go to these secular-humanist counselors, who don’t help, and then finally find a Christian counselor to get us straightened out. After we have exhausted all the human possibilities, we do the thing we should have done in the first place.

Recognition or no recognition, Human never forgets to be human. The entire Abhijit Naskar legacy was created without any recognition. Then why did I continue you ask, Because I never wrote for admiration. I write to provide shelter to all, And electrify their veins into action.

Bible, Vedas, Koran (Sonnet 1274) Take my Bible, Take my Vedas; Take my Koran, Take my Suttas; Take my Darwin, Take my creation; Take my Aquinas, Take my Atom; Take my myths, Take my reason; Take my facts, Take my fiction; Take the whole lot, I'll still be human. My humanity thrives beyond all dualities of facts and fiction.

Till we end militant atheism, there is no Humanism.

If children in a given school, for example, come from diverse religious or cultural backgrounds, on what basis should the school conduct ethical education? To use a single religious perspective would be inadequate. [...] What is required is a way of promoting inner values which is genuinely universal — which can embrace, without prejudice, both agnostic humanist perspectives and religious perspectives of various kinds.

…humanist principles—especially those that emphasize human worth and dignity, the imperative to respect human rights, reverence for life, and the intrinsic ability of humans to be caring and just—provide the foundations of secular moral orientations.

Whether you consider your worldview to be sacred or secular, religious or humanist; whether you eagerly await the newest scientific discovery or spend your days dreading the next disclosure that might undermine your faith, you share something with every other human being on earth. You are alive. Vibrantly alive. Mysteriously alive. You live and breathe and swim in an ocean of spirituality.

the moral atheist or secular humanist?

Love of religion may or may not make you a good person, but religion of love always does.

The secular-humanist worldview has no answer to the questions concerning the problems from evil and suffering. In fact, it has no answer to much of anything.

The humanistic beliefs, then, of most secular people should be recognized as exactly that—beliefs. They cannot be deduced logically or empirically from the natural, material world alone. If there is no transcendent reality beyond this life, then there is no value or meaning for anything.64 To hold that human beings are the product of nothing but the evolutionary process of the strong eating the weak, but then to insist that nonetheless every person has a human dignity to be honored—is an enormous leap of faith against all evidence to the contrary. Even Nietzsche, however, cannot escape his own scalpel. He blasted secular liberals for being inconsistent and cowardly. He believed that calls for social bonding and benevolence for the poor and weak meant “herd-like uniformity, the ruin of the noble spirit, and the ascendency of the masses.”65 He wanted to turn from the “banal creed” of modern liberalism to the tragic, warrior culture (the “Ubermensch” or “Superman”) of ancient times. He believed the new “Man of the Future” would have the courage to look into the bleakness of a universe without God and take no religious consolation. He would have the “noble spirit” to be “superbly self-fashioning” and not beholden to anyone else’s imposed moral standards.66 All of these declarations by Nietzsche compose, of course, a profoundly moral narrative. Why is the “noble spirit” noble? Why is it good to be courageous, and who says so? Why is it bad to be inconsistent? Where did such moral values come from, and what right does Nietzsche have, by his own philosophy, to label one way of living noble or good and other ways bad?67 In short, he can’t stop doing what he tells everyone else to stop doing. Thus, Eagleton observes, Nietzsche’s “Man of the Future” has not abolished God at all. “Like the Almighty, he rests upon nothing but himself.” We see that there is no truly irreligious human being. Nietzsche is calling people to worship themselves, to grant the same faith and authority to themselves that they once put in God. Even Nietzsche believes. “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.”68 We have seen that the secular humanism Nietzsche despised lacks a good grounding for its moral values.69 However, the even greater dangers of Nietzsche’s antihumanism are a matter of historical record. Peter Watson details how Nietzsche’s views were important inspirations in the twentieth century to totalitarian figures of both the Left and Right, of both Nazism and Stalinism.70

Mr. Lowery gave a talk Wednesday night at prayer meeting about secular humanists. He said they were all over the place.” “What are they, anyway? I keep reading about them.” “Well, they do all these secular things for one thing and you just don’t know when one’s liable to break in your bedroom and start doing some of it.

I am the world I want to build, I am the human I want to inspire. I am the mind I want as neighbor, I am just a glimpse into the future.

It's not enough to outgrow the divisions in culture, we must also outgrow the divisions in intellect. For example, if you think theology is all about the supernatural, it doesn't mean the entire field of theology is nonsense, it just means, you are studying the wrong kind of theology – you are stuck with an archaic notion of theology. Likewise, if you think science is all about cold facts and figures, then you are studying the wrong kind of science – you are stuck with an archaic notion of science. Till you develop a common humane ground underneath your feet, all the facts and all the faith won't do you any good.

Our political program, I write, calling for the establishment of a secular, democratic state in the whole of Palestine for both Palestinians and Jews, represents a humanistic vision of a society that recognizes no oppressor-oppressed, occupier-occupied dichotomies. Palestinian violence, I conclude, is the only weapon left to the Palestinians -- a colonized people -- to ensure the hearing for the voice of moderation. Besides, I add, the world recognizes that the violence committed by slaves to break their chains is not the same as the violence committed by the slave master to subdue them.

I'll tell you plainly - I don't believe in a supreme being, but if you do, and your belief helps you be a better human, I'll fight for your belief till my last breath. But if your belief is your excuse for intolerance and fanaticism, then you're my child, and I am your judgment.

This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

It could be the Catholic Church asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun in Galileo’s time,

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in a book like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, now says that the Portlandesque bumper-sticker view of evolution as a linear progression from monkey to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens to (naturally) progressive secular humanist is untrue. Many scientists now think that all sorts of hominin species were on the earth at the same time. (Fun fact: the average person of European ancestry is 2 percent Neanderthal.4) Harari makes the case that the

How I Get My Ideas (The Sonnet) You wanted to know how I get my ideas, The universe speaks to me. You wanted to know how my words appear, The soil and the air hand them to me. You asked how do I speak for every culture, I listen to the heart beyond the word. You asked how am I not bound by geography, Long ago I turned my inner walls into dust. You said to me that I should have some fun, I'll indeed have fun when the fallen are lifted. You wanted to know why do I care at all, That's because I am an alive human not an insect. Instead of asking why and how a human acts human, If there is no such being around why not be the first one!

Sonnet 1359 I know people who use God as excuse for hate and war. I know people who use God as inspiration for love and peace. I know people who use Science as excuse to be cold and inhuman. I know people who use Science as means to be warm and responsible. It's neither God nor Science, that causes coldness and war. In the hands of a selfish ape, Science and God are equally impotent. But when it's a responsible human that wields either God or Science, You can rest assured of one thing, nothing can dent their humanness.

It's neither God nor Science, that causes coldness and war. In the hands of a selfish ape, Science and God are equally impotent.

I am not a capitalist, I am not a communist, I am not a socialist, I am not a traditionalist. A puerile, clinically sectarian species like yours cannot fathom what I am. Does that mean, I am not the same species as you! Sure, I am - but from a different dimension - a different dimension in time - a different dimension in mind - where intellect is only a tool, not torture - where faith is only a choice, not compulsion - where money is only a means, not master - where oneness is fundamental, not fiction.

Only sin in the world is the sin of division.

Ardent critics of religion are just as animal as fundamentalists.

More than being the spark of reason, Be the reason for someone's spark. Better than bearing the light of faith, Instill faith in someone's light.