a Humanist holiday called Human Light

Humanism means taking charge of the often lousy world around us and working to shape it into a better place

a sense of meaning in life that is not bound by or determined by a belief in a higher power that assigns us. We acknowledge as Humanists that there is no one single overarching purpose or meaning to our lives that's given to us, that's handed to us by the universe.

we therefore have not just the freedom but also the responsibility to choose a meaning for our own lives and to struggle to pursue it.

what is the meaning of our life? What is the purpose of our life if not, you know, avoiding divine punishment or achieving divine reward? And he called it dignity.

we build our lives and the meaning of our lives based on the relationships, the connections that we have with other people in the here and now.

check in with ourselves and say - how are we doing, how am I doing, how am I living, how am I handling my relationships with the people that I care most about, how am I handling my relationship with this Earth that I live on that I can't do without?

we can do better than simply rely only on the traditional sources that have this message that we no longer believe in

why do we need to use the word God when we have the perfectly good word love or the universe

what I was really wanting was not, you know, the presence of a mystery but the presence of people to love me and care for me

there is no justification for the tragedies that happen

There's nothing that one could say that would say, oh, this makes it better.

the only thing that we can say is that we care, we love, we acknowledge.

Death is real. It's final. It takes tremendous, tremendous courage to cope with. And we have to love one another because that's what we get. We get this world, this one shot.

I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrating the fact that we have this culture and this history in common as Americans and as people of the world. The question is what do we believe about it and how do we believe, you know, we should go about trying to be good people. And that's the discretion that we have to have, but I think we can celebrate in many ways together.

Good Without God

if then His Excellency would put a human soul on public view, explain and demonstrate the method of its separation from the corpse, and its means of transportation to eternity

The years they never knew, the loves they never gave, would matter less.