Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
Interpretation
Goodness can exist independent of religious beliefs, and communities should focus on altruistic actions rather than self-congratulatory displays.
This quote by Rebecca Goldstein emphasizes the notion that moral goodness does not necessitate the presence of God or religious faith. Instead, she advocates for humanist communities to actively engage in practical acts of kindness, such as supporting those in need, rather than solely investing in promotional efforts that serve to bolster their own egos. The call to action highlights that true goodness is found in collective efforts to aid others, embodying the principles of empathy and solidarity.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a community service event to inspire participants.
Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience.
Men (people) are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.
I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?
The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
To believe in Jesus is to accept what he says, even when it runs contrary to what others are saying. It means rejecting the lure of sin, however attractive it may be, in order to set out on the difficult path of the Gospel virtues.
Now conscience wakes despair That slumber'd,-wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse.
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