“Love is wise; hatred is foolish"

 In A&P we're picking up our last required text, Andrew Copson's Secularism: A Very Short Introduction. I'm also recommending his and Alice Roberts's Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning, and joy. His podcast What I Believe is good too.

I love that the LBH begins with that Kurt Vonnegut statement of welcome I'm always quoting:

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

Kurt also said  “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.”

That's because, as Eustace Haydon said, "The humanist has a feeling of perfect at-homeness in the universe... as an earth-child." I'd drop the perfect but embrace the sentiment and the experience of continuity with all life. 

Contrary to the anti-evolutionary crusaders of his and our time still, that was Darwin's view as well. 

“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

Just imagine what a peaceably cosmopolitan world it could be, if more of us echoed Terence (and Appiah): I am human, nothing human is alien to me. And Russell.

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”