Jewish Atheist

“Life is a near-death experience.”

George Carlin

“Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool. A comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.”

Sholem Aleichem

“You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.”

Quentin Crisp

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, I am not a crank. There is a lot to complain about. But humanism is above all positive, a resolve to live the best we can in the life we have. Religion is concerned with the same question, which it answers with a bunch of fantasies taken as reality; at the extreme, the religious delusion devalues this life to the point where it is an unimportant prelude to the next, and next thing you know, people are blowing themselves up.

(Scientific digression: NASA’s current goals include building better relations with the Muslim world. I agree emphatically! Anybody who knows how a man can ride a horse to heaven has definitely got something to tell NASA about space travel.)

We have morals.

Belief in these fantasies confers a specialness on the believers. Religion’s holier-than-thou stance is nowhere uglier than when atheists are accused of having no morals, as if morality can come only from deities or holy texts. Stalin and Hitler are held up as example of the excesses of atheism.

I’m tired of hearing it. It mires secularists in quagmires of good and evil (and Stalin’s and Hitler’s attitudes toward religion; we reallly gotta retire these absurd examples), only one aspect of the issue, subsumed in the larger question: how to live a good life, how to make the right choices (when we have them).

There is much ancient (as well as modern) secular wisdom…and much that we can discard. Religion first invades morality in Genesis 3:5, where God’s problem is that Adam and Eve will eat the fruit and, according to the serpent, “you will be like divine beings/gods who know good and bad.” Humans will be able to make moral decisions without God. Can’t have that.

Yet that’s just what they’ve been doing. People have been writing and thinking about right and wrong for many centuries since the Bible writers. Morality (as part of the good life) has undergone considerable refinement. And the definition of a good life can be simple or complex.

Alternatives are there.

The alternatives to belief are there for the secularist who will look for them. Good news: You don’t have time to pore through books of philosophy, and neither do I. In my career as a speechwriter, I discovered an amazingly convenient source of wisdom: books (later websites) of brief quotes, profound generalities, aphorisms, many of which were appropriate for speeches – and all applicable to life.

Some are positive; others, downright cynical and curmudgeonly. But that’s life. Some are brilliant; others, “I could have thought of that” (but you didn’t). Some even contradict others (quotes on marriage are equally split between “prison” and “heaven”).

Winston Churchill advised reading books of quotes. Emerson hated quotes: “Tell me want you know.” Well, sometimes what we know can come from the benefit of other people’s observations or experience.

Selection criteria

The quotes that have passed the “seems-to-fit-reality” and “applies to my/others’ life/lives,” as well as the brilliant ones and the BFOs (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) are collected in the Secular Wisdom section of this blog. It’s not just that we don’t need religion’s fantasies. We have some choice as to how our lives turn out (25% at most; the rest split between nature and nurture/circumstance). How do we choose wisely?

Below are the latest adds to the Secular Wisdom tab. You might want to look over the whole tab. If a quote from somebody intrigues you, you might want to read more of what he/she has to say.

Some of the same ideas appear repeatedly down through the ages. But people still don’t get it.

“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

Confucius
[Today, most people aspire to be pebbles, and the culture urges them to be.]

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“Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.”

Lao-tsu
[A critique of the Western cult of busy-ness, constant activity/consumption.]

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“More important than learning how to recall things is finding ways to forget things that are cluttering the mind.”

Eric Butterworth

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“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.”

George Sand

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“Think enough and you won’t know anything.”

Kenneth Patchen
[The philosopher’s problem. But most people don’t think enough.]

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“Each day should be passed as if it were our last.”

Publius Syrius

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“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.”

Elbert Hubbard

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“Life is a candle before the wind.”

Japanese proverb

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“1. Get enough food and eat it.
2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet; sleep there.
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it.
4. “

Richard Brautigan

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And my current fave…

“There is no murder worse than the killing of time.”

Yamamoto Gempo Roshi