Green Oasis

Dale McGowan, editor of Parenting Beyond Belief, wrote about the definition of humanism that he gave to his six-year-old.

A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.

I’m not there yet, but every day sees me care a little bit less about metaphysics except for this one question that crops up whenever someone makes a metaphysical assertion: How do you know that? In other words, I’m becoming a strident apatheistic agnostic.

I hope that I will rewrite my character as the kind of humanist Dale described. I want my attitude to become “I can’t know and you can’t know, so why pretend it matters? Let’s sit down and reason together. When we’re done, let’s be kind to each other and try to remake the world the way we both want it to be. At the end of the day, that must be enough because we can’t do any better.”