I once met Christopher Hitchens at the post office on Florida Ave. in Northwest DC. It was a rainy day in April. Turned out it was his 61st birthday, several months before he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. I saw him from behind—he was standing a few people ahead of me in line—but I recognized him instantly. I then spent the next few moments talking myself into approaching him and trying to think of something worthwhile to say. He turned around several times, looking toward the front windows of the post office. He looked terrible. Bloated, disheveled, a worn tote bag with all kinds of loose paper sticking out the top thrown over his shoulder.

As the line crept forward he turned around once more, and I said, “Mr. Hitchens?”

“Well,” he began with some restraint, “would you like me to be?”

People who knew Christopher Hitchens, or knew of him, were likely to have a strong opinion about the writer one way or the other, and I took his question as an attempt to confirm whether I was friend or foe. I introduced myself as the editor of the Humanist magazine and he instantly warmed. “Ah yes, yes. I believe I accepted an award from you,” he remarked matter-of-factly. I really don’t remember what happened to the one or two patrons between us, but suddenly we were together in line, inching closer to the counter.

It had been in the news just a few days before that he and Richard Dawkins were seeking advice from human rights lawyers to have Pope Benedict arrested during a planned visit to Britain, the charge being his cover-up of sex abuse by Catholic priests. I asked him whether he thought they could pull it off, and he wasted no time describing the legal rationale and the idiocy of the Catholic Church with his trademark candor and erudition. He no longer looked terrible. He was Christopher Hitchens on a tear—indignant and aglow. Being on the receiving end of this energy, I was very glad to be seen as a friend and not a foe. And then it was his turn to mail his letters. I managed to slip him my card and ask for an interview (“of course, of course,” he said, “I’m in the phone book.”). And that was it. I later sent him a letter and a copy of the magazine, but when the diagnosis came down I thought it best to hold off. Then his cancer became a big story, along with the requisite bets on whether his mind would convert spiritually before his body gave out physically, and any access I may have had was lost in the shuffle.

I regret that I never got to sit down with Christopher Hitchens and hear him out on all manner of issues of importance to humanists. We’re all familiar with his targets and his shifting foreign policy perspective. But we can’t ignore his contribution to the cause of reason. I personally wanted to ask him about his falling out with Gore Vidal, who I did have the opportunity to interview and who had some pretty scathing things to say about his one-time friend, Hitch. If nothing else, it would have felt fair to let him have his say. Then again, Christopher Hitchens was someone who got to have his say again and again because he did it so damned well. So with that, I think I’ll go and finish his memoir, Hitch- 22 and then start in on Arguably, his recently published collections of essays. Mr. Hitchens, you’ll be sorely missed!

(Guest post by Rick Heller)

I have been participating in the Occupy movement, and although I have held a sign outside Bank of America protesting policies that allow banks to be “too big to fail,” my main activity has been to lead meditations at Occupy Boston’s encampment across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

These meditations are based on those conducted at the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. The Humanist Mindfulness Group at Harvard has an orientation that can be described as “Secular Buddhist,” bearing a relationship to the Buddhist religion analogous to the relationship that Humanistic Judaism has with Orthodox Judaism.

When leading a meditation at Occupy Boston, I make clear that I don’t think meditators send out “vibes” that magically effect our financial institutions. Rather, these meditations have two purposes. The first is reducing stress, because living and sleeping in close quarters with others can be trying (I’m not a camper, only a day visitor). But more interesting is the possibility that meditative practices can directly contribute to the primary goal of the Occupy movement, which is to oppose the greed that led to speculative bubble and subsequent economic crash in 2008.

Newsweek has a cover story out on the science of why people overspend (I wrote on the same subject in the Humanist’s July/August issue). We have two motivational networks in the brain, one that focuses on immediate gratification and one on long-term payoffs. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University has found that when people receive injections of oxytocin, a hormone associated with loving feelings, they are better able to make financial decisions that require the deferral of immediate gratification. To put it simply, when you feel good now, you don’t need “retail therapy.”

With this in mind, I led a loving-kindness meditation in which you successively summon loving feelings toward yourself, a friend, a neutral person and finally, a person you find irritating. In a separate meditation, we were mindful of sounds. As Occupy Boston is next to a busy road and diagonal from a fire station, it provides a rich environment to practice receptive, loving attention to sounds usually thought of as “noise.”

Meditation and allied practices like psychotherapy can help us overcome our own greed, but they won’t magically overcome the greed of the “1%.” My hope is that young people in the Occupy movement can serve as role models to others in their generation who pursue materialistic aims. The current crisis has knocked a lot of young people off the career path they expected to be pursuing. They are examining alternative ways to live “the good life.” If the Humanist community were to engage with Occupy right now, I think we’d find a lot of young people open to our message.

Rick Heller is the author of the new eBook, Occupy the Moment.

(Guest post by George Erickson)

Morning. The sun, shuttered by clouds that brush my Ely Lake treetops, is just a feeble glow. Were it not for the intervening Norway pines, I could see the Eveleth/Virginia airport, and a mile beyond that, my gaze would stop at a roadside memorial to a caring, progressive, Minnesota activist who ranked among the best.

On a day like this, when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and his wife Sheila were en route to the funeral of a friend in a chartered Beechcraft King Air, their lives took a tragic turn. Descending too low, and more than a mile off course, the Beech struck the trees, and we suddenly had a vastly different funeral to consider—a service to honor Senator Wellstone, his wife, and child plus several coworkers and two instrument-rated pilots who died in that inexplicable crash.

I retrieve a book from the table beside my deck chair, and as the wind sighs I turn the first page of a book that every American should read: Wellstone’s The Consience of the Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda.

The title says it all, for Wellstone was a truly compassionate man: “How can we live in the richest, most privileged country in the world… and still hear from Republicans and too many Democrats that we cannot afford to provide a good education for every child, that we cannot afford to provide health security for all our citizens?”

He was always that way. As a fledgling Carleton college professor who was determined to organize the poor, Wellstone was warned by the college trustees that he’d be fired if he continued his activist ways. He persisted—and was fired.

Fortunately, 1600 of the college’s 1700 students rose to Wellstone’s defense. Reinstated, he became the Carlton’s youngest tenured professor, and soon turned to politics as a way to improve the lives of John and Jane Doe. “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives,” he said, “lessening human suffering, advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.” Thomas Paine, the first great American humanist comes to mind.

With his green bus, he traveled aroung Minnesota, won the Democratic nomination, and campaigned against wealthy Rudy Boschwitz, the incumbent senator who eventually sunk his faltering campaign with a desperate, bigoted charge that Wellstone was insufficiently Jewish because he’d married a Christian.

During his years in the U.S. Senate, Wellstone, who came to be known as “the conscience of the Senate,” championed women’s rights, promoted single-payer healthcare, and campaign finance reform. He was re-elected despite a vicious campaign that relied on a Newt Gingrich strategy to always use derogatory adjectives when speaking of your opponent. Thus, Paul faced ads that said “Wellstone is a lying, hypocritical whiner” but rarely addressed the issues. He was labeled “Senator Welfare,” and was charged with wanting to take everyone’s guns away, and with supporting abortion at nine months for the purpose of sex selection. In an attempt to make liberalism sound like a crime, he was called “embarrassingly liberal.” (Nevermind that liberalism is defined as “favorable to progress or reform, favorable to freedom of action and thought, free from prejudice, open to tolerance and generosity.”)

Despite frequent death threats, Wellstone persevered, serving the ordinary man and woman—not the corporations and not the rich and famous. He had been targeted by Republicans as the # 1 person to be removed from the Senate. Undeterred he soldiered on, and on October 25, 2002, just two weeks after he voted against George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, his Beechcraft fell from the skies.

Though just five foot five inches tall, Paul Wellstone took on bigger, more powerful, and often unprincipled foes, winning some battles and losing others, but in eschewing power, fame, and profit, and in representing John and Jane Doe so faithfully, Paul Wellstone repeatedly proved that he was the a superb human being.

The following is a guest post by Jason Torpy, President of the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers. He delivered the following remarks to the Pennsylvania Nonbelievers on September 11, 2011, at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, PA.

I want to open by talking about why I’m here today. 9/11 is a tragedy, not a holiday or a political platform or a reason to justify or condemn ideologies. Proper activities to mark the anniversary of a tragedy do not include media blitzes, profiteering, or recruiting. Proper activities include respect and consolation for the families of the victims, first and foremost. Also included, I think, is a solemn effort to learn from the tragedy, both the causes and our reactions. It is this latter activity that I hope to focus on today – how did we react to 9/11, how can we prevent the next 9/11, and when tragedy strikes again, how can we better react.

On 9/11 2001, 3000 people died, with thousands more injured. This was a coordinated series of 4 hijackings by 19 Al Qaeda operatives. In the dismay of such a large attack on US soil, the institution of patriotic, xenophobic, religious, and militaristic fervor instilled in the population by our leaders has resulted in a decade of wars and the degeneration of a century of American goodwill around the world. Everyone knows these basic, terrible facts. I fought in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. For over a year, I served with the Army’s 1st Armored Division first holding Baghdad and then moving south to quell a political Shi’i uprising. Even then, I had questions about deploying. My motives were simple: To help the Iraqi people rebuild from our invasion and the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Many other people — soldiers, leaders, voters — had many other purposes in mind: a Christian crusade to convert Muslims, a corporate push to seize Middle East oil, a breakup of a terrorist stronghold, a defensive action to stop a nuclear attack, an imperialistic expansion of western dominance, simple vengeance, and even blind, stupid politics. On Big Think, David Ropeik, a Harvard instructor specializing in risk and fear recently wrote, “The war in Iraq was possible only because the American public was afraid.” All those reasons, in some combination, were held by all the soldiers in Iraq and the leaders that sent soldiers to Iraq. All those reasons were in the minds of American allies, American enemies, and of the people we were supposedly trying to liberate.

But were any of those reasons valid? I don’t have the answers, but as we continue these wars and consider the next war, in Libya, or Somalia, or Egypt, or Iran, or Russia, or China, I hope we reject corporate interests, imperial interests, and most of all fear and vengeance. Some people say proudly that they are already against the next war. Can we rest comfortably in a cocoon of pacifism, ignoring cries for help from the oppressed, calls for support from our allies, and threats of violence from those who would do us harm? When we have humanitarian and purely defensive goals, military action is sometimes the only recourse in a violent world. Silent protests, airlifts of food, diplomatic action, and NGOs are part of the toolset, but, war is also an option.

Invasion of Afghanistan was the immediate response to 9/11, barely a month after the attacks. The Afghanistan war has always been on a smaller scale, always been more closely related to the 9/11 attacks, and always been easier to label as a purely defensive action intended to root the terrorists out of their home in Taliban territory. In fact, my original order to Iraq was not for Operation Iraqi Freedom, but rather as an extension of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Afghanistan War operation. The character of that war and its continuance provided the military and political foundations for expansion of military action into Iraq. The expansion into Iraq also carried an expansion from national defense to more questionable goals and outcomes.

As we reflect on 9/11, we pause to remember the thousands who died. As atheists and humanists, we know that they are gone in the literal sense, but we can focus on their legacy and what we, the living, can learn from their lives and deaths. We the living will shape the legacy of those lost in the 9/11 attacks. We the living may grow from tragedy or perpetuate tragedy. Our reactions as a nation have resulted in over 6000 US dead in continuing wars, as well as those dead from coalition forces. The smallest estimates put civilian casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at well over 100,000. The near term economic cost of the 9/11 attacks were about one hundred billion dollars in lost GDP and rebuilding costs. The cost of war is impossible to pin down but is certainly well over a trillion dollars. Add to that cost the eradication of American goodwill around the world, the expansion of Executive war authority, and loss of freedoms due to the Patriot Act. Everyone should think very hard about whether they would trade those costs for another 9/11.

Last month, the International Humanist & Ethical Union held their triennial World Congress with a focus on Peace. As representative from the US Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers, I presented on humanists in military service. One key argument I made was the influence that we, as rationalists, skeptics, humanists, and ethical atheists, can bring to both Jus in Bello and Jus Ad Bellum, that is the entry into Just War and the execution of war in a just manner. As humanists, we have the opportunity to promote humanitarian rather than vengeful reaction to terrorism and tragedy. I can’t say what the right response was to 9/11. I can’t say whether invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, or the continuance of either of those wars for so long was necessary to defend the United States. I can’t help but wonder if the forces of terrorism could withstand a trillion dollars of roads, schools, and hospitals.

It is easy to fall into the animosity of “us and them,” but humanity is not so diverse. In viewing a picture of the Earth taken by a space probe as it left the solar system, Sagan saw a pale blue dot. About this pale blue dot that was Earth, Sagan said,

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

This means that even in the face of tragedy, when the world swells from a pale blue dot to a monstrous and frightening eye of pain and misery, we must remember that we are all in this together. With all of our differences and fears and hurts and desires, we must see people as people, equal in worth and dignity. Even when we take up arms in order to free the oppressed from tyrants, it must be to bring us closer together and not merely to punish and destroy our brothers and sisters who may look different and live far away.

We humanists have no monopoly on morality. It is absolutely essential that we join hands with those Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other spiritual persons who identify more with a supernatural element to the world. This is important not least because we are brothers and sisters on this planet. For some humanists, our ideological commitment to naturalism and reason puts us at odds with adherents of various religions. It becomes easy and even comfortable to hold up those events of 9/11 as proof of the universal evils of religion. We cannot look at radical, violent religious extremism and call it mainstream religion. We have friends, family, co-workers, and even fellow townspeople who show the positive face of religion. Why exploit this tragedy to build bigger walls between us?
We should see this as an opportunity to reach out to those who have felt the deep despair of fellow humans doing evil, especially fellow humans who claim the same ideology. Whether by taking solace in a higher power or through a naturalistic and humanistic perspective, we all mourn in our own way. We can reach out and hold hands in order to understand the tragedy of 9/11 and to eliminate its causes. We can join hands to rise up against intolerance, religious division, and violent extremism. We can stand as allies in our goal of peace and unity, even if we draw our inspiration from different sources. We can console the victims and those closest to victims even better if we do so as partners without rancor and divisiveness.

But there are still those with a different agenda who will promote violence, condone the attacks as justified, look for conspiracies under every rock, or try to place blame on all those who carry labels like “Muslim” or “believer” or who have faces or skin colors similar to those of the hijackers. Will we join together against those who are different, or will we join together with those who seek peace? Will we seek out allies who seek peace, or will we seek out enemies to blame and to ostracize and to kill?

I hope that we can all keep in perspective that we are brothers and sisters on what Sagan called this pale blue dot. In the face of tragedy, I hope that our differences become smaller, not larger. As we consider military options, we should do so in order to free people from suffering, not to seek vengeance or to destroy enemies. We must ask ourselves hard questions about how we have reacted to the one great tragedy of 9/11. Have the wars, legislation, foreign policy, and cultural shifts in the United States been for the better or for the worse? If for the worse, then we can start today to change for the better. Solutions and salvation will only come from us, and can only be better when we respect our diversity and work together. We say that we will never forget 9/11. My hope is that we will continue to learn from 9/11.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a world-renowned activist for the cause of physician-assisted voluntary euthanasia. He waged a tireless battle against the medical establishment, politicians, theologians, and all who would actively resist a comprehensive, rational, and compassionate program of death with dignity. Kervorkian died on Friday, June 3, in Michigan. He was eighty-three.

The following article was adapted from the speech delivered by Dr. Kevorkian upon receiving the 1994 Humanist Hero Award from the American Humanist Association at its annual conference in Detroit, Michigan. It was originally published in the November/December 1994 Humanist magazine.

In it he asks:

What is ethics? Can you define it? My definition is simple: ethics is saying and doing what is right, at the time. Does that make sense? And that changes. Notice I added “at the time.”

and says this about what it is to be a humanist:

I used to define maturity as the inability to be shocked. So I guess in some ways we’re still immature. But if you’re truly mature, and a true humanist, you can never be shocked.

A Modern Inquisition
by Jack Kevorkian

This is probably the first time that this august body has been addressed by someone under indictment on two counts of first-degree murder.

I was ignorant of many things when I graduated from college. I was uneducated; maybe I still am. All I was trained for was a craft. I think that’s true of colleges generally in this country today–they train you for a craft. But everything of value I learned in my life I learned after college, on my own: philosophy, music…. The one deficiency I have is literature; I’m very weak there.

So I wasn’t attuned, back then, to what life in our society is. I was put by fortune into this position, which has given me a real deep insight into what so-called civilized society is. And I learned one thing: that society is not civilized. And I learned another thing: that we are still deeply mired in the Dark Ages.

Superhighways crossing each other at several levels, color television sets and compact discs, these to me don’t indicate the height of civilization, and they don’t indicate enlightenment either–in fact, they’re dangerous tools of the Dark Ages.

The Inquisition is still alive and well. The only difference is that today it’s much more dangerous and subtle. The inquisitors don’t burn you at the stake anymore; they slowly sizzle you. They make sure you pay dearly for what you do. In fact, they kill you often in a subtle way. My situation is a perfect example of it.

This is not self-pity, understand. I don’t regret the position I’m in. I am not a hero, either–by my definition, anyway. To me, anyone who does what should be done is not a hero. Heroes to me are very, very rare. And I still feel that I’m only doing what I, as a physician, should do. A license has nothing to do with it; I am a physician and therefore I will act like a physician whenever I can. That doesn’t mean that I’m more compassionate than anyone else, but there is one thing I am that many aren’t and that’s honest.

To me, the biggest deficiency today and the biggest problem with society is dishonesty. It underlies almost every crisis and every problem you can name. It’s almost an inevitable thing; in fact, it’s unavoidable as you mature. Children are born perfectly honest–and slowly learn how to become dishonest. They are trained at it. We feel that a little dishonesty greases the wheels of society, that it makes things easier for everybody if we lie a little to each other. But all this dishonesty becomes cumulative after a while. If everyone were perfectly honest at all times, if human nature were such that it could stand that, you would find many fewer problems in the world. I know that’s impractical. Maybe I’m a hopeless idealist. But at least that’s looking at the problem at its root. Children, by the way, can handle honesty. They swear and curse at each other, and it doesn’t affect them very much. But it’s difficult to be perfectly honest as an adult.

I never considered myself a humanist. I’m not a joiner. I never join any organization. And yet humanism, I think, is the closest to what I think is a good way of living in society. What is the best rule for life? I often ask myself that. Some people will tell you, “the Golden Rule is best.” Well, I don’t know–is it? We spout platitudes without thinking. We’re trained not to think, really; we’re trained to respond to platitudes. Education does that. I think education in this society is geared toward making sure you are well brainwashed by the time you are an adult.

The Golden Rule states: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But that doesn’t always apply. What if I met a masochist or a sadist? You see, it wouldn’t work. I think the best rule for life is “Say and do what you wish, whenever you wish, so long as you do not harm another person or his or her property.” Does that sound right? Now if every adult human being acted that way, this would be a much better society. We may not have color television sets, and we may not have super-highways, but we would probably be a better society. We certainly wouldn’t have the Inquisition.So all I’m doing is what a physician should do. I’m not really frightened by what’s happening to me; I’m not even intimidated. I’m annoyed! In fact, I’m reinforced in what I’m doing because of the opposition, which is so irrational.

By the way, this is not a one-man operation. I keep getting all the credit, and I don’t deserve it. I’ve got tremendous legal support in Geoffrey Fieger and Michael Swartz. You’d be amazed how much of a burden they relieve me of I can’t think of anybody else who could do it the way Geoffrey does it, and he deserves as much credit as I. He handles all the legal aspects, which, as you know, are enormous, and gives me free rein on what I should do. Credit must also go to my sister Margo and to my other sister Flora, who’s now in Europe. Margo and Flora were with me during the Janet Atkins case, and I must admit that I couldn’t have done it without them. I was very nervous–I was actually a little frightened–and they gave me great moral support. They were just as nervous as I, but they tried not to show it, which helped. I must also mention my other assistant, my medical technologist Neal Nichol. These people make up the nucleus of the group that deserves the credit; I’m just the figurehead here.

When we first started this work, we didn’t expect any of the publicity that followed. We tried to keep this low key. I have been accused of grandstanding, recklessness, and publicity seeking, all of which, of course, is not true. You must understand that the entire mainstream media, especially in the first year or two, were totally against what I’m doing. Entirely! It was unanimous. They tried to make my work look very negative–they tried to make me look negative–so that they could denigrate the concept we’re working on. They said I should not be identified with the concept, yet they strived to do just that. They insulted and denigrated me and then hoped that it would spill over onto the concept. It didn’t work, however; according to the polls, people may be split 50-50 on what they think of me, but they are three-to-one in favor of the concept, and that’s never changed.

Now isn’t it strange that on a controversial subject of this magnitude–one that cuts across many disciplines–the entire editorial policy of the country is on one side? Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Even on a contentious issue like abortion, there is editorial support for both sides. And our issue–death with dignity–as far as we’re concerned, is simpler than abortion. So why is every mainstream editorial writer and newspaper in the country against us on this? Not one has come out in wholehearted support of us, even though public opinion is on our side.

As I surmise it, they’re in a conspiracy, which is not a revelation to many people. But with whom? Well, let’s take a look at who’s against this: organized religion, organized medicine, and organized big money. Now, that’s a lot of power. Why is organized medicine against this? For a couple of reasons, I think: first, because the so-called profession–which is no longer a profession; it’s really a commercial enterprise and has been for a long time–is permeated with religious overtones. The basis of so-called medical ethics is religious ethics. The Hippocratic oath is a religious manifesto–Pythagorean (pagan, by the way)–they don’t even mind that. It is not medical. Hippocrates didn’t write it; we don’t know who did, but we think it’s from the Pythagoreans. So, if you meet a physician who says, “Life is sacred,” be careful: we didn’t study sanctity in medical school. You are talking to a theologian first, probably a business person second, and a physician third.

The second reason that organized medicine is against physician-assisted voluntary euthanasia is because of the money involved. If a patient’s suffering is curtailed by three weeks, can you imagine how much that adds up to in the medical and healthcare field? Let’s look at Alzheimer’s disease. They say, “Well, that’s not terminal.” Well, it is terminal. Any process that curtails natural life is a terminal disease; the duration of the terminal process is the only difference. Some cancers last a week in their terminal phase. Alzheimer’s disease is terminal. I understand that we have four million Alzheimer’s cases in this country. Let’s assume that one out of ten opts to end his or her life at a certain stage, just when it is getting bad. That’s 400,000 people depriving some nursing homes of perhaps four or five years of care for a vegetating human being. At $30,000 a year, multiplied by 400,000, times five years–you’re into billions of dollars. And that’s just one disease, and one out of ten people.

How about the pharmaceutical industry? A lot of drugs are used in those last several months and years of life, which also add up to billions and billions of dollars. So you can see why they are going to oppose this.

That’s what is so dismaying to me; that’s what makes me cynical. You have to be cynical in life when you read about a situation that’s so terrible and so incorrigible. There are certain ways to deal with it: you can go along with it, which is hard to do; you can go insane, which is a refuge (and some do that); or you can face it with deep cynicism. I’ve opted for cynicism.

In responding to the religious issues, I ask this: why not let all the religious underpinnings of medicine apply only to the ethics of religious hospitals and leave the secular hospitals alone? It’s a perfect solution. We’re not going to tell the religious hospitals what to do; they can perform any insanity they wish. But what they can’t do is impose that insanity on the rest of us. The doctors who work in those religious hospitals can refuse to do abortions, they can refuse assisted suicide or euthanasia, they can do anything they want. But they have no right to impose what they call a universal medical ethic on secular institutions.

Besides, what is ethics? Can you define it? My definition is simple: ethics is saying and doing what is right, at the time. Does that make sense? And that changes. Notice I added “at the time.”

Religion claims to have eternal truths; philosophy, too. I’m not singling out religion; you’ve got idiotic philosophy as well. You’ve got Kant with his unknowable realm. What sense does it make to hypothesize an unknowable realm? When you know it, there is no longer an unknowable realm. And if it’s unknowable, you’re never going to get there.

Ethics is saying and doing what is right at the time and that changes. Geoffrey and I use the example of coal as fuel. Seventy-five years ago, if I told you that for Christmas I was going to have a truck deliver 10 tons of coal to your house, you would have been delighted. If I told you that today, you would be insulted. Doing the right thing changes with time.

That’s true of human society also. There is a primitive society–I don’t know which one exactly–whose members were shocked to learn that we embalm our dead, place them in boxes, and then bury them in the ground. Do you know what they do? They eat them. To them, it’s ethical and moral and honorable to devour the corpse of your loved one. Now we’re shocked at that, right? It’s all a matter of acculturation, time, where you are, and who you are. Now if I visited this primitive society and learned that they do that, and I was a real humanist, I’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And if the so-called savage in turn said, “Gee, that’s interesting what you do,” then he or she would be a humanist. I used to define maturity as the inability to be shocked. So I guess in some ways we’re still immature. But if you’re truly mature, and a true humanist, you can never be shocked. If they eat their dead, so be it–that’s their culture. But you know what our missionaries did, don’t you? That’s immoral action.

I think you get the general gist of my position.

With Geoffrey at my side, I don’t fear this indictment for murder. In fact, everybody I’ve met just scratches their heads and laughs about it. These contemporary inquisitors have made a mockery of the judicial system in Michigan. This indictment has done one good thing, however: it brazenly manifests the depth of corruption within our society. And it’s not just the judiciary. Our legislature has manifested that as well with its silly law that I knew was unconstitutional. What kind of a legislature or government is it that would enact a so-called law it knew was unconstitutional? Can anybody get more depraved than that? Or more corrupt? Hardly. But that corruption permeates everything.

Our medical societies are just as corrupt; our medical boards are just as corrupt. I don’t have a license any more. Did that stop me from doing what a physician should do? No! You see, the licensure is not entirely to guarantee competence. In fact, I think that’s only a small part of what licensure is supposed to do. It guarantees absolute control. But they miscalculated on me. A piece of paper does not control me. They can’t take away my training, my experience, or what I want to do, what I feel is right. They miscalculated, and now their anger knows no bounds. That is why they are behaving the way they are. That is why you are seeing so much negative press. They are desperate now, and that makes them dangerous. When anyone becomes that desperate, they are dangerous, and I recognize the danger.

So you see, in effect, our society is no different than primitive society–or Nazi Germany. People easily forget that. We pride ourselves in this country and the Western world, saying, “We’re really enlightened and we’re different.” No, we’re still totalitarian to a great degree.

And I’m afraid it’s getting worse. When they added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, they stepped in the wrong direction. When you get your feet mired in quicksand like that, you cannot extract them very easily. This society is thrashing around now. And you know what happens when you thrash around in quicksand. I am not optimistic at all.

It took two-and-a-half centuries for the Catholic church to apologize to Gallileo, and you can bet it is going to take something like that long for any apology to come for what we are doing today. If an apology comes at all!I hate to end on a pessimistic note, but I appreciate this opportunity to address you all. I thank you for your support. We are very much encouraged by it. We will keep going.

John Lennon was shot dead in front his apartment building
across from Central Park in New York City thirty years ago today.

He’d just returned from the recording studio.

His music and his mark on our culture are indelible,
his most famous song undoubtedly humanist:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

WE MISS YOU!

[Rant & Reason welcomes this guest post by Miguela Holt y Roybal]

Before I explain how much this author means to me, let me tell you a few things about him. Kurt Vonnegut, war hero and popular twentieth century author, was born in Indianapolis just three years after U. S. President Woodrow Wilson declared November 11th Armistice Day, a holiday commemorating the end of World War I, in 1919. “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with lots of pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service,” proclaimed the president to a nation still shell-shocked from the War to End All Wars.” Although the name of the celebration was changed in 1954 to Veterans Day to honor the service of all veterans, November 11th is a day still dedicated to world peace.

The irony of his birthday on Veterans Day was never lost to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He dedicated his life to promoting peace even though he fought in World War II and was proud of his service to our country. As a soldier who lived through the Battle of the Bulge, he knew the hell of war first hand. Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Dresden where the starving young man worked in a vitamin factory and risked beatings by sneaking teaspoons of the life-giving stuff. It was located in a meat storage locker with a cellar that on February 13, 1945, served very well as a shelter during the firebombing of Dresden by British Allied Forces.

One hundred and thirty five thousand people were killed and to the end of his days Vonnegut wondered why he and his fellow prisoners were not killed also. Dresden, the once magnificent European showplace, looked like the craters of the moon when they emerged from the meat locker into the still smoking ruins. The prisoners were ordered to pull hundreds of bodies out of basements but the city became so putrid that the liquefying remains of the citizenry were burnt with flamethrowers for expediency.

He defended his participation in World War II but reminded us of the human cost of wars. “One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It’s been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we’re always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of,” Vonnegut said in a 2002 interview.

Vonnegut was able to write about his war experiences in his masterwork Slaughterhouse-Five many years later finally publishing it in 1969. It was a bestseller and he was haunted by a terrible sense of loss and riddled with guilt about the riches he made from the book’s publication. In a speech he stated ruefully, “… not one Allied soldier was able to advance as much as an inch because of the firebombing of Dresden. Not one prisoner of the Nazis got out of prison a microsecond earlier. Only one person on Earth clearly benefited, and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight.”

The astonishing thing about all this is that Vonnegut tells us his story of war with exquisite humor as well as sadness. He’s been called “a moral mad scientist” and “the pinball wizard of cosmic cool.” However, his humor does not in the least take away from his serious themes about dark, foolish humanity and its responsibility for this messed up world.
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George Carlin’s death raises the question, was he a humanist? He was an atheist who certainly “told it like it is” regarding religion, and he advocated progressive values, civil liberties, and the First Amendment. But Carlin’s regular lamenting of “humanity’s bullshit” and a statement like, “I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse,” doesn’t exactly scream humanism to me.

Or does it? You could say Carlin was a humanist in the way Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist (except that I don’t think Carlin ever called himself one). That is, they worshiped at the altar of absurdity. But wait, absurdity is defined as, “The condition or state in which humans exist in a meaningless, irrational universe wherein people’s lives have no purpose or meaning.” Again, not very humanistic! But remember—these guys were artists and entertainers. Exposing the absurd was both Carlin’s and Vonnegut’s bread and butter, their shtick, their—quite literally for Carlin—act. How we respond to it is what matters. George Carlin’s talent rested in his ability to lay open what’s absurd about life and the human species, and in doing so to make us mad. And to make us think.

And so I would propose that illuminating the absurd is an act of rebellion that adds meaning to a seemingly meaningless world. Sisyphus with a smile. (Or is it a wink?) Now, what do you think—is this a humanist’s take?