Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Tijana Mihajlović
So, I'm really glad to be part of this "We" session
because, like it or not, for secularists like me,
the most powerful form of connection to other people
and to a community throughout human history
has been religion.
Now, I am one of these people
who human rights activist Michael Ignatieff once described
as having a very religious personality, without a scintilla of religious belief.
And so, I want to argue that we can have a thriving moral and ethical community
without God or religion.
But, in order to show why and how,
let me tell you a little bit about my story.
So, I first got interested in religion growing up in Flushing, Queens, New York,
which has been described as one of the most religious neighborhoods in the world.
And so, in my class, my elementary school class,
I had maybe 20 different religions represented,
so we got a chance to experience each other's congregations,
and holidays, and even funerals.
And I really saw the beauty that is a religious community.
But we never talked about belief
because it made me have this instinctive sense
that, if one of those religions was absolutely true,
then the rest of them had to be, well -
Anyway, I had a Reform bar mitzvah,
but that only kind of confused and a little bit annoyed me.
I mean, all these secularist Jews standing around,
"Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu" - "Are we done yet?" Right?
You know, you can say, well,
"Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, ruler of the Universe,"
but you'd think that, if we're really talking
to the ruler of the entire Universe,
we'd stand up and salute a little straighter, right?
That was my thought, and so, you know -
You know, that just wasn't working for me,
but, in college, my interests deepened a little bit.
And my father died when I was 18,
after a long struggle with cancer.
And, you know, you'd think that, going bald at 21, you know,
maybe that was a good enough excuse to start asking questions like,
"Why do bad things happen to good people?," right?
(Laughter)
But at least I had the seriousness to work to try to answer these questions.
So, you know, I forgive myself for that.
So, I went and I thought,
"Well, you know, it's not going to be in the Abrahamic religions,"
because, you know, for me,
the idea of a god that has all that interest
in the commandment about your sex life -
But maybe Eastern religion.
And so, maybe I could achieve a Nirvana,
or become a bodhisattva,
or maybe everything really does happen for a reason.
Well, I was willing to study Chinese for several years
in order to figure out the answers,
but, you know, when I finally got to Asia and experienced this in person,
I realized that the Buddhists and the Taoists that I was meeting
were no more enlightened than the Reformed Jews from Flushing.
And so, you know, I was ready to give up.
I mean, maybe, I thought, I should just become one of these people
who pretend to believe in order to connect.
But then, I discovered something that I found really interesting,
and it's called Humanism.
And it was so rational that I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it on my own,
and I was really excited and surprised to find
that it was an organized movement
that had already existed for about a hundred years.
So, let me give you the basic beliefs of Humanism
as succinctly as I can.
No heaven.
No hell.
We determine the nature of reality
based on science, reasonable thinking, rational thinking, and critical thinking.
In other words, we worship the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But, anyway, humanist ethics are determined by the golden rule,
which is essentially: do unto others as you'd have done to you;
or the alternative: don't do unto others what you'd find hateful to yourself.
And, you know, there is a statement like this
in every one of the world's major religious traditions,
but, if you think about it, it's pretty much common sense.
I mean, this is not something
that, in any of the versions, includes or requires a god.
And so, I discovered this and I was pretty excited.
I mean, "Humanism," I thought, "will sign me up! And this is awesome!"
And I still feel that way.
But -
the problem was that human beings are flawed,
with or without God,
and the flaw that I began to discover in humanist organizations
was that they are sometimes a little bit less communities
and a little bit more like there-is-no-God debating societies.
And so, you know, if Humanism was good without God,
then I what I found was humanists often express it a little bit more like this
and a little bit less like this,
and that's self-defeating
because I figured we were never going to convince people
to take this idea of Humanism as seriously as a traditional religion
until we recognized that, for most people,
religion is not about -
Well, it's not about this guy, right?
It's about family, memories, connections,
coffee cake, community.
And this idea is not without serious consequences
or empirical justification.
So, the noted sociologists Robert Putnam and Richard Campbell,
in their landmark work "American Grace," sociology of American religion,
showed that religious Americans are "better neighbors"
than non-religious Americans.
And what that means is they found
that religious Americans are more likely to give time and money
to not just religious but also secular charities.
They are more likely to give blood,
more likely to give up a seat on the bus,
more likely to spend time with a friend in need.
But this has nothing to do with God,
because an atheist attending a religious congregation,
say, to accompany a spouse,
shows all of these positive effects,
whereas a religious person who doesn't attend a congregation
or, when they do, don't get involved
is no better than average.
And this is not basic, by the way, about liberals versus conservatives.
Liberals involved in liberal congregations
do just as much, if not more, good than conservatives,
but, if you look at people who just get involved
in things like book clubs or sports leagues,
they don't show these benefits.
So, the idea is that it turns out
that, if you get involved in a moral community
that asks you to be a better person,
surprise, surprise: you might actually become a better person.
Now, what do we do about all this?
I mean, there are a billion non-religious people -
a billion in the world, 40 million in America,
one in every four young Americans,
like the Harvard students that I work with.
So, are they ironically doomed to get none of the benefits of religious community
without basically taking a "fake it till you make it" approach to belief?
Or, maybe, it is possible
to have a thriving humanist community these days,
maybe even more so than ever.
When I was studying Humanism,
I found out that there was a tiny humanist chaplaincy at Harvard,
privately funded,
and I thought, "Well, you know, this little thing is interesting,"
because Humanism is so underappreciated and Harvard is so overap...
Well, anyway -
(Laughter)
Eventually, they raised some funds
to bring me on, at first on a temporary basis,
to figure out how we could grow an organization like this.
And, several years later,
we now have a thriving humanist community center in Harvard Square,
overflown with four or five meetings a week,
with students, with faculty, with alumni,
with anyone who wants to come and get involved.
And what we do is we discuss, we debate, we meditate,
we make food, music, and art,
we help one another, we help society,
and we hear each other's stories.
So, it's a community.
But of course there's so much more to learn about this, though.
And so, we've decided to turn the organization into a laboratory
for the study of the development of humanist community.
We're calling it the Humanist Community Project,
and I'll give you a quick sense of what we're going to do.
Let's say you maybe want to get married,
you want a meaningful ceremony, without religion.
What do you do?
Well, you might ask, "Well, how do I combine things like race,
culture, gender?"
Well, there are thousands of humanist ceremonies like this
around the world every year.
Or, let's say you've got a family,
or when you do, you might want a place for your kids,
to, in an organized way, learn what it can mean
to be a moral, ethical person without God.
Well, there are dozens of such programs around the world today.
Or let's say that, you know, you just want to get involved and meet people, right?
I mean, what do the humanists do when they get together?
Well, I'll give you a hint: it's not prayer,
and only some of us like the atheist choir idea.
So, more often than not these days, it's service.
There are wonderful service programs helping the needy around the world
in the name of Humanism.
I mean, don't get me wrong,
we do just get together for brunch sometimes,
but the point is that there's never been a program anywhere in the world
to link together all of these different kinds of programs
and study how they can thrive even more together.
And so, you know, that's the idea.
Over the next few years, we're going to create this laboratory.
We're going to put out a website that we'll launch soon,
a book, a conference, that sort of thing.
So, maybe, if you are non-religious,
you've now discovered your community.
But the point to keep in mind is:
for humanists, it's not enough to not believe.
Humanism is about action.
And so, as humanists,
we will thrive when we are known not for what we disagree with,
but what we do in defense of and in affirmation of our values.
So, let's go out and make a difference.
Thanks.
(Applause)