Yale's Think Tank
Wish I could proclaim this gem mine but rather it belongs to Elfi's photostream. Second only to Harvard, Yale has one of Ivy League's biggest coffers to spend on improvements and education. Looking at it you can tell it has to be a wealthy, highly intellectual and an enlightening campus.
And look I did - stare is more like it. Unlike Princeton, Harvard or Brown, Yale's eye candy today was the quintessential expression of neo-Gothic revival. As I drove through the campus, I pulled the car over repeatedly to examine the decorative friezes, arches, turrets and towers. Then I discovered it's true worth.
One of the 12 on-campus libraries is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It holds a special collection of original manuscripts about a belief called "secular humanism." Secular Humanism is a anti-authoritarian philosophy first written about 2,500 years ago by Socrates and Confucius. It emphasizes the importance of reason, empathy, scientific evidence and compassion for others to form a persons values and views of the world. I liked it and delved deeper.
Millions of people around the world agree with the humanist philosophy of living a happy and productive life based on reason and compassion. Some of these great humanists I found include Isaac Asimov, Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Carl Sagan, Mozart, Beethoven, Voltaire, John Lennon, Katharine Hepburn, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
It's far too late for me to attend Yale (even in my dreams) but I'd be in great company if I applied to humanism as my own belief system. Count me in as enrolled!
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
—Thomas Paine
posted by Sonja Stark of PilotGirl™ @ 10:37 PM
1 Comments:
Once upon a time in this country, most people believed in the separation of church and state as specified in the first amendment to the US Constitution. A major danger which has arisen in the past twenty or thirty years is that many religious leaders no longer want to respect that separation, are, instead, actively working to promote the integration of church and state, i.e., theocracy based on the religion of their choice.
The only way to stop this trend is to actively, vocally oppose it at every turn and not let humanist thoughts be buried by the rhetoric of religious zealots who are not the "moral majority" even though they proclaim themselves to be.
Post a Comment
<< Home