The Comfort of Secular Humanism

The secular philosophies of death that I’ve been writing and reading about and contemplating for years have been a tremendous comfort. For instance: The idea that we didn’t exist for billions of years before we were born—that nonexistence wasn’t painful or bad, and death won’t be either. The idea that our genes and our ideas will live on after we die. The idea that each of us was astronomically lucky to have been born at all. The idea that death is a deadline, something that helps u...

 Gertrude B. Elion's Tragedy

I had fallen in love with a young man..., and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...