Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.
Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.
We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.
Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.
The Master said, I set my heart on the Way, base myself on virtue, lean upon benevolence for support and take my recreation in the arts.
The world will not know liberty until all that is religious and political is transformed into something simple and human and made susceptible to criticism and denial.
It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.
The arts are not simply skills: their concern is the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human dignity, the arts have become the custodians of those values which most worthily difine humanity, which most sensitively define Divinity.
Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
If Confucius wasn't born, the long night would have no bright lamp.
As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.
I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.
Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.
I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.
I'm an atheist how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people.
A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.
The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques.
All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by." It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.
I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived.
My favorite movie ever is 'Bicycle Thieves.'
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
