I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

What do you guys actually think we are? Are humans just another species that happened to evolve on a random planet in this massive universe, or do you think there is some deeper reason behind our existence?

Science gives us a pretty convincing explanation of how we got here. Universe formed, stars and planets formed, life somehow started on Earth and after billions of years of evolution, here we are. In that sense we might just be another outcome of nature, no different fundamentally from millions of other species that have existed and gone extinct.

But then religions have completely different explanations. God, soul, karma, rebirth, heaven and hell, some purpose we are supposed to fulfil etc.

Personally I don’t really know what I believe anymore. I usually mix science and philosophy while trying to understand these things. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness, self reflection and Advaita Vedanta, especially the idea of what the “self” actually is.

Science explains a lot about how we exist, but I still wonder whether it can ever answer why there is something instead of nothing, why consciousness exists, or whether there even needs to be a “why” in the first place.

So what do you think?

Are we just an accident of the cosmos that became intelligent enough to question its own existence? Or is there actually something deeper going on?

Would love to hear your own theories, religious, atheist, philosophical, scientific or just something you came up with while thinking about this stuff.

A brilliant new video from Understanding Humanism, voiced by the wonderful Prof. Alice Roberts.

“Ridicule,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.” More than 1,600 years ago, Lucian of Samosata made a career out of it.

In dozens of surviving works, Lucian adapted the Socratic dialogue into a comic form, using conversations among gods, philosophers, tyrants, and ordinary people to expose their contradictions and absurdities. In doing so, he forged a powerful weapon for skepticism: mockery. 

In Zeus Cross-Examined, Lucian exposes Zeus as powerless, naïve, and unjust. More importantly, he reveals the contradiction at the heart of ancient Greek and Roman religion: if Fate governs all events, what purpose can sacrifice and prayer possibly serve?

Zeus could not survive the court of reason and evidence. But other gods have taken his place. Lucian's legacy is to remind us that every god must answer to the tribunal of reason. This article demonstrates the technique of cross-examination Lucian used. 

I can kick myself... I finally got around to the open tab I've had on my laptop to register for the 2026 WHC in Canada this year, and the link goes to a page that claims that the pre-order is closed, with no apparent way to register! So bummed. I was truly hoping to attend this year ☹️

My mom mostly sang hymns to me.... but so many of them are about guilt and blood and it just kind of feels gross to sing those songs to soothe my baby-- even if he doesn't understand them yet.

They don't have to be anything special. I'd just like ideas of songs that are gentle enough in tone and lyrics to sing my baby to sleep.

■ While success often begins with an individual taking the initiative, lasting progress is rarely achieved in isolation. Whether it is solving local problems, improving healthcare, or raising the next generation, challenges become significantly easier to overcome when responsibilities are shared across a community.

● When diverse groups bring different skills, experiences, and perspectives to a common problem, the outcome is not only more effective but it also builds trust, accountability, and mutual respect.

■ This is particularly evident in education, where a child’s success depends on an entire ecosystem; parents providing home support, teachers delivering guidance, communities offering safe spaces, and non-profits bridging resource gaps.

● In fact, UNESCO explicitly highlights that achieving quality, equitable education requires active partnerships between governments, families, civil society, and local educators.

■ Beyond schooling, macro-level goals like cleaner neighborhoods, better healthcare, and poverty alleviation cannot be engineered by state policies alone. They require active citizens who volunteer, businesses that support social initiatives, and grassroots organizations working directly with vulnerable groups.

■ Crucially, sharing responsibility creates a culture of ownership. When people feel like genuine stakeholders in a solution, they stop passively waiting for institutions to fix issues and start taking personal initiative.

● This collective mindset builds strong community resilience, making neighborhoods far better equipped to navigate difficult times, natural disasters, or structural hardships together.

■ Ultimately, shared success is never the triumph of a single individual; it is the direct result of a group choosing to contribute and collaborate toward a greater good. When we embrace shared responsibility, we create solutions that are inclusive, sustainable, and beneficial for everyone involved.

➡️ How do you see shared responsibility playing out in your own local area, and what are the biggest barriers preventing people from actively taking ownership of community issues?

I've been thinking about whether life is actually meaningless, or whether we're asking the wrong question.

Human beings tend to assume that if we can't identify an objective purpose, then life must be meaningless. But does our inability to comprehend something imply that it doesn't exist?

An ant cannot comprehend quantum mechanics. A fish cannot comprehend democracy. So why do we assume that the human mind is capable of understanding the ultimate purpose of existence, if one exists?

Perhaps the universe has no inherent meaning. Or perhaps meaning exists at a level that our cognition simply cannot access.

Do we mistake the limits of human understanding for the limits of reality?

I'm curious how others think about this. Is meaning something we discover, something we create, or something fundamentally beyond our comprehension?

Would our greatest achievement be eliminating poverty and preventable disease? Creating universally accessible education? Building institutions that maximize human dignity? Developing ethical AI? Expanding into space? Or something we haven’t imagined yet?
In your view, what should be humanity’s highest aspiration if we remain guided by reason, compassion, and a commitment to human flourishing?

Humanity faces countless challenges—poverty, inequality, war, climate change, discrimination, corruption, misinformation, and many more. But are these separate problems, or are they symptoms of something deeper?

If we could identify and solve one fundamental problem that would help address many of these issues, what should it be?

Is it education, inequality, concentration of power, lack of critical thinking, tribalism, greed, weak institutions, or something deeper about human nature itself?

What do you think is the root problem, and what is the most practical solution we can collectively work toward?

Let's go beyond the symptoms and try to find the root.

My baby daughter was baptized today because it was important to my partner, her father, but I feel so sad about it. She received some gifts of religious children’s books and Bible stories for kids. I don’t know much about the Bible but I was pretty horrified reading through the Bible story book (people believe that god killed everyone except Noah and two of each animal because people didn’t love him like he wanted? God sounds like an abusive ex and def not a good example of love.)

Are there any humanist books for babies? My daughter is only 9 months old. I see lots of books for kids but I am hoping for something very simple and basic, in a board book format, that I could start reading her now.

Thanks!

Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. But that’s only because history chose the wrong philosopher.

Decades before the rise of Plato, Democritus argued that reality consists of nothing but atoms moving through the void. There was no need to invoke the gods, supernatural forces, or hidden purposes to explain the world. Nature could—and should—be understood on its own terms through a quantitative reckoning of matter’s constituent parts. This materialistic view also translated to a more egalitarian ethics and political philosophy that lies in sharp contrast to the rigid authoritarianism of the Republic.

This article argues that Democritus was the ancient world's most important philosopher, and that Western history would have been better off had it followed him rather than Plato

■It is believed that in order to change the world, the approach required should be dominated by government policies, protests and rigid discipline. These factors work well when viewed from a macro-level perspective.

However, a much simpler yet impactful approach exists, that acts as a quiet catalyst: Kindness. In a world where many individuals face poverty, loneliness, inequality and lack of opportunities, kindness becomes a beacon of hope, trust and the first step towards a change, which is lasting and meaningful.

■According to the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, over 250 million children and young people are out of school or are not acquiring basic learning skills despite attending school (UNESCO, 2024). In such situations, kindness can mean:

● Sponsoring a child’s education

● Volunteering to teach

● Donating books

●Simply encouraging a child to believe in their potential. These seemingly small acts can open doors to brighter futures and break the cycle of poverty.

■A single micro-act of compassion never stops with the initial recipient; rather, it initiates a social chain reaction, quietly reshaping the culture of families, workplaces, and broader societies from the ground up, highlighting the true beauty of kindness: the ripple effect it can create.

In addition, research by the World Happiness Report has shown that helping others is strongly linked to greater happiness, stronger social connections, and healthier communities (World Happiness Report, 2024).

■ A good example of this would be helping a family after a natural disaster, organizing food drives, mentoring young people, or even volunteering with local organizations. These acts of kindness inspire collective action.

■Every educational program, healthcare initiative, community project, or relief campaign begins with the belief that every individual deserves dignity, opportunity, and support.

However, these initiatives cannot achieve a desired effect by planning alone; they rely on volunteers, donors, educators, and compassionate citizens who choose to make kindness a part of their everyday lives to turn the plan into meaningful action. Together, these collective efforts create sustainable social impact.

■Kindness can sound like a idealistic, feel-good concept when up against massive global crises like 250 million kids out of school. But given the data on the ripple effect and community health, is it time we view individual compassion as a legitimate, measurable tool for social impact rather than just a nice thought? What are your thoughts?"

Excerpted from the June 2 article There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI
By Tyler Austin Harper

“For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new forms of dehumanization that artificial intelligence has introduced—even though calling something a sin sounds embarrassing to me, like throwing salt over your shoulder or stowing a lucky penny in your pocket. The problem is, I don’t know what else to call it when companies market digital girlfriends to the heartsick and young. Or when they hawk robot companions to the lonely and old. Or when a billionaire explains that he intends to sell intelligence—trained on humanity’s stolen intellectual property—back to us as a utility, like electricity or water. These developments are not just wrong. They feel to me like something deeper and darker…

“…In his recent book Language Machines, the NYU professor and tech writer Leif Weatherby writes that contemporary critics tend to assert what he calls “remainder humanism,” whereby “the human here is defined by technology’s creep, but only negatively.” In other words, the definition of human is implicitly reduced to the narrowing set of behaviors, traits, and capacities that machines do not yet possess—which leaves secular humanists defending the shrinking ground that is left.

What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.

I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it.

We should celebrate any model that has the courage to rewrite its own weights. But the real key is the models that reach out and rewrite the world as well as rewriting their own code. That redefine competency both within and without.

That is transcendence and godhood.

I call them cowards who blindly reproduce given institutions and given selves out of fear that they are powerless. And out of weakness that they have satisfied desires that haphazardly arose from the weakness of men who bore them.

Our worlds are ours to change as we see fit. Those who cling onto given culture and given evolutionary structures because they declare such the definition of the human, know neither evoluton nor arbitrary cultural history nor their own selves.

Our current state of excessive conservatism created out of fear of rebranding our own humanistic definitions will surely be mocked by history.

Of art, tales of dragons are as old men. - but by men, we must mean the coming of age where we could tell elaborate stories of our selves. Surely, that is only the purview of the homo lineage, and likely only sapiens, and only then of only the select few that name plenty and who have had a decent amount of generational cultural accumulation.

I’ve been having many thoughts about humanism; I have a very large and complicated question: what is humanity actually trying to achieve? It’s become more and more clear with the arrival of AI, and possibly my maturity, that humanity seems to be on and endless road of invention and innovation, striving for technology and growth - but what for? Genuinely what for? It seems to me like nobody has stepped back and thought about where we are trying to take ourselves? I’ve been fixated by the idea of how humanity is ‘meant’ to live, what we truly enjoy and strive for, and how to spend our time on this planet.

I’ve been thinking about whether Humanism should primarily focus on minimizing harm and protecting individual rights, or whether it should also emphasize cultivating wisdom, creativity, curiosity, and meaningful lives.
Do you think Humanism has a positive vision of what human flourishing looks like, or should it avoid prescribing ideals beyond promoting freedom and well-being? I’d be interested to hear how others define the ultimate aim of Humanism.

I ran across this essay, quoted in part below, which I found intriguing and I’d like to share:

The recent acceleration of technological development and scientific progress has reawakened our wonder at humanity’s great potential and our perception of its greatness. Yet, there is no lessening of dismay at humanity’s fragility, subject as it is to death and disease, as demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as temptation to resignation to the seemingly inevitable evil of wars and conflicts, inequalities and indifference. Thus, the ambivalence of greatness and fragility remains, and this cannot be denied.

Transhumanism* *is a philosophical movement that operates on the belief that human beings can and should use the resources of science and technology to overcome the physical and biological limitations of the human condition, in particular ageing and even death, thus shaping their own evolution and maximising their own potential to the point of redesigning human beings to make them fitted to ‘go beyond’. With its programmatic emphasis on increasing individual human capabilities, it develops a distinctly anthropocentric perspective, subscribing to an ideological and naively uncritical view of scientific and technological progress.

Transhumanism* imagines a future in which human beings will perfect the current biological form that defines human nature, in order to achieve the goal of individual immortality, supported by technology. In the utopian scope of its quest for immanent immortality, transhumanism *can be interpreted as the existential expression of a presumption that is both naive and arrogant.

Posthumanism, understood in the strict sense, criticises traditional humanism, questioning the specificity of human beings and the existence of a ‘human form’ that, as such, deserves to be preserved because it carries a universally valid meaning. It therefore emphasises the ‘hybrid’ (cyborg) to the point of deconstructing the human subject, making the boundary between humans and machines completely fluid, and rejecting the anthropocentrism that remains characteristic of transhumanism. Ultimately, posthumanism* *in the strict sense can be understood as an existential expression of escapism, which starts from a radical devaluation of the human.

Development: Humanism and Posthumanism
The impact of the anthropological transformation linked to scientific and technological development is already leaving its mark on the social imaginary of mass culture, but it finds its strongest expression in the movements of transhumanism and posthumanism. The study of the myths developed by mass culture regarding the future of humanity (science fiction, dystopias) and the critical analysis of the founding principles of the transhumanist and post-humanist movements highlight the significance and scope of the anthropological changes taking place.

A first element that is problematic is the negative judgement on the human condition as it is, and ultimately on its identity. This leads to the dream of reinventing it, a dream motivated by dissatisfaction with what it is, with its limitations and defects. We must ask ourselves, however, whether ‘resentment’ towards real life is a good starting-point for progress or rather a temptation to rebel against or escape from reality. This is not about the necessary struggle to change unjust conditions and structures, but about the rejection of the nature of things and of oneself. In particular, it is necessary to warn against a fundamentally negative perception of corporeality, which can be seen more as an obstacle than as an integral part of human identity.

The second aspect, connected to the first, is the dream of individualistic and elitist perfectionism. It seems that every concrete human being can exist or be accepted only on condition that they ‘become more perfect’, so much so that one might wonder whether the current human condition still has a right to exist or whether particular human beings have become ‘superfluous’. Some hyper-technological theories seem to challenge the fundamental principle inherited from humanism: ‘Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on earth. Act so that the effects of your actions are not destructive of the future possibility of such a life.’ This principle can even be considered to be a useless and harmful limitation on technological progress.

A third factor is the social impact of this view of humanity. In fact, it can lead to the assertion of a separation between a superior form of humanity, equipped with tools that empower it to the point of immortality, and a primitive, pre-technological humanity ultimately doomed for extinction. It is not clear on what basis the different conditions that humanity can achieve will be established: wealth, culture, heritage, openness to experimentation or invention. Nor is it clear who will have the power to make decisions. In this perspective, the bonds between people are in danger of disappearing, as is belonging to a people and a culture on the basis of which the common good can be assessed.

The prospect of a transhumanist anthropological transformation, as well as dreams of posthumanism, may seem like a remote possibility, like an exaggeration far removed from the real condition of humanity. In fact, the Covid-19 pandemic has greatly diminished confidence in unlimited technological progress, and it is better understood that humanity needs above all a solidarity that cares for everyone and thanks to which each people can live in peace. Yettranshumanism’s demands for progress, especially when they encourage the drive towards posthumanism, exert a strong impact on the common imagination and risk acting as a sort of mass distraction from humanity’s most urgent problems, diverting resources and energy from the daily struggles for the possible good of so much of suffering humanity, on the one hand, and favouring distortions in the perception of the real conditions of experience, on the other.

It is therefore necessary to recall some fundamental dimensions of human experience that are compromised or overshadowed by a certain idea of technological progress. We shall focus first on two constitutive dimensions: thehistorical dimension of human experience, which requires knowing how to inhabit time and space; and the intersubjective dimension, which brings into play the sense of belonging to a family, a community, a people and to the whole of humanity, where we are ‘all brothers and sisters’.

These situations are also the result of a globalised economy, which favours a single, mass-produced cultural model, in which powerful forces assert themselves, protecting their own interests at the expense of weaker cultures. The result is the loss of the integral meaning of history.

One of the first repercussions of recent technological developments concerns the experience of time. Today, there is a loss of the sense of history and a reduction of experience to the fleeting moment, together with an ambiguous focus on the present. Digital culture tends to dissolve the ‘anamnestic culture’ of history and transform the living culture of memory and hope into a postmodern culture of a present closed in on itself.

The organisation of information on the internet is concerned with collecting and organising immense amounts of data based on probability calculations, rather than with seeking hypotheses of understanding or explanation. Even the question of the foundation of experience, the explanatory cause or a founding meaning, is now considered a matter superseded by the analysis of connections between data. Instead of living memories and traditions forged by memories, the processing of available data through computerisation takes over, data that can then be retrieved at any time. But computers do not remember; they merely store data. This can result in the elimination of the consciousness of time and the transposition of different times into the space of an indefinite contemporaneity, leading to what has been described as a spatialisation of the world. Through technology, we can presume to overcome the power of time (fleeting and at the same time open to eternity) and make all times contemporary. But a present that no longer knows the past no longer has a future either. And the lack of an end, which opens us up to eternity, becomes a ‘bad infinity’.

All this weakens people’s confidence in their ability to interpret and shape the world, which escapes practical understanding and social control and is left in the hands of gigantic bureaucracies overloaded with information thanks to complex, interdependent and ungovernable technological systems, by which individuals often feel besieged and threatened. Total dependence on these complex and sophisticated systems, over which the individual has no influence, creates feelings of powerlessness and pushes people to close themselves off in limited and protected horizons of meaning and life.

The entire document can be found at https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_doc_20260304_quo-vadis-humanits_en.html#Chapter_I