Life is precious.
For the humanist, this is by no means a statement of faith. It’s a reflection of reality, a pronouncement of fact. It is stating the obvious. It is the only response that makes sense, faced with the fact that our lives are so finite and so fragile. We are all going to die one day. We know this. So we try to make our lives count.
Sometimes that’s hard to do.
Senseless brutality, like the violence which rocked Brussels earlier this week, or Paris last November, or cities all over the world these past weeks and months, reminds us of that mortality. And this scares us. Of course it does. That’s the point of it.
Terror of this sort has a purpose and that purpose is to divide us. To turn neighbour against neighbour. To undermine the social fabric of our societies and diminish our capacity for empathy. We must never let it succeed in these aims. We are one human family, living together in communities, caring for each other, united only by the bonds of our common humanity. We mustn’t allow those bonds to weaken or break. We must remember to look out for each other; to celebrate our differences; and to stand strong in the face of hate and violence.
‘To stand strong’ is not an empty phase. But it is a difficult one. It describes a tough set of obligations: to challenge and oppose those ideologies and actions which harm our species, and to do so without being twisted by anger, or warped by hate, or driven by a petty instinct for vengeance.
There are no easy solutions to global terrorism, so we won’t try to offer any.
But we can say this. We are lucky. We are lucky because we know the value of this one life we have. We know how precious it is. We know to make our own lives count and to cherish the people around us. We may forget this, sometimes. But it’s true and it always has been true. And this is your life to live, and it always has been. Do not live in fear. Do not live in hate. Live the life you want to live, and try to find happiness wherever you can.
Notes
The British Humanist Association is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethically and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. It promotes a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.