I love my atheist friends who prefer to call themselves "secular humanists". They try to do their best to treat other people decently, because they "believe" in that policy, though why they do so believe is not easy to get at. Some claim that they can show that moral values are connected to empirical reality. They discuss evidence, for example, that altruism is advantageous for squirrels to practice or apes or other creatures. An individual who risks death by warning the whole colony of an approaching cat will raise the odds that its own genes will go on in future generations because its kin will survive, even though the altruistic individual will almost certainly become a leopard or cougar's lunch. Or so the argument goes. 

This line of argument, as I have said before, invites us to ask what is being revealed here about the character of a universe in which altruistic behavior is rewarded and whether the cases of the squirrels and the apes can be seen as instructive for all other living things, and if so, why. What is the whole picture here? No secular humanist that I have been able to discover pursues this line of reasoning. 

But I have dealt with that matter in other places on this blog. Today, I wanted to say something more personal and painful to my secular humanist friends. Yes, painful. But it needs to be said. 

Secular humanist atheists are people just like the various kinds of theists are. What I mean by that remark is that all of us have needs that we will seek to fill by one means or another. For example, there seems to be built into all of us what can only be called a spiritual need. Each of us needs to feel a sense of connection or communion with the whole system of the universe that we see. Cultural practices and artifacts in all of the nations of the world indicate there is something very human about this need to feel connected to a larger consciousness. Or maybe "a larger truth" is a good enough way of putting it for my secular humanist friends. Science, for them, gives humans a vision of a universe of great size, beauty, and power. It just doesn't contain, for them, any universal entity that can properly be called "aware" or "conscious". 

In this blog, I have differed sharply with this worldview before. Quantum entanglement is indicating that the universe is very much aware. But there is no need to go over that matter today. I want to say something else in this post. 

What saddens me as I look on many of my secular humanist friends is the way in which their barren view of reality ends up saddening them. First and foremost, if we accept their barren view of life, we have no sense of meaning. We have nothing to say to a suicidal teenager if we see nothing more in the universe than numb particles crashing into one another. Death will come. Why wait? 

On the other hand, I have a view of reality that does contain hope. My view of reality is not facile or bland or naive. But it assures us that we do have a purpose in the universe. We are supposed to take intelligent life to the stars. Our life form is miraculous. The development of a sentient, sapient life form capable of self-awareness is not impossible in this universe, but the odds are so remote that we have every right to feel amazed by our own existence. Astronomically speaking, human beings are astronomers and astronauts. And our life form will prove itself even more miraculous when it begins to spread onto other worlds. The consciousness that feels itself in every atom of this universe loves us most when we spread our type of life form out and out into space.

Life is not an absurd joke. It has meaning. Courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are values inherent in the very atoms that make up our cells. They're real.  

And then we come to the second, drearier, more familiar flaw in the secular humanist belief system. 

We all have needs. Among these is the need to know a feeling of meaning in life that is larger than just whatever we may whimsically feel like making up. What happens to too many secular humanists as a result of their misdirecting this all too human need is the tragedy of smothered love. 

People who have no larger sense of purpose begin to place on the shoulders of their relationships with other people a weight that no human relationship can bear. If you are unhappy, listless, disillusioned, angst-ridden, and despairing, that can't be fixed by the one you love, no matter how much he or she may love you. Each of us must digest his or her lunch alone. We each think our own thoughts and hide our own secrets, sometimes out of shame, sometimes out of chicanery, sometimes out of respect for the rights of others whose secrets would also be revealed if we told the whole story. 

The point is that there is a fundamental aloneness to life. You must fight your own internal wars against your own demons and I must fight mine. And the monsters are never slain for all time. I fight mine back into their caves and bring rock slides down in front of the entrances. But I know I may very well have to fight them again in a few days or years. 

I watch you, my humanist friends, meet and fall in love, and find great joy for a while, only to come, in a few months or years, to bitter partings laden with recriminations. I can tell you exactly why you keep re-enacting these melodramatic scenarios. You are asking of your partners and of human - most often, heterosexual - love a thing that human love cannot give: a sense of meaning. 

The flip side of this coin tells you that if you aren't happy in the relationship in which you currently find yourself, very likely that is not your partner's fault. No other human being and no mysterious, poorly defined ideal of a "relationship" is going to fill the need that you are seeking to fill. 

Your own deep relationship with God is what is missing. God in whatever form most resonates with your most profoundly honest self. For many today, it is a deep religious feeling for the ecosystem of this planet. I like that. Look at the pictures taken by the big space telescopes of other celestial bodies. There is nothing else that we've been able to spot out there so far that looks anything like this white-shrouded, blue-green miracle. 

Or perhaps for you, music really is the language of God. It was for Beethoven. Or perhaps you feel sacredness in painting or sculpture. Or in an elegant algorithm or proof. There can be great beauty in pure thought. 

In a free society, where you find that connection is yours to discover. But after living as long as I have, I will all but guarantee to you that you need that sense of the holy and that you will not find it by falling down at the feet of the person that you love. 

Finally, I will say the hardest truth, because it needs to be said: you will not fill that need to know the sacred even with your children. No matter how much you love them, the day will come when they will have to assert themselves on their own terms in the world. You've got to let them go.

And secular humanism, in the end, is an adolescent dream. Adults have to get by on bitterer, but much more nourishing, spiritual fare.  

Someday your children will be standing where you are, 

And you will know they are your children no more. 

Love whispers softly, "Time has come to step aside. 

Another song is playing. They are who it's for." 

You'll search inside yourself for wisdom or advice, 

Some words that they can carry forward from that day. 

You'll turn to God and ask him, "Help me say what's right." 

And find there's not a thing you're supposed to say. 

You are the keepers of the sacred flame of life. 

You are the hands, forever reaching for the light.

You are the stories told by campfires long ago. 

You are the husband and the wife.   

You are the husband and the wife.