35 Years Ago

“Lack of religious worship, prayer, and ceremony has affected my life very favorably—by giving me much more time than I otherwise would have had to be committed to other, quite worldly pursuits. Including personal pleasure!

“I consider life meaningful even though I reject the idea of a theistic being, because I make sure that I always give it real meaning. I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that, in themselves, life and the universe are meaningless and absurd—have no intrinsic meaning or value whatsoever. Only humans and our humanism create personal and world significance.”

—Albert Ellis, “Testament of a Humanist,”

Free Inquiry, Volume 7, No. 2 (Spring 1987)

Albert Ellis (1913–2007) was the executive director of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York City. He was the author of fifty books and more than five hundred articles on psychotherapy and sex, love, and marital relations. Ellis’s article accompanied others in the feature section on personal paths to humanism. He was joined by B. F. Skinner, E. O. Wilson, Steve Allen, and others.

25 Years Ago

“We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today’s knowledge industry is not the scarcity but the excess of information. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little. And to craft such filters we need a naturalistic, comprehensive, deep, and up-to-date worldview. Secular humanism should help here.…

“Secular humanists do not oppose all technological advancement. We applaud all useful innovations and we do not believe that machines can dominate people, or that technology marches on by itself. But we do not embrace technological novelties before examining their fore-seeable social consequences.”

—Mario Bunge, “A Humanist’s Doubts About the Information Revolution,”

Free Inquiry, Volume 17, No. 2 (Spring 1997)

Mario Bunge (1919–2020) was a professor of theoretical physics and philosophy as well as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. His article was part of a feature section on the freedom to inquire.