Head Heart & Hands Humanism

21/06/2025

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Happy World Humanist Day!
Today is a day to celebrate humanism and its values, such as reason, compassion, and kindness. It's a time to reflect on the importance of human connection, critical thinking, and ethical decision-making. How are you celebrating?
https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/world-humanist-day/

15/05/2025

19/12/2024

Happy holiday season, whatever you celebrate!

11/12/2024

Mountains play a key role in water and food supply, and provide beauty and recreation. This day was established by the United Nations to promote the protection and sustainability of mountains.

10/12/2024

International Human Rights Day is December 10. On this day in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that all human beings are born free, and are equal in dignity and rights.

15/07/2024

Our brains are wired to try to find explanations for what happens, and especially what worries us. It wants to create a narrative, a story. A cohesive narrative is one that makes sense, that connects elements in our memories. A coherent narrative is one that also corresponds to reality. Conspiracy theories, listening to mainly one side in a major conflict -- these are cohesive narratives.

If we're conscientious, we can resist letting the brain settle on explanations that don't have full evidence for them. That means we have to LOOK for what might challenge the cohesive narrative. Also, we need to be aware of our emotional commitments that tend to make us believe some elements and eliminate others -- like sympathy or lack of it for a victim, for instance.

Getting quick narratives formed can help us make snap decisions, but we need to make longer-term decisions these days. What is best for 10 years from now? The next generation? The seventh generation?

04/07/2024

From a Walt Whitman poem that was omitted from later editions of Leaves of Grass, remembering the origins of the USA:

"Remember, government is to subserve individuals,
Not any, not the President, is to have one jot more than you or me,
Not any habitant of America is to have one jot less than you or me."

25/06/2024

Some old-fashioned language -- but this is Anna Garlin Spencer in a Berry Street Lecture to Unitarian ministers, 1929:

>>
The Church as the organized expression of this religious sentiment must then it, seems, be here to stay.

If so, it must change its form with the changing conditions of man’s life. It may, it must, experience ebb and flow in its power as an Institution as the generations come and go, each with its varying gift to mankind, one of thought, another of feeling & another of action.

Its accessories may, doubtless they will, alter past our present perception as its function becomes more and more specialized in the growing complexity of life. But unless the root elements of human nature are permanently changed, the aspiration ands ethical passion of mankind will kneel at some Altar and voice themselves in some heart-name for the Infinite, in some sort of a Church.

18/06/2024

It's definitely worth remembering WHY Juneteenth became a holiday.