My hope is not based on Faith, that dreary, dessicated thing. My Hope is based on what is real. What is real is this, something that I’ve said before and I’ll say again:
We humans are so amazing when we let ourselves be. That is the source of my Hope. Us. Our abilities, our qualities. Because despite our faults…we are so amazing when we let ourselves be.
I have hope because we do such amazing things. We question, we quest, we explore. We are clever, endlessly clever, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. We have uncovered secrets of our past, of other worlds, even other galaxies.
I have Hope because we have an equally limitless capacity for creating Beauty. We are thrill to the Beauty of the Cosmos, but we aren’t content with that. With our art, our architecture, our words, our lives, we create Beauty, add to the total already in the world.
I have Hope because of the human capacity for compassion. We push the boundaries of our circle, expand it, grow it, encompass other beings in it. The compassion in the simple act of giving a stray some food is so commonplace that we take it for granted; and yet, it is a remarkable thing, something that speaks to hearts that can grow.
I have Hope because somehow, despite the troubles that beset us, despite our shortcomings, despite the less noble parts of us, we still do these things. Not as big as we should, not as often as we should, but we do them.
I have Hope because, whatever our failures, we are capable of so much; I have hope because we have, all around us, all the time, the evidence of our ability to be amazing, to create Beauty, to sow compassion.
1 Comment
24 October 2008 at 1:43 am
It seems like I’m the only guy in the audience standing up and clapping my hands madly.
I find myself often disillusioned to have very little in common with many if not most atheists because atheists spend a lot of time tinkering with how silly belief and religion are, and that’s not the reason I’m an atheist at all. I’m an atheist, among other things, because nature is so much more amazing than anything you’d find in scripture.
I’m just as thrilled as you are with every new piece of information I gain about the universe. I cannot imagine any greater gift or a more prized distinction for our species than this.
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