We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife.I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and bingo games.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.