https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letters-to-the-editor-coronavirus-pandemic-qualifies-as-great-catastrophe/article_7a64b4b4-9095-11ea-8688-af9e14eaf1cf.html
 
COVID-19 is not the apocalypse many religious people have been expecting, when God brings about the end of the world in a battle between the forces of good and evil. Nevertheless, we are having an apocalypse. The original Greek word means a revelation, an unveiling of what was previously hidden. It also means a great catastrophe. This pandemic certainly qualifies as such. It’s striking the difference between those who fantasize about a religious apocalypse from a position of comfort and safety, and those who are experiencing real danger and hardship.
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Scientific evidence shows that the pandemic will eventually pass, in part because of the courageous work of our health care and service workers on the front lines, and those volunteering to help them. It will pass when we distance ourselves from each other long enough so we don’t get the virus and then infect others.It will take scientists in many countries sharing knowledge to create a vaccine.

In the meantime, we can improve our country with selected rent and mortgage suspensions, a stronger social safety net, paid sick leave for essential workers and more companies allowing employees to work from home.

We can extend kindness and donations as we are able to those less fortunate and emotional support when needed. In short, we should use common sense, compassion, cooperation and collaboration, all the best parts of civilization and rational thinking. That’s what it takes to overcome an apocalypse.
 
 

​https://www.ftsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/May-June-2020-Ezine-web.pdf
 
I could not have had a more patriotic beginning, or so I was taught to believe. I was born on Flag Day (June 14) in 1942, during World War II, at Liberty Hospital in Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation and the flag purportedly designed by Betsy Ross. I wanted to believe family members who told me that flags were hung in honor of my birthday. My first public speech was at a fourth grade Flag Day ceremony. I was chosen to read my essay, “What the American Flag Means to Me.” I wrote about looking at the flag when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung at major league baseball games, hoping I would one day be a player on that field. I’m pretty sure my essay was picked because I happened to mention Flag Day was my birthday. Or maybe the other essays were even worse. My views on patriotism in general and Flag Day in particular have changed considerably over the years. Suffice it to say that the anniversary of my birth has become a day when opportunistic politicians regularly attempt to take away freedoms for which our flag is supposed to stand. On my twelfth birthday, President Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance saying, “From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.” President Eisenhower made no mention of the Constitution during this Flag Day ceremony in 1954 because the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office and says nothing about any almighties.

https://in-sightjournal.com/2020/04/22/free-of-charge-1-the-free-in-freethought-with-dr-herb-silverman/
 
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Herb, how is freethought represented in the secular communities now?
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Dr. Herb Silverman: Freethought is represented in different ways in different freethought communities. When I first became engaged with freethought communities, I learned about several national atheist and humanist organizations. I joined them all because each was involved in issues I supported. But each group was doing its own thing and ignoring like-minded organizations, while competing for funds from what they viewed as a fixed pie of donors. I knew we needed to grow the pie to benefit all these organizations and the freethought movement as a whole. They were spending too much time arguing about labels (atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker, etc.) and too little time showing our strength in numbers and cooperating on issues that affect all freethinkers. Here’s an interesting distinction between Christians and freethinkers: Christians have the same unifying word but fight over theology; freethinkers have the same unifying theology, but fight over words. At least our wars are only verbal. So in 2002, I helped form the Secular Coalition for America, whose mission is to increase the visibility of and respect for nontheistic viewpoints, and to protect and strengthen the secular character of our government. Our 19 national member organizations cover the full spectrum of freethought. 

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-20-newtons-sight-came-from-the-hind-a-send-off-d203212c33bb

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Legacies don't come from one person, usually. They come from a collective mass of unknowns and the forgotten, where one person or representation gets the collective credit. But the vast majority of our benefit comes from the dead even before them. I can understand the ancestor worship, the praying for the dead, and the making divine of ordinary human beings who persisted and had some talents. I can see this as a source of reverence. Those we never knew gave us a bit of a better shot, bit by bit, then died. What do you owe to freethought pioneers?
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Dr. Herb Silverman: Isaac Newton in 1675 said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton produced a mathematical understanding of motion, making the workings of the cosmos intelligible without any reference to supernatural belief. Yet he misguidedly said, “This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” Religious or not, scientists like Newton and Galileo contributed an enormous amount to the freethought movement before the Enlightenment. As Galileo learned, scientists often diverge from scripture at their peril. Scientific contributions have spread disbelief throughout the world because scientific arguments are settled through experimentation and evidence, not through authority or unproved claims of miracles found in so-called holy books. Scientists may not directly attack religious creeds, but they have undermined religious foundations. Nobody anymore believes that the earth is the center of the universe or that a deity made stars as an afterthought after creating the sun and the moon. 

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-19-archimedean-pivot-to-take-a-stand-and-to-move-the-earth-549ca22ea795
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In life, our wills, characters, and true stances will be tested. This seems like an inevitability. I've had several myself. Many cost me, dearly. Some, I'm still paying the costs in different ways. Nonetheless, I don't regret them, taking the stands. I doubt I ever will. You need to take a stand. It may cost you. No one does anything alone, though. However, you can make a change and an influence as an example for others. So, instead of avoidance of the issue, we best deal with them headfirst. What are the meanings of trials and tests in life, in hindsight?

Dr. Herb Silverman: Regarding trials and tests in life, here’s a paragraph from the preface of my book, Candidate Without A Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt: “When I was a graduate student in the 1960s, I occasionally took breaks from mathematics to write what I thought were clever stories. Then my roommate showed me a quote from Henry David Thoreau, ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’ So, prodded by Thoreau, I stopped my creative writing and focused on completing my PhD in mathematics. Now more than forty years later, I’ve written about a few of the times I stood up to live, about the times I couldn’t or wouldn’t, and about the times I stood up and should have remained seated.” Life consists of trials and tests, and we need to learn from them. Before committing to an action, we should think about whether it will make a difference and to whom. For most of my life, I was a mathematics professor. I think I made a positive difference with some students, and though my research was respectable, it was not significant enough to make much difference to the mathematical community, nor did it have an impact on people outside the world of mathematics.

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-18-platos-demon-and-platonic-friends-or-a-mathematician-who-can-64a14cefd9ec

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We talked some sessions ago about the death of Paul Krassner. A cultural elephant in the countercultural room, or, more properly, the plural alternative cultures room. Friends come from many different areas. What makes a friendship?
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Dr. Herb Silverman: There are all kinds of friends. I recently met someone I had never seen before, and she informed me that she was a friend of mine—a Facebook friend. When I first got on Facebook I agreed to be friends with anyone who requested it, and now I think I have too many such “friends.” I’m also friends with some charities I support, as in “Friends of the Library.” I am not a Quaker (the Society of Friends), though among religions I think it is one of the best because of its emphasis on peace, social justice, and finding the light within. Surprisingly, there is also a group called Nontheistic Quakers (nontheistic Friends). A more traditional notion of friends would be people not related to you whom you know well, and whose company you enjoy. This might include professional colleagues, fellow supporters in a cause, or someone you are intimate with. Friends are the family you choose. No matter how down you are, good friends should be able to make you laugh. I think the best kind of friend is someone you love and who loves you, someone you respect and who respects you, someone you trust and who trusts you, someone with whom you can be honest and who is honest with you, and someone you are loyal to and who is loyal to you. (We are fortunate in life if we have two such friends.) My wife, Sharon, is my best friend.

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-17-family-the-united-nations-and-conservatism-8088a3283480
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Conservatives take the family as the fundamental unit of societies, the building block. It becomes a divine mandate in many theologies and religious social commentaries. The United Nations is fundamentally allied with this vision in its foundational and associated documents with the description of the family as the fundamental group unit in the society.  An almost unacknowledged unifying vision between a nationalist and a globalist vision view of the world. So, why is family fundamental? They both seem right from different view of the world.
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Dr. Herb Silverman: A family is usually viewed as people connected by blood, adoption, or marriage. The question then becomes how we should treat family members. Surprisingly, I like what Jesus said about blood relatives, though with some objections and a different perspective. This is from Mark 3:32-35: A crowd was sitting around Jesus and said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And Jesus replied, “Who are my mother and brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and my mother.” Of course, I disagree with defining family in terms of faith. On the other hand, there is something to be said about counting friends we choose after we are born as more important than people we are related to through no personal decisions. I would say that family is fundamental if we include those we are close to, whether or not we are related to them. 

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-16-take-some-time-virtues-and-virtuous-habits-e615750991f5

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Virtue seems mostly like a habit. Then we call long trends in behaviour in someone a character trait. It seems like this to me. So, virtue starts with the habituation of ethical conduct. There are consequences to a certain behaviour. Good results become consequentially good, tautologically. Bad results become consequentially bad, but come from antecedent behaviour, inescapably. The possible good and bad have a range of known and unknown consequences. So, I am noting some virtue ethics and consequentialism mixed together here, where limits get placed on personal responsibility based on cognitive-predictive limits.  What virtues should be encouraged/vices should be discouraged every day?
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Dr. Herb Silverman: Let’s first describe what we mean by “virtue.” To me, virtue is behavior that shows high moral standards, which means good behavior. Humans have evolved to be social animals with patterns of behavior to live harmoniously and productively together. Without cooperative behavior, humans would not have survived. Ideas of right and wrong that we call morality arise from human nature. We all have the ability to think in moral terms, except perhaps for psychopaths. Of course, being moral or good means different thing to different folks. Some religious people would say that to act morally is to act in obedience to God’s commandments. Many Christians view virtue as having faith, hope, and charity, described in 1 Corinthians 13:13. Islamic virtue requires submission to Allah. Muhammad said, "Virtue is good manner, and sin is that which creates doubt." As a secular humanist, I certainly don’t tie any virtues to god beliefs. I think that ethical values are derived from human needs and interests, tested and refined by experience. Morality should be based on how our actions affect others. Our deeds are more important than our creeds, and dogmas should never override compassion for others. 

https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-15-all-things-bright-and-wonderful-and-unknown-what-do-we-know-34476c70a775
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Of all possible mathematical knowledge, what do we really know? You were a distinguished professor in the past. We have written a text on this. 
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Herb Silverman: Here is what we know about mathematics. Mathematicians start with axioms (assumptions) and see what conclusion may logically be deduced (proved) from these axioms. The nineteenth century mathematician Leopold Kronecker once said, “God created the integers, all else is the work of man.” I interpret this statement to be more about the axiomatic approach than about theology. Mathematicians often begin with axioms that seem “self-evident,” because they are more likely to lead to real-world truths, including scientific discoveries and accurate predictions of physical phenomena. But if at least one axiom is false, then the conclusion may not be scientifically applicable. Unlike with applied mathematicians, theoretical mathematicians are not so concerned with whether their axioms are true. Axioms in some branches are contradictory to axioms in others. In non-Euclidean geometry, we replace Euclid’s parallel axiom with a different axiom. The axioms in Euclidean geometry have led to discoveries on planet Earth; results from the axioms in non-Euclidean geometry were applied many years later by Einstein for his general theory of relativity, when he showed we live in a non-Euclidean four-dimensional universe, consisting of three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time. 

​https://medium.com/humanist-voices/if-youth-knew-if-age-could-14-a-rational-life-includes-non-rational-parts-535498da5aa1
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve talked about rationality and such. You’ve commented on personal experience with love, and more. Love is a non-rational part of life, but love happens, nonetheless. A profound, significant, and, sometimes, incomprehensible and inexplicable component of human life. What do you make of making room, in life, for the non-rational? As Chris Hedges clarifies, he does not mean the irrational, but the non-rational forces of life.
Herb Silverman: For most of my professional life as a mathematician I made good use of the irrational. I speak, of course, about irrational numbers (not expressible as the quotient of two integers) like the square root of 2 and pi. Irrational numbers were discovered in Greece in the 5th century BCE, and challenged the Greek belief in a rational universe controlled by mathematical harmonies. Such numbers seemed to these Greeks so illogical and unreasonable that they called them irrational. So, sometimes things may seem irrational because we don’t understand them. Outside the world of mathematics, the main difference between rational thinking and non-rational or irrational thinking is that rational thinking is based on logic and reason, while non-rational and irrational thinking are usually based on neither. In rational decision making, choices are made through reason and facts.