Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the universal human experiences that evoke a sense of awe and transcendence beyond the self, often associated with spirituality.
Rebecca Goldstein suggests that experiences such as engaging with math, music, and the beauty of nature can inspire feelings of transcendence and a grand perspective on life that are deeply human. While religious individuals may attribute such feelings to a divine encounter, Goldstein argues that these moments of awe and connection to existence do not require a religious framework; they are inherent to the human experience.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of art in education, one might reference this quote to highlight how creativity can lead to profound experiences.
Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.
We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we made.
Were it only to learn benevolence to humankind, we should be merciful to other creatures.
Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.
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