Sublime

I am not sure I do accept God, or how God has been traditionally defined or understood.

Socrates—who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement.

For Lee Kuan Yew,26 the aspirational ideal was to become, as Confucius urged more than two thousand years ago, a junzi, which has been variously translated as an “exemplary person,” or “gentleman.” This was someone who is27 “loyal to his father and mother,” “faithful to his wife,” “brings up his children well,” and is a “loyal citizen of his

that we have been lucky to arrive in the one whose particular chemistry enables us to exist.

A healthy mind combines an appropriate suspicion of certain people with a fundamental trust in humanity. It can take an intelligent risk with a stranger. It doesn’t extrapolate from life’s worst moments in order to destroy the possibility of connection.

And I think it is ungracious and unnecessary to deny that they exist. To claim that thinkers who claim to be atheists are actually believers in another kind of absolute is childish and insulting.