When I left the religion of my childhood ... it was ... as though the spigot was knocked off my tank of certainty.  What came flooding out had no place to go at first.  Much of the religion of my childhood, rituals and beliefs that were devoid of meaning for me, ended up spilled on the ground.  I felt rather empty for a while, but then found different buckets to catch pieces of my ethics, my tentative faith, my certainty ...  a fair amount of my early teachings ended up in one of those buckets ...   Eslinger

... he taught the basic precepts of humanism:  ...  that showing love to humans is a worthy goal, and that  immortality is found in the examples we set and the work we do ... there are many religious books and teachings that can instruct us about how to live, that we need to think for ourselves, and we have the power within to do so.   Oelberg

“Responsible Irreverence” means admitting that we honor the dreams, feelings and deeds of others, because whether we are humanists or theists, meditators or pray-ers, we ourselves are nothing more than collections of dreams, feelings and deeds. All of us¾ liberal or conservative, theist or atheist¾are therefore equal, under something larger (even if it’s just our exhaustion from dealing with chaos), to those whom we would criticize.  Curtiss