Meaning Archives
At this month's Humanist Community we talked about friendship. Friend is an interesting word in the English language because it refers to really anyone, from your close friends to people you simply work with or is just a contact (all are refereed to as a "friend", especially on Facebook).
This isn't the case in other languages where the word friend refers to close friend and there are other words to describe someone who is simply an acquaintance - that being the closest term we have to it, and very accurate, though simply too long to use in every day conversation.
We began by going through a list of qualities you would expect a friend to have, recommended to me by a friend from a service given at the Church of Freethought in the United States.
Some of them were very much taken up while other qualities were questioned at length. Honesty was an interesting one for example because we all have friends who are liars or bullshitters - not because they're bad people, it's just who they are. But then again, maybe friendship is knowing that you can take what they say with a pinch of salt.
Shared interests can often be good in a friendship though having disagreements are always good too - for example one of my best friends is an evangelical Christian - we have the shared value of both being interested in religion and ethics even if we come from different sides of the coin.
Reliability is similar to honesty - we all have friends who simply aren't reliable, but then again, if they are at least reliably unreliable that is half way there!
This month, Gijsbert picked up on something Professor A. C. Grayling said at the recent Enquiry 2010 conference hosted by the Chris Worfolk Foundation.
If all is well you can expect to live to at least 70 years of age, probably more. And 70 years is a long time - I mean think how long a year feels, they feel they are going so fast each birthday but most of the time a year feels like quite a long period of time - it is 365 days after all, many of which unless you are lucky enough to be retired, are probably spent behind an office desk rather bored.
However, if you think about it, 70 years is actually only 840 months. That is a lot of months of course but then a month is quite a short period of time - it's only 4 weeks long, most of which I spend wishing would go by so I can get to pay day.
Therefore it seems to feel somewhat different when you think how fast a month flies by, and the fact that we have less than 1,000 of them to live our entire lives in. To love, laugh, cry, travel the world, follow our dreams and get through the entire back catalogue of House and CSI episodes.
From this perspective, for the humanist who believes this life is the only one we have, at least, feels too short a period of time to waste it. We must make the most if it, live life to it's full and enjoy those precious months we do experience.
Of course, what exactly is wasting a life is another question - maybe just sitting on the sofa watching TV is a good life - who is to say it isn't if you have enjoyed it? This topic we will be looking at next month.
Recently we had the comedian Robin Ince kindly give a talk to Leeds Atheist Society and one of the things he talked was one of his favourite Richard Feynman quotes which I also love.
The story goes like this. He was walking through the woods one day when someone asked him "see that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"
Richard said "I haven't got the slightest idea."
He replied, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."
Richard smiled to himself because his father had taught him about science. Indeed, one of the things he had taught him was as follows.
In English, we call the bird a brown-throated thrush. In German it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling. But knowing all these names doesn't tell you anything about the bird.
It doesn't tell you that it flies south for the winter, it sings or that it teaches it's young to fly.
All this fact tells you is about humans and about what different humans in different parts of the world call this type of bird.
It's interesting then to relate this to a lot of the talk that is going on in the political spheres at the moment. We need to "bring back real education" they cry. The example given would be that children would be taught the kings and queens of England so they would know them off by heart.
But really, such a task as memorising names doesn't tell you anything about English history. It doesn't tell you what life was like, the background, the culture - it's just a list of names and nothing more.
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Our next event is on Sunday 1 July 2012. The meeting starts at 5:30pm. More...