The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Man is the measure of all things.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Know then thyself,</em></p><p><em>Presume not God to scan.</em></p><p><em>The proper study of mankind is man.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Of all men of his time … Socrates was the wisest and justest and best.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Take us singly, and what are we?&nbsp; The prey of creatures, their victims, whose blood is most delectable and most easily secured ... no might of claws or teeth makes him [man] a terror to others, naked and weak as he is, his safety lies in fellowship.&nbsp; God [nature] has given him two things, reason and fellowship, which, from being a creature at the mercy of others, make him the most powerful of all; and so he who, if he were isolated, could be a match for none is master of the world.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">What a piece of work is a man!&nbsp; how noble in reason!&nbsp; how infinite in faculty!&nbsp; in form and moving how express and admirable!&nbsp; in action how like an angel!&nbsp; in apprehension how like a god!&nbsp; the beauty of the world!&nbsp; the paragon of animals! &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions [rather by Natural Selection], to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there [as in Genesis (1:1-2)], may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future … We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which he feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not a man.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn’t preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration.&nbsp; Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.</em></p>