Prologue:
	I am driving my car down the highway, listening to the tape deck.
It's an old tape - one I made some years ago and have come across while
cleaning up my office. I have no idea even what songs I put on it in that
long ago time. I listen to The Animals, Black Sabbath, Cream and other
bands from my youth. Then, I'm surprised to hear Jimy Hendrix talking on
the machine. "Like, we're just gonna jam, man," he says. And jam they do.
It's the opening of Hendrix's famous Star Spangled Banner from Woodstock.
I've not heard it for many years, and have usually skipped over it when the
opportunity to hear it has presented itself. It can be somewhat hard on
aging ears.
	Today, though, I listen. In fact, I turn the volume up. And, as I
listen to the screaming sounds of the guitar, the gut-wrenching feedback, I
remember how meaningful those disharmonious notes were back in the era of
Viet Nam and civil rights, the flag burning and draft dodgers, and all the
rest of it. I begin to weep, and sob unabashedly. Nothing has changed. We
are there again, only the need is far greater and the times far more
desparate. They have thrown us their table scraps and we have gone to war
for them. We have learned no lessons.

Why a Humanist Manifesto?
	The further we travel, the less far we seem to go. While it is a
basic assumption that humanity is evolving toward a higher plane of
existence, there is little proof that we are evolving at all. The world of
the distant past seems a barbaric place to some of us in today's world, but
while the so-called barbarians of that age practiced physical barbarism,
there are many of a similar nature in this age who practice economic
barbarism.
	It is blatantly obvious even to the lowliest of our species that
there is little fairness in life as it is. Explain the concept of fairness
to someone born into what we hopefully call the developing world. Because
of where they were born, they will live a life filled with poverty,
starvation and misery. They will have no opportunity to live the so-called
American Dream that has dragged us all into dreamless sleep. They will be
lucky to eat and to live to the age of five. And yet the majority of people
on the planet live in such circumstances, in hunger and darkness, so the
few of us can live in opulence and be engaged in the pursuit of pleasure.
	This was perhaps tolerable in the world of past ages, when the poor
had little awareness of their poverty because they had no knowledge of the
relative richness in other parts of the world. This has now changed to the
point where every person on the globe is very aware that some have while
others have not. There is general awareness of the huge inequity that
exists on the planet. The poor want a piece of the action. Either we agree
to share or they will take it. It is a brutally simple fact. It is already
happening.
	What is much more surprising than the realization that the world's
poor live in relative misery in the modern age is the fact that most people
in the developed world also dwell in a type of misery. They have food,
shelter, protection of body and soul and many earthly delights, but are
fundamentally unhappy. They feel an unbelieveable pressure to consume their
society's goods and services at a rate that threatens to strip the planet
bare and drive them to insanity. Their society is rampant with health
disorders, emotional breakdowns and a variety of other ailments brought on
by what they refer to as stress. Even with all of their opulence and
pleasure, they do indeed seem to live in as much misery as the world's poor.
	The world is an unfair and unkind place for most of its
inhabitants. That is simply wrong and must be changed. We must hope that we
have indeed evolved to the point where we can create a new humanity. We
must develop a humanist economy that values life above all else. It is the
only way we will survive and achieve all that we are capable of.

The Mercantile Economy
	The economy that has driven humanity for its entire existence on
the planet has been given many names. Whether feudal, free market,
capitalist, communist or whatever, they have been basically the same system
- a mercantile economy based on trade and the pursuit of wealth. In the
pursuit of trade and wealth, humanity has explored and exploited our world.
Nearly every technological development that our species can lay claim to
came into being to facilitate the movement of goods and services in a
trading economy. Even those societies that have relied on a type of
communistic system of government have been traders, always anxious to
acquire something better than they could get within their own economy.
	This desire to have something more than you should normally have
has led to social unrest and violence in almost every case. Throughout
history, we have warred among ourselves, always for some great prize that
we felt could not be attained through peaceful means. Throughout history,
we have coveted our neighbour's possessions and sought to acquire more than
we should normally be entitled to.
	The Mercantile Economy seems a product of human nature; that part
of it that could be called competitiveness, but which often masquarades
under the guise of greed and avarice. Humans always seem to have to out
possess those who surround them in life. Regardless how much material
wealth they gather, there seems always to be a desire for more. Whether
this comes from true greed, or from long ago times, when nearly all people
felt a fundamental and base insecurity concerning their ability to sustain
themselves over the term of their existence, is open to some discussion.
Life shows again and again that you can really never have enough capital or
wealth to protect yourself from its viscissitudes. It will catch up to you
- it will get you no matter how much you are able to accumulate. Still, it
seems our basic survival instinct drives us to forever seek more than we
have, so as to somehow protect ourselves from the vaguaries of life.
	Certainly, throughout our history, all exploration and all
technological development have been closely tied to the Mercantile Economy.
Whether we've been building the instruments of war or the instruments of
peace, it has somehow been bound up with the need to continue to consume
and to reach out for the resources to feed that consumption.
	In an ideal world, people would have only enough to sustain a
reasonable standard of life for themselves and their dependents. This ideal
has been perverted to the point where only a few have come to possess
nearly all of the wealth in the world and to control the lives of nearly
all of the people in the world. It is a wrongheaded notion. It is always
wrong for some to have more than others. All are equal. All take the same
risk at birth. The fact that some have the skills and abilities to
successfully exploit the current economic system, while others do not,
should not determine who lives and who dies, or who laughs and who cries.
	But while the excessive pursuit of wealth and its utter
concentration in the hands of the few is wrong, it is what has gotten us
here. And we have somehow gotten here. It has been a dismal journey through
centuries fraught with death and destruction and wars and revolution, but
it has been a journey nonetheless. And we have survived it, some in better
shape than others, but we have still made it through.
	This Mercantile Economy was created in an ad hoc and piecemeal
manner, developed to meet a series of ongoing crises that have wracked
humanity since its beginnings. There are no rules written in a large and
cumbersome book of life. We have spontaneously created a series of
haphazard guidelines for life on the planet as each new crisis has unfolded
and we have scrambled to save ourselves from it.
	Throughout our history, we have been a religious peoples, even
given the fact that there is no tangible evidence of a god or gods or
anything supernatural on the planet. There are many who would argue that
this is blasphemy and sacrilege, or even that it is foolish to deny the
existence of ghosts, even holy ones, but the claim can still be made. And
while the religions of the world may well have been created by a
frightened, fearful humanity in the dark and dangerous beginnings of its
existence, it is also certainly true that all religions have been
ultimately used to control the poor and disenfranchised in our world.
Religion promises that there is reward in a next life if there is
sufficient suffering in this one. There is somehow justification for
poverty and misery within this promise. And false promises are like false
gods. Empty and evil.
	Certainly, even if religion has been the opiate of the masses for
most of our brief history, it has been replaced by wealth as the drug of
choice in the modern age. Humanity now freely worships material wealth and
allows it to openly drive all decision-making on the planet. It is the
answer to all questions. It is manna from heaven.
	All effort in the world is directed toward the pursuit of wealth.
Whether dropping bombs on an unfortunate planetary neighbour, or developing
a cure for cancer, the pursuit of wealth is the driving force. And while
there are awards and honours for great acts of war and great acts of peace,
the usual call is to show us the money. This is the way our world has gone.
Show us the money.
	The problem, of course, is that not all have fair and open access
to the money. Some are born with it. Some have the right skill set to
acquire it. Still others are given it. But not all have the equal chance to
acquire it. And until that is the case, there can really be no fairness to
life. Some will starve while others gorge. Some will weep while others
laugh. Some will die while others live. And none of this is a free chosing
of free will. It is the luck of the draw. It is being born here instead of
there. It is wrong that some are lucky enough to win, while others are only
lucky enough to die.
	So, what is the point of saying these things are true, given the
fact there seems no way of changing? Humanity seems on the same path now
that it set out on at the beginning of its history. The gods and the kings
have changed, but that has been all. We live and we die, but the nature of
life remains essentially the same, and has remained the same for all of our
being.
	But while we may not have changed, we have changed the world around
us. We have built great and mighty technology, we have conquered each other
and a good part of the planet and we have fundamentally altered the space
in which we live. The concept of Spaceship Earth has become a real one and,
indeed, while we were always passengers travelling together on a huge,
intergalactic space vessel, it is like we have multiplied to the point
where we now totally consume all space on the ship. We can no longer move
about without causing great concern for our fellow passengers. Air and
sustenance are becoming increasingly difficult to acquire. We are fighting
for space.
	Yet through all of our struggles, we have steadfastly held to the
belief that we are somehow rising to a higher level of existence. Indeed,
human history is usually seen as a line steadily progressing into a better
future. It seems we are an optimistic lot, if nothing else. And it does
seem, if you live in certain parts of the world, that we are perhaps
evolving into something more than we were before. But if you live in many
other parts of the world, indeed, in most parts of the world, it's hard to
argue that the level of existence has improved much at all, and, in fact,
in relative terms, it has almost certainly declined. Much of the world's
population had no idea it was poor until the last century. While people
starve to death the same today as they did in the past, in past times they
thought of this as merely the normal cycle of life. They didn't realize
that while they were starving, others were gorging themselves and feeding
the leftovers to their dogs and cats.

Survival:

	Others have played this name game throughout the centuries, and
there have been kings and prelates and presidents and dictators and all
manner of leader and all manner of government for all manner of people both
good and bad. And there is really no need for a new name or a new system
that is really just based on the same old economy. Because, for certain, no
matter what so-called system of government with whatever manner of
leadership, all have been the same, with no way for the people to shake
free of their shackles. Indeed, it has been the same thing over and over
that has confounded the great and the small throughout our history. Call it
trade-goods, money, wealth, capital, whatever you wish. It comes in many
guises and with many noble titles, but it is at the very root of every
system of social organization that has existed on the planet. Its
distribution has been the focus of nearly all of our effort since the
beginning of time.
	But what does it matter how we have arrived where we are? What does
it matter other than that the world turns for another day and that we must
live life upon it? And who could argue that we are making a sorry mess of
the whole human affair and that we will be badly remembered for our
efforts? Even the lowly cattlebeast chewing her cud beside the busy
thoroughfare must laugh at the way things have turned out. To know that if
the slaughterhouse is hidden from view, her existence is better than ours.
And the beasts of the forest and field and the fishes of the sea must know
that they have the better life, even if we drive them to extinction.
	So, the verdict is reached and the foreman reads that we are
guilty. There can be no other conclusion. We are foolish indeed to have
come along this way because it will surely bring an end to things - and not
the end that we are wanting. Science fiction is looming over us. Dark
clouds of thunder are filling the air with the sounds of war. The sabres
are rattling. Population pressure, pollution, hunger, disease, war, etc. -
all smell with the stink of death. And it is our own death that is fouling
the air. Can we stagger and stumble yet a little further, or has the end
been reached? Is the end at hand? Look about you. Examine your morality all
you good people.
	What kind of madness is this? Since the beginning of scholarly
thought, great and wise people have wondered about the purpose of the human
experiment. Much hard thinking has gone into whether there even is a
purpose to life, or whether we are merely careening randomly about the
universe for no particular reason. Certainly, we all have our own little
purposes in life - to put out the garbage or cut the grass - to find the
food to eat or the medicine to live. But it would be difficult to argue
that we have had any overarching purpose to being since our time began.
Rather, we have agonized over the wrongs we have committed while in the
process of committing more wrongs, and done right on only a few joyous
occasions. And the wrongs have grown progressively larger, while the rights
have become fewer and smaller. So that the darkness is gathering.

The Purpose:
	To help make the planet a better place for all living creatures.
Why? Why not! Or even because! What would be so wrong with worldwide
happiness and peace? What would possibly be wrong with sharing and
cooperating? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Treat all
fairly. Let no life be sacrificed for nothing. Help every tiny bit of life
reach its full and positive potential, so there is no happiness and peace
as long as even one small omoeba weeps for something better. How can you
people claim to want anything else but contentment for all? If you think
the way things are is A-okay, or even if you think we can make some small
changes and improve the product, then you are the one who is mad. And the
rest are sane, because they can see that all is lost, and has been since
the most meat went to the strongest hunter.
	No small change is required in this case. Indeed, there is the need
for wholesale change that will not come easily. In all likelihood, there
are dark days ahead trying to convince those who have that they have
entirely too much and that they must share. They will not share. All the
greed of the ages will be brought to bear to maintain the richness of the
rich and the poorness of the poor. It will be no mean feat to convince the
wealthy and the powerful that their day is at hand, and that they must give
it up for the betterment of all. They already think they are rich for the
betterment of all, and that their richness makes the world a better place.
They will hold to that belief even though all evidence point to the
contrary because they have believed it since the beginning of time - since
the most meat went to the strongest hunter.
	We must hope that there is some way to win them over - we must hope
that there has been some truth in evolution - that we are becoming somehow
better than we once were, and that we will suddenly see the folly of our
ways. And that folly has been bought and paid for. And therein lies the
problem and the crux of that very same problem.

A New Economy:

	Regardless whether we have ended up in such a mess as the result of
our systems of economy or human nature, there is a need for a new beginning
- a fresh start. The cause of our dysfunctional world no longer matters. In
fact, whether we survive as a species really doesn't matter. But we should
put that aside and think that perhaps our continued existence does indeed
matter - not too terribly much and to no one else but our mothers - but
matter nonetheless. And if we judge that to be the case, then it is time
for change. It is time to cast off what has held us firm since the
beginning of our age and strike out in a brave new direction, but one that
better suits the reality of the age we now find ourselves in. Only by
showing the resolve to forge out a new way of life for every individual bit
of humanity can we save ourselves, and, by saving ourselves, save the
planet and all life that dwells upon it.
	Because if we have achieved dominion over all other living things,
and if we are indeed masters of our known universe, then we deserve to be
known by those who come after as kind and gentle masters, willing to share
what we have for the betterment of all. We must reach out beyond our selves
and come to know why we are the chosen ones - why we have been blessed by
god or natural selection to be the pinnacle of life on this planet. Perhaps
it is our lot to ravage and destroy life, because that is a purpose in
itself. But how could it be that we have come this far, and struggled so
much, only to face an anonymous death among the stars?
	There must be the belief that there can somehow be more to life
than we have so far given it. Even if we are mean and base creatures that
have brought ruination to all, surely we must eventually reach a point
where we will realize that it is ourselves we destroy. Surely, we will come
to our collective senses before it is too late - if such is not already the
case. And how can we not see the universal truth - that god is life and
life is god and both are the sacred stuff of being. It is all that matters.
It is all that should matter.
	Life must replace wealth as the currency of the planet. We must
deal in life from now on. We must trade in souls, and not in stock. The
preservation of all life must become more important than saving for a rainy
day, or even for a rainy year. If even one small bit of life is placed in
jeopardy, we must rally to its cause. We must find out what is wrong and
strive to make it right, because all life is precious and we must work
tirelessly to make it better. If we loved one another the way we have loved
our money, there would be nothing beyond our reach. We would feed the
hungry, cure all disease and fly among the stars. Humanity would know no
bounds and might indeed achieve some part of a potential so far only seen
in our dreams. We could come to be the great and mighty creatures we once
thought we might be. Life could be wonderful for all, and not just the
precious few as it is in the here and now.
	As has been said before, we must turn our swords to ploughshares.
Our armies must become our peace corps, spreading truth and light out
through the universe, telling all about the gift of life and what it means
to be alive. We must make heaven on earth because it is our obligation, as
the known rulers of all the eye can see, to do so. Just because life isn't
fair, doesn't mean that each and every one of us shouldn't fight and
struggle with every fibre of our beings to make it so. And to make life
fair means that there can be no inequity. Because all are equal before
conception and all are equal after death, all must be equal during life.
And although some might choose to rule when others might not, all remain
equal before nature. And that is as it should be.
	No amount of wealth can save a life. It is fleeting. It comes and
goes with a whisper, and there is no telling what was said. We must honour
it for what it is - a wonderful gift that comes only once to each of us,
existing together but alone for a single moment in time, before its self is
snuffed out and goes to join with the great oneness of the universe. It
cannot be gotten back. Once it is gone, it is gone, and only comes to those
who remain in ever diminishing memories. Life is a wondrous occurence here
in this dark universe. Honour it as such. It is your only salvation.
	Rise up, oh you slaves and masters alike. Know what you are and
what you are capable of. Know that you are indeed made in god's image, and
that god is life and life is god, and that life is every one and every
thing rolled into one. We must make peace with our creator. We must be
ready to make something better of ourselves than we already are. That is
the challenge and the purpose. Think differently. That is also the
challenge and the purpose. Somewhere it is written to love thy neighbour.
Do it today in case tomorrow never comes. Life is today, not tomorrow.

Epilogue:
	I have done what I can. These few pages don't seem like much, when
compared to the empire of evil and darkness that is currently spreading
across the earth. I don't want to discount the many individual acts of
kindness and goodness that are carried out by many individual people on our
planet - I simply want to point out that they are not enough. The world is
currently a miserable place for most of its inhabitants, either because
life puts unbearable pressure on them, or because they put unbearable
pressure on life. Either way, it's a crap shoot, when it should be
something incredibly beautiful, enjoyed and shared by all in somewhat equal
fashion.
	We need to develop a whole new way of thinking as we continue our
journey on Spaceship Earth. The old rules, such as they are, were developed
in far different times, and no longer apply to humankind. There has been no
effort in a hundred years to suggest a new way of life for us. That is what
I hope to do with this short document. I want to suggest an economic system
where life, not wealth, is the chief commodity. Where any amount of wealth
can be spent to save even a single life because life is always more
important than wealth.
	I could go on, but why bother. If you've read this far, you've
gotten the idea. Spread the word. All life matters, regardless how big or
small. Think deep inside yourself to see the truth. Deny what I say and
deny that truth. Life is precious.