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“Or fail to do.

“What happens if you credit a bum with human dignity—a drunken bum with his pants full of shit and snot dangling from his nose? At least you haven’t made yourself poorer in a financial sense. And he can’t take whatever it is that you have given him and spend it on Thunderbird wine.

“There is this drawback, though: If you give to that sort of a stranger the uncritical respect that you give to friends and relatives, you will also want to understand and help him. There is no way to avoid this.

“Be warned: If you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed yourself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is.

“If you see dignity in anything, in fact—it doesn’t have to be human—you will still want to understand it and help it. Many people are now seeing dignity in the lower animals and the plant world and waterfalls and deserts—and even in the entire planet and its atmosphere. And now they are helpless not to want to understand and to help those things.

“Poor souls!

“I am descended from fairly recent immigrants. My first American ancestor, an atheistic merchant from Münster, arrived here about five years after William Ellery Channing died. Channing died in 1842, a reluctant Abolitionist who did not live to see all the murdering in the Civil War. I am a drop of spray from one of the waves which swamped the American Atlantis.

“The faith of my ancestors, going back at least four generations, has been the most corrosive sort of agnosticism—or worse. When I was a child, all my relatives, male and female, agreed with H. L. Mencken when he said that he thought religious people were comical. Mencken said that he had been widely misunderstood as hating religious people. He did not hate them, he said. He merely found them comical.

“What is so comical about religious people in modern times? They believe so many things which science has proved to be unknowable or absolutely wrong.

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful—and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.

“More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

“I read an essay by Harvey Cox recently, in which he quoted an early Church father as having said, ’One Christian is no Christian.’ Mr. Cox said that one of the most distinctive and attractive features of Christianity for him was its insistence on forming congregations.

“We might also say that one human being is no human being.

“Many people have found a solution to loneliness by joining the paratroops. Membership in that particular family is gained and maintained by jumping out of airplanes and shouting ’Geronimo!’ Not even the commanding general knows why everybody is supposed to shout ’Gerónimo!’ It does not matter.

“In a lonely society, the main thing is not to make sense. The main thing is to get rid of loneliness. I certainly sympathize.

“I have not mentioned love yet. I have been saving that for close to the end.

“Love was invented by a chef at the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood, California, in 1939. It consists of overripe jumbo peaches with San Fernando Valley honey and chocolate jimmies on top. It is traditionally served in heated purple bowls.

“As every married person here knows, love is a rotten substitute for respect.

“I have spoken of the long tradition of religious skepticism in my family. One of my two daughters has recently turned her back on all that. Living alone and far from home, she has memorized an arbitrary Christian creed, Trinitarian-ism, by chance. She now has her human dignity regularly confirmed