If Youth Knew, If Age Could 14 — A Rational Life Includes Non-Rational Parts

By Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019), and Short Reflections on American Secularism’s History and Philosophy (2020).

Here we talk about the rationality of a life lived with the non-rational.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve talked about rationality and such. You’ve commented on personal experience with love, and more. Love is a non-rational part of life, but love happens, nonetheless. A profound, significant, and, sometimes, incomprehensible and inexplicable component of human life. What do you make of making room, in life, for the non-rational? As Chris Hedges clarifies, he does not mean the…