Dreams
I had a dream that I was on the Enterprise, from Star Trek, and that I had become friends with someone who turned out to be a murderer. His murders were very clever and all of them involved funny anecdotes, which he told to a number of us, who started laughing.
After about five minutes of this, I became furious and started screaming at my friend and telling him that murder wasn't funny.
"He could have killed him, rather than another, to leave a sign, to signify something else."[...] "But what would that sign be?"
"This is what I do not know. But let us not forget that there are also signs that seem such and are instead without meaning, like blitiri or bu-ba-baff. . . ."
"It would be atrocious," I said, "to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!"
"It would be atrocious," William remarked, "to kill a man even to say 'Credo in unum Deum.' . . ."
(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, pp. 106-7)
William, in that book, is the very best example I can think of if I want to show what's meant by a humanist (see below).
