Sir Terry Pratchett's Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Terry Pratchett's lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in London was shown on BBC One last night, and is still available here (though you may have to be in the UK to view). Sir Terry's talk – which he couldn't deliver himself for the most part due to his early-onset Alzheimer's – was mainly about attitudes to death, assisted death, and our choice of a dignified death that this far has been almost categorically denied.

I too find the thought that assisted death should be viewed as a questionable practice entirely alien, inhumane and medieval. But beyond that discussion, it was Sir Terry's treatment of his own humanistic worldview that really moved me: "We are rising apes, not fallen angels," which to me is a beautiful way to describe the difference between the nature of humanist morality and that of a a theistic morality.