Greg Epstein

“The whole concept of what a good life ought to look like also changed with the secular revolution. A good life used to mean a life of suffering. Why? Because nearly everyone was suffering so much from lack of decent food, shelter, medicine, and leisure time that the best way to prevent panic was to assert that "your suffering is good for you." So Jesus became a suffering role model. Buddhism cultivated meditative techniques as an escape from worldly suffering. And African American slaves sang of the redemption their protracted pain would bring them in the next life.
But the Enlightenment propagated a new (to most people), Humanistic view of a good life. This new view was made possible by new science and technology that made commerce, communication, and existence in general easier. It was motivated by horror at the centuries of religiously inspired mass murder that had terrorized Europe. It was influenced by Epicurus and Lucretius as well as the Roman Cicero and other early human-centered thinkers. And it was expressed in manifold ways by brilliant writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and others whose work is now considered among the foundation stones of contemporary Humanist philosophy. But our view was first "canonized" in the Declaration of Independence,most likely by Thomas Jefferson: that all people are equally deserving of an opportunity to pursue happiness and to be free of suffering in this life (rather than be redeemed by it in the next life). My late mentor Sherwin Wine used to say that he knew that his mother had a pre-secular revolution mind-set because she didn't understand how to be "happy." Suffering, she could take. But happiness? Oy! What is there to be so happy about - the world is a mess!”
― Greg Epstein