UN General Assembly
2001

that decimated sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Out of these wars of religion and out of the 30 bloody struggles of the Reformation came a powerful antidote to religious violence that we call humanism. The great French humanist Michel de Montaigne was a sceptic. He wrote about the limits to human knowledge in his remarkable Essays. In one of them, entitled “Of Practice,” he observed that, although we can practice for many things in life, there is one thing for which we cannot practice, one thing we cannot know, and that is our own death. He went on to describe the closest he came to knowing death, an accident that happened when he fell from his horse. He had been out riding in a militia and was nearly crushed to death. He had a brief sensation of his soul hovering over his body, and, later, after being taken home, terrible pain continued to plague him. At a time of religious extremism, when Catholics and Protestants were fighting over the keys to heaven — just as the 11 September terrorists died