Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
Thats IT?? Decomposition? Then why even bother? Why do good, or be good? What difference does anything make?
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<atheistic religious tangent>
If life ends at death--truly ends, no afterlife, no reincarnation, no ghosts, no join-the-eternal-in-bliss-of-nirvana--then this life is all we have.
That makes it PRECIOUS.
All the meaning, justice, goodness in the universe is
what we create. That makes us
important--we are the ones who perceive order, who prefer nurturing over destruction, who have invented and sustained love for thousands of years.
It means every moment of our lives is an irreplaceable, unrepeatable blip in the universe; we become the candles in the darkness. We are good, moral, kind, generous people by choice, not by threat; all the goodness in the world (stories medicine technology tenderness love) are to our credit; all the evil, too, is ours--and that we strive to overcome it, without purpose or reason other than it is repugnant to us--is also to our credit.
If nobody's keeping score, all that matters is how you play the game. Children know this... they make games like "tag," with limited rules and no winners, no losers, just a way for people to enjoy activities together.
And it says something, that we as a species admire those who play the game of life with joy, intelligence, honor and beauty. It says more if we admire these things out of choice, than if we admire them because some huge cosmic entity has declared we must, or we should.
If we are unique and alone in the universe (which is the case without an afterlife, no matter how overpopulated the universe happens to be), then it's our destiny to create our own meanings for life. It means our achievements are founded on self-discipline, the kind we can be most proud of. It also means our failures are our own, and it's up to us to improve ourselves. It's a heavy responsibility--with nobody to enforce it but each other.
And we have performed
miracles. And it's a great insult to our miracle-workers, to blithely move the credit for their efforts to some remote, unspeaking entity who can't even be bothered to indicate his existence clearly. (We have also performed atrocities. And it's a travesty to fail to assign blame for those on the people who've committed them, to decide that our mistakes belong to some grand evil spirit. Or to claim that our nature is inherently vile, and our atrocities are "natural" while our glories belong to someone else.)
</tangent>
Or was that </rant>?