From: George Dibos <georged@meaddata.com>
Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Conclusions of a Rational Man
Date: 23 Dec 1992 14:46:33 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH


After reading Mathew's five part FAQ & etc. posting, and considering it,
the central question seems to be (and please excuse the near-quote of
Einstein to express it) that:

"...life is so strange--we are created from nothing without being asked,
then made to live without being told why."



And here is the answer, WITHOUT resorting to make-believe for comfort and
satisfaction:


By all appearances, it is only Man's powers of reason which distinguish
him from Earth's other life forms, and only this intelligence which makes
his behavior more complex than theirs.  (Chewing grass, for example, is a
boring way for a human to spend his life.)  The feeling of superiority 
this gives most of us, however, fades after we realize that assigning
SIGNIFICANCE to our activities simply because they are complex, is a
mistake--that we are, rather, simply going about life the only way we know
how.  Cats hunt, jellyfish float in the current, and men build spaceships.
To do otherwise essentially isn't possible--it would violate our
programming.

The only truly objective conclusion, then, is that none of Man's activities
is any more valuable than those of any other life form, and to think
otherwise is merely evolution indulging in a bit of anthropocentric
frequency-jamming.

The same objectivity applied to Man's intra-species activities yields an
equally surprising result:  None is intrinsically more worthy or correct
than any other.  (Excepting perhaps the notion that all things given life
should be left alone to enjoy it.  The laws of thermodynamics flatly
disallow such behavior in practice--try eating rocks--but keeping the 
ranks of the consumed as far beneath what we believe to be self-awareness
as possible lets us feel less guilty about that part of it.)

So where does all this lead?  To a place which allows clear thinking.  One
from which we can look down on the grazing herd of ideas-about-life and
spot those which are lame, dead, or have "wishful thinking" stenciled
across their back, and disregard them.  And what a lovely thing happens
after doing so:  The relentlessly logical, but painful-to-face conclusion
that "nothing we do ultimately matters" just fades away.  (As will,
hopefully, any need for Man to refute that conclusion through consensual
delusion--Heaven, anyone?)  The question, it turns out, never was about
significance in the literally ultimate sense in the first place.  Why?
Because the grand machine that is the universe MUST consume itself in
order to exist at all--the very nature of space-time precludes permanence,
even as a concept.  A transitory universe, in other words, cannot contain
anything EXCEPT transitory events.

So, whether the starving dog is fed, the song composed, or the baby born,
DOES matter after all...  With all actions ultimately equal in the face of
impermanence, significance becomes what we choose it to be, different for
everyone, and of the highest legitimacy for being so.  It is all we have.
Indeed, it is all there IS.


George
  


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| George Dibos        | Views expressed are my own.... | (513) 865-1689       | 
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