gilesgoat wrote:I mean if we'd stop thinking there's any God and just go on realizing "we are just micro dots on a speckle of micro dust in the middle of the universe and nothing much more".
Which is pretty much my perspective, and I see it as "if we're ever going to get out of this shit, then it's because we picked up the spade and started shovelling".
That is, nothing out there is going to save us. We have to do it ourselves. No gods nor superheroes nor magical unicorns are going to fly in and save the day. If the day is to be saved then it's 100% down to you and I to do it. If we require heroes, then we have to raise ourselves up to be those heroes... even if only just for one day.
(In fairness, there are the animals and potentially space aliens. But the animals we share this planet with are generally not going to be of much use in this quest, as they don't speak and understand things as we do, unfortunately. Though they are cute and that's nice. And though, in a universe as gargantuan as it is, I feel there's statistically almost certainly other life out there somewhere, the odds of the space aliens ever showing up is extremely low. And, even if they did, then why would they know how this "reality" thing works any better than we do? Indeed, they might show up exactly because "yeah, sorry, we fucked up our own planet and are looking for another replacement one" - I mean, if humanity ever ends up on some other planet, that's unfortunately a likely story for what we'd be doing out there in the black ourselves.)
gilesgoat wrote:I don't know, at times one could even think "if it really makes any better the fact there could be a God/something for real or if that is actually worse".
Christopher Hitchens had this argument that God, if he did exist, is the Cosmic Tyrant of a Celestial North Korea.
The point being that if all of this is just to perpetually suck the dick of some infinitely insecure deity in eternal worship then, even if that were true, fuck that for a game of dice.
It's not just "is it factually correct?", but is it any good even if it was?
I don't think so. "God's masterplan" is a chaotic piece of shit, frankly. If the gods are there and listening, what the fuck were you thinking?
But, alternatively, if this is just things falling out of chaotic natural processes and it's just the way it is because that's the way it is - per the laws of physics and all that - then it all makes vastly more abundant sense to me.
But I remain fundamentally optimistic, because there's historical precedent. Look to the past, and humanity has achieved miracles of social, technological and economic progress. We've pulled our arses out of worse shit holes than this before, so we are better than this and we can be better than this. And that's not an act of faith but just a historical fact - though glacially slow, we have slowly bumbled our way to a world that's leagues better than the atrocious shit that existed beforehand. Still a long ways to go, of course. But that's what I'm saying - we've got to keep moving things forward. Off our own backs, as nothing and no-one is going to come swooping in with any magic to fix it all up for us.
It can be done, as it has been done before.
(A common misconception is because you have Buddhists venerating Buddha, or Christians worshipping Christ, that a "humanist" therefore worships humanity. But, no, not at all. I'm quite the misanthrope, in fact, as you might have gathered by my regular complaints about our species. And I hate crowds of people, as little good ever comes from that.
Humanists don't worship humanity, or even necessarily think we're particularly good at what we do, in the main. It's more a recognition that it's just us. If we humans want things to be better, then it's up to us to raise our game to meet that challenge. And if we don't, then things will just continue to be shit. That's the long and short of it. We must endeavour to do better, for our own sakes, or absolutely nothing good nor useful will change. I like to cite Neil Armstrong on the Moon - such a milestone in human achievement... and he fluffed up his line. It was supposed to be "One small step for
a man, one giant leap for mankind", but he forgot the "a" and made perhaps the most famous quote in all of human history a bit meaningless. Now, that, for me, is humanity through and through. Head in the clouds, feet firmly planted in the shit.)
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
