There is no meaning to life and to dedicate your life to looking for the non-existent meaning of your life rather than actually living your life seems to be bordering on the grotesque.

I have said it before but I think it is appropriate to say it again, the biggest wrong idea in our heads is the idea that there must be something in it . The synthesis fallacy. The idea that if you stick enough wrong-headed concepts together you come up with something that approximates truth. This is utter nonsense. Mysticism and science don't need bridge builders. Mystery is the enemy of science. The way for there to be a fuller understanding of science and religion is for science to expand and occupy all the intellectual territory held by religion. We need to train psychologists and neurologists to get on the same wavelength as each other and to fill in all the gaps of knowledge not to capitulate to the saffron robed mystics and to accept the idea that truth can be discovered by sitting cross-legged on the floor and trying not to think or any other such nonsense.

Mystery and spirituality are evil. The world has never been improved by any priest or monk contemplating or praying. Action is needed to build a better world order. Action requires a will to act and that requires people to think that waiting for God is not a sensible option.

Mankind has improved his condition enormously over the millennia, not by prayer but by action. By politics, law, invention, engineering, medicine, agriculture and education. Behind all these forces has been knowledge and science. Knowledge and understanding of the real world. Mystics have been the brakes on civilization. A drain. Beggars, parasites, charlatans. Jesus, Buddha, all the saints and Lamas, monks and nuns; every one of them has been a scourge to humanity, holding us back at every turn. Whenever religious people have ever made a difference to humanity and made things better it has been when they have taken action. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the abolitionists, charity workers. They have used the tools of secular humanism; politics, law, direct peaceful action. The world becomes a better place not when people pray for it or think about it but when they actually do something about it. God has never changed the world, although Men of God have, when they have acted as though God was incapable of acting himself.

The world is only ever changed by action, never by squishy feelings inside, no matter how subjectively awesome they seem. Good people are not people who have good thoughts, good intentions and faith; good people are people who do good. Even for selfish reasons. I don't want to have a blinding revelation about the interconnectedness of the universe and feel the power of unsought knowledge, I want to have a good life.

I don't need to know the fundamental laws behind the universe to know that poverty, disease, ignorance and war are bad. I suggest that all those people who believe they will have an afterlife should save bothering about the imponderables and knowing the mind of God until after the die. In the meantime get on with living this life and making the world a better place for the people we know for certain will have to live in it.

Come on, you know that makes sense. And if there is a God how could he object to that plan?

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