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Atheist Prayer
Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?
Theocracy? No Thanks
Atheism and Marriage
Petition to the gods
Blinding Faith
Atheist Hell
The Devil Hypothesis
Only the arrogant or the stupid can look upon the world without a god and revel in evolution and the market.
It is of no use to know that the fit will survive and the strong will rule unless you have the arrogance to assume you are strong and fit and your descendants will always be not just strong and fit but the strongest and the fittest.
I don't care for winners and I don't wish them bigger victories, and I see no reason why anybody other than a fellow winner ever should. I am not enhanced by any other person's victory but I feel diminished by every loss. My concern is for all who have the capacity to suffer rather than for those who have the capacity to win. What is the point in empathizing with winners? It makes no sense at all! Most people are losers and always will be and we will spawn little but losers. That is the way of the world. We all come from winners or at least survivors, we will all spawn losers, or fail to manage even that. That is true of every organism that has ever existed. It is the basic laws of the universe. Life is like a tournament, you keep playing again until you lose, all but one are beaten. Then it starts again. Losing is inevitable.
It is very easy for us to get totally the wrong idea about life by focusing on winners. Think about the 100 metres in the Olympics. I am sure you can remember a winner or two of that race from the past. But at every Olympics there are heats, semi finals and finals, dozens go home beaten. And yet we always only focus on the one who fails to be beaten. Why? Does the glory of the winner outweigh the pain of the losers? How could it? You can't even get to the Olympics without being fiercely competitive and deeply committed to winning. Of course the pain of the losers outweighs the pleasure of the one who is victorious. But at the Olympics all are willing volunteers who feel honoured merely to be allowed to compete. In life that isn't so. The billions who must lose so that some few can feel that they have won did not choose to compete and they get no glory from merely taking part. You can imagine the hypothetical googolplex of those unborn who did not even get the chance to stand on the starting line are cheering you on if you really try hard. However if you're going to play those kinds of mental games to gain solace for an empty life in the gutter helping to define victory for other people you might as well go the whole hog and imagine a god and pie in the sky for your reward. That's Pollyanna cerebral masturbation.
Of course there has to be competition sometimes and there must be losers. But there is no point in making everything a competition and making every competition deadly serious. Nobody can win at everything, if anybody is seen to be trying too hard at winning at too many things that alone makes them out as wholly despicable. It's OK to beat the boss at golf, your son at soccer, the boy racer off the line at the traffic lights and drink your colleagues under the table but if you do all of those things then you're a universally acknowledged (behind your back) to be a git.
We are all in this life together and I can let you into a little secret here, us losers heavily outnumber the winners. Why should we put up with being used to define the success of others? The poor are always with us, otherwise how can you tell you're rich?