Is the Debate over God Worth It?

Seriously consider this question: Is the debate over God's existence worth it? Or rephrased, is it really worth it to argue for or against God's existence? More importantly, is the debate over the nature of God worth it? Before you get offended by these questions, bear in mind that there is an important dilemma surrounding these questions.

Here is what I want to ask you all. When wars are started over basic things such as a disagreement over the nature of God and who God thinks is right, you have to ask if the debate is worth it when millions of people die for it? Realistically, I don't know how anyone with any real sense of moral integrity can value a debate about God over the lives of the people that God supposedly created. At least according to the Judeo-Christian and maybe Muslim tradition (I don't know overly much about Islam), God created man in his image. If he created people in his image, I doubt he wants people to kill each other in his name. After all, if God is benevolent and omniscient, then whether or not humans get the ideas right are irrelevant. A truly good God should only want good effort and the strongest attempt at a moral life as is possible.

Wars over religion are stupid, no matter what. Whenever one culture or religion begins to attack or fight with another one just because of differences in belief, a serious tragedy has occurred. If anything could make God cry, I think it'd be petty conflicts over differences in belief. We are all humans born forth from the same planet, no matter what religion we are. Unless you subscribe to some belief that aliens deposited humans here (which though possible is only fractionally so), we all came from the same soil, from the same life-giving earth. To kill each other over different beliefs about God and religion or even lifestyle is just stupid and tragic. If I subscribed to the anthropomorphic version of God, I would imagine him shedding tears at how his children are destroying each other.

We are too inclined to conflict, to war. Some cultures have managed to avoid excessive violent tendencies. The Hindus have existed in their own subcontinent without ever trying to expand out of it. It has survived multiple invasions and attempted cultural assimilations and has never once attempted real retribution. Only in recent years as Muslims and Christians continue to try to crush their culture and replace it with their own have there been violent retaliations. This is expected though; punch somebody enough times and they deserve to hit back. This does not mean that Hindus are perfect, but there is something to be learned from them. They happily assimilate other religious beliefs into their cultural system, while other religions reject everything they have to say. How come we, as humans, are not listening to each other? This becomes only more tragic when blood is spilled because of this.

If religion can only lead to contention and strife, then it's not worth it. I don't believe that religion inevitably leads to conflict. There is the possibility for peace between religions, but only when each person values another's religion as much as they value their own. In fact, you have to believe that they are as justified and as correct as you are before you can claim to be giving their religion proper and fair treatment. If you fail to do this, you are tarnishing your religion, and should take your failings elsewhere. Though you can't succeed at this immediately, the effort needs to be present. If you're not even trying, then you are failing to love other people like your God loves you. In order to be worthy of the God within and the God who made us, you have to be willing to love your neighbor and his beliefs more than your own. Until then, we will be nothing other than failures to the godliness that God instilled in us.

I personally do not believe in an antropomorphized version of God. I don't believe it's impossible, I just don't hold it is a belief in my personal life. I relied too much on God as an agent in my life, when I am supposed to be my own agent for action. God is meant to be a source of strength, not a being to give you what you want or fix your life for you. Part of our free will is the ability to make our own choices and do our own actions. No God who truly wants us to grow up could ever live our lives for us. That would be a kind of death for us, and God wanted us to have life. I relied on and prayed to much to the human God. That was a personal failing. I imagine God more as the total sum of all possibilities, the whole of reality made manifest. The concept of a conscious God is no longer present in my thought processes. Consciousness was too limited, and God is eternal. I personally subscribe more to the idea that God is everything, except I don't call it God, I call it eternity or reality, and I don't worship it. I feel blessed to be a part of the ceaseless process of reality, but I will live my life without the expectation of someone coming to save me (that was a personal fault by the way).

Anyways, the next time you feel compelled to engage in a religious debate, trying to prove whose conception of God is the best, remember that you're likely causing more problems than good. God needs no champion; he's God. His existence and power are not belittled or weakened by people disbelieving, so no matter what your views are about the objective truth about God, remember that fighting over it is pointless. If your God is truly God, he will remain God no matter what you do. Make yourself worthy of that God by spreading the only thing that a good God could truly want: peace and love (and peace and love does not mean spreading your religion, it means spreading the good of humanity). Once you have achieved that, then you have found the God within, and will then see the God without. If you value the future of humanity, please, please make this your most important of goals. If this is not achieved, many people will continue to die.

Contradictions and Other Stuff...Maybe

In recent days I have found myself in the greatest confusion and simultaneously the greatest peace of mind I could ever have imagined. There is no real logical explanation for it, but then again, logic doesn't always work (if I actually had an audience, many philosophers, intellectuals, scientists and mathematicians would blast this comment). Contradictions appear in our lives in the form of logically irreconcilable situations, ideas and concepts. Good and evil seem to contradict each other, and the existence of one seems to contradict the other. If that were true than their simultaneous existence necessitated by the existence of one would cause both to cancel each other out, thus showing neither to exist. Are you ready to accept a world without the comforting dichotomy of good and evil?

I am.

As we grow into maturity, we use our growing intelligence to find clever ways to hold onto the security blankets of our childhood all while managing to put them under the guise of some more mature-seeming thing or object. Alcohol replaces the pacifier, and ideologies replace the blanket we carried around half of our toddler years. Children no more we become full grown adults who are capable of acting like children in fantastically creative ways. After all, children learn from the parents and people who raise them, and mimic what they see. A general cycle of immaturity and irrationality become inculcated in the very system of species reproduction and maintenance. After awhile, it may not actually matter though, and I leave that choice for you. Either way, there's a contradiction: that we cease to become children and transform into adults, ignoring the fact that adulthood is just glorified and complexified childhood.

Ultimately what matters is what we do based on the decisions we come to. When we act immature under the premise that we are being mature, we create serious dilemmas in the form of unprecedented situations and phenomena that eventually come back to haunt us. Stupidity by itself is not overly dangerous, but stupidity under the guise of intelligence is boundlessly pernicious. After all, we welcome intelligence and chastize stupidity, and so when we welcome absurd and stupid doctrine and ideas under the guise of intelligence, we are opening a gateway to the depths of our mind. In those depths, ignorance and stupidity will take root, becoming an infestation that can never fully be removed. All that can truly happen is that we limit the scope of the stupidity we have.

Here's a contradiction: stupidity has utility. Occasionally it might be good to be stupid. Stupidity occasionally saves one from over-exerting their intelligence on a relatively simple matter. It becomes a catalyst to move one from staled action to refreshed action, even if that new action is somewhat ridiculous. It is better to bump into somebody accidentally then spend all day analyzing what the hell a flyer for an upcoming concert means. Meaning pervades every layer of life, but that does not mean that it pervades every layer of perception (contradiction). Life is dynamic and quickly changing. Who knows where it can go?

My thoughts are scattering as my mind fades to the twilight of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I've written multiple papers this week, run numerous errands, battled some kind of cold or infection, and contended with my own weird thought processes that continue to attack random parts of my mind like an overactive immune system attacking some innocuous agent. All that said, I need sleep, and I need sleep bad. Unfortunately, I also need to write my rough draft for PHIL 311, which I have done no research for and do not have much to say for yet. You know what's sad? I have to write a 12 page paper for it. Damn.

Good night, and don't do drugs or deprive yourself of sleep. Lack of sleep is brain rot, and causes neural pathways to inexplicably fail to stay connected, even mid-thought. These last two entries have shown me when my mind loses the major connections which enjoin all my ideas together. My cohesiveness fails as the web of my consciousness shrinks and shrivels, needing a brief rest so the spider of my mind can re-fortify and rebuild the inner web of my mind, giving rise to my full consciousness once more.

Ramblings: 04/19/2006

I'm almost certain that I'm not alone in having had this feeling. Occasionally you experience a fleeting moment, and in that blink of an eye you feel this crushing, boundless loneliness, abandonment, and as a result, hopelessness. Though the moment is transient to the point of nonexistence, it crushes down upon with a tidal surge, destroying the frail houses of your sanity. I know I'm exagerrating to a great extent here, but I'm serious. Some times you just feel utterly alienated and alone in the cosmos. I don't mean that other people don't exist to me, because to me that'd be a form of egocentric insanity, but I do mean that I don't exist for other people.

Although we are ultimately the only ones who can definitely state whether or not we exist, there is something to be said for external validation. I personally am too self-scrutinizing to ever hold many extremely positive views about myself for any great length of time. Even my morals and my moral actions are second-guessed by the persistent process that has a stronghold on my consciousness. This process is one that constantly refutes the wonderfulness of my ego.

Sure, human ego can lead to some pretty horrifying and terrible things, but it is still at its core what makes us us. Without our ego we wouldn't be human; we'd be mere drones. So there is some pride to be had in the singular I, the acknowledgement of our own existence not dependent on some other source. Our own self-recognition is fantastically powerful and weak at the same time; subject to the dynamic forces that underly consciousness, they ebb and flow with the power and consistency of some enduring tide. We build up layers of self-confidence, only to have one event crash through those layers with the full force of a demented comet, throwing up a dirt cloud to obfuscate our view for even longer there after.

Why does this happen? I've been full of rage lately, full of it. This is unusual for me because I rarely harbor any kind of anger very long without having a serious drain on all levels of my being. I have no idea why I operate that way, but I do. Now, two weeks into my seething anger, I keep trying to both placate myself and instigate myself. In a very powerful way, I want to say what I want to say, and I want to say it with the full force and clarity rarely afforded anything save those most basic of natural processes. At the same time, I try to hold myself back, apparently in the belief that there is nothing good to be gained from such an action, even though my intuition tells me that there is at least the long term achievements made therein.

That kind of a view seems feasible. While short-term feelings and goals are infinitely more potent (because they focus on the present, which is all the human mind ever truly seems to focus on), long-term feelings seem hinged on the idea that a greater good will be achieved by suffering the present. Though I love that ideal, there is nothing necessary about it and in many ways, it can absolutely fail. There is an exception to every rule, and many people can think of a case when every conceivable good is attempted only to result in an inconceivable bad. Though I won't offer examples here (hate me for being lazy if you'd like), consider that. Good does not always lead to good, but it does not necessarily have any meaning unless you adhere to some structure of morality.

More and more every day I realize that I don't believe in many of the objective norms that we as westerners take for granted. Take, for instance, the belief that there is an objective morality. This means that there are morals that exist beyond the level of sheer human relative action; there are some things that are just intrinsically bad and some that are just inherently good. This kind of marked dichotomy permeates so many levels of our society that it's startling. Good vs. evil, religion vs. science, reason vs. absurdity, logic vs. madness, democracy vs. oppression, the list goes on and on.

So I should state this outright: I don't really care if there is an objective reality or an objective anything. I reached this conclusion at some point in the last year, though the weight of it has descended upon me more as of late. This doesn't mean that I reject objective views, it just means that I find them inconsequential for my intentions and goals in life. If objective reality doesn't exist, then so what? I think I exist and that's good enough, and if an objective reality does exist, that's fine too. Either way, the paradigms on which my life is built don't really depend on such ideological security, rather they depend on a security of self. But when my relentlessly second-guessing mind roars into action, serious conflicts arise.

I don't know why I care sometimes about so many of the things that I care about. I'm a dreamer, I always have been and always will. I dream of certain marvelous futures, read about them, and imagine my own. Many of the problems in the world today are roadblocks to that goal. Also, in some corner of my biological being, there is a will to species survival. Ultimately though, I somehow ended up caring about some other people (I won't wear the false pretense of caring about everybody in the world, because I'm probably much more evil than that). Either way, I should be reducing people to mere variables, playing off their strengths and weaknesses, making their victories mine and their failures theirs alone. Success is a resource game, so why am I doing nothing to gather my resources?

My vague and kind of retarded conceptual framework prefers to view each person as inherently equal, if not superior, to me. If that is the case, I can never reduce them to a mere variable. Clearly, though, I am as guilty of this as anyone else. So why should I care if I do what's right. Doing good has not seemed to earn me much over the years, hell, it hasn't even earned me peace of mind. Though I've been blessed enough monetarily and to have a good family, every year I more and more feeling completely isolated. I desperately want some kind of peer recognition, but I know that's a fruitless endeavor. If it doesn't involve drinking, how can I expect there to be any success for any enterprise I start here at JMU.

Morality has brought me little. Perhaps if I believed in the afterlife or some cycle of living reincarnation, this would matter more to me. But it doesn't. Long-term death doesn't phase me much anymore (though obviously I'd have completely different instincts/reactions in the short-term), and the presence of an afterlife is trivial. Even from a religious standpoint I think that God would rather us be moral for the sake of being moral rather than for the attainment of some alleged promise. Who knows? Heaven may be real, and that conception of God may be real. I'd say I'm going to burn in hell, but given the divergence of books present on the subject, I don't think a good God would eternally damn me just for not following one of his many religions at any given time. So no, I don't feel hell, and I don't worry about heaven. I'm quite happy being a part of a grand cosmic cycle, and even though nothing, not even a memory, will be left of me in a few decades or so (hopefully no sooner), I of course want to keep living.

Note: sorry, but I'm getting delirious from either lack of sleep, the sickness I have, or some combination of both

I'm too out of it to right more. My brain is inexplicably dropping sentences completely from memory even as I think them. Names and concepts are just washing over me at that this point, and I can't care. Anyways, good night!

Humanity's Family Feud

Ignore the uncreative title here, because the topic is important. Though this very idea abounds throughout every layer of our society (American society at least, I can't claim to speak for any other) and many far more credible and intelligent people than I have looked at and discussed the issue, I feel it merits some of kind a discussion by me. Also, given that many crucial and pivotal events in the world today hinge on this debate, which in turns filters into other problems (such as the assumption of the necessity of the truth of science, which is then imposed on other societies), I figured it was important for me to at least glance at this topic.

Consider a couple of things: western society prides itself on science; religion is still a powerful force; people practice religion and believe it totally; we, as people, often suffer from ferocious bouts with unbridled ignorance and stupidity; we assume science and religion can't be compatible (which is a false dichotomy - something I will argue here). This silly battle has raged on for far too long, despite the fact that some people have begun to recognize that the two are not so different.

Try to think of it in this way. Religion and science are two brothers, both born from mother humanity. Like juvenile siblings they bicker incessantly, growing and becoming more complex and more powerful over time. Eventually, they reach a point where they can either become brothers who love and understand each other, even if their views are different, or they become relatives who rarely speak to each other for the rest of their lives. Hopefully they go with the first option, and become the two great united children of humanity, rather than the hateful siblings who tear the family apart.

Ultimately I believe that religion and science are more or less the same thing. Neither religion or science have any necessary validity. Though science seems more or less certain, history is not remiss of examples of paradigmatic shifts in essential and fundamental changes in scientific theory. Given that this trend has been present since the dawn of human logical enquiries concerning the natural world, I find it hard to believe that there will not continue to be massive and fundamental changes in our conceptual frameworks with regards to science. Though every scientist on earth would hate me for this, science is a leap of faith. It requires putting trust in human logic, observational quality, and creativity. Science is the religion of reality; as a deity it demands rational thought, and in return it yields the great secrets of the cosmos, or at least enough to radically change our world.

Religion on the other hand is the science of human coping with the unknown. We form religion to help us endure the unexplainable or irreconcilable in life. A belief in an afterlife helps some reconcile the inevitability of death with meaning in life. A psychologist might call religion a coping mechanism, for through it we explain and reason what we cannot observe. There is no way to witness the departure of a soul upon the death of an individual, and so we let our creativity flow and adhere to the most plausible explanation. For Christians, there is heaven. For Hindus, there is the cycle of rebirth that marks the steady road to perfection. For some, there is nothing, just a termination of biological and neural processes culminating in the physical decay of the body and the dispersion of its constituent matter throughout reality. In all of these scenarios (except maybe the last one), religion is how we define the indefinable.

There is a logic two both of these disciplines, though the scientist would belittle the theological method of religion and radical religious adherents would reject the seeming absurdities of science. At their origins, there is nothing wholly absurd about either. Both serve humanity in its never-ending quest for happiness, security, and survival. Without science, our physical survival seems endangered, and without religion, our mental survival seems endangered.

Though it's a bit late in the article to lay out a definition, I realize now that I should define religion. Contrary to popular opinion that religion only includes organized faiths or practices, I am going to use the word religion as a referent to the beliefs or views one has concerning non-scientific and sometimes non-empirically deducible views. Under this definition, nihilism would count as a religion, because even though some nihilists may believe that nothing truly exists, their belief is still a belief that requires faith or internal logic (no scientific method). Basically, religion here may include philosophies of life, metaphysical views, or general perceptions and worldviews.

As we look forward into the future, we see potentially glorious paths for both. Science is making greater and greater leaps each year; fueled by the greatest of human ambition, it will reach the stars, carrying it's makers with it. Religion (in its ideal form) seeks to bring hope and understanding to people, preserving their integrity and peace of mind. Lying in the depths of human consciousness, it will ensure that humans don't forget their humanity when they finally leave earth, their loving mother, behind, taking to the stars to become a new breed. In short, both are crucial for the continuing propagation of our species. The one fuels the species, the other maintains it. With an inclination for entropy and chaos, we need something to prevent stagnation and something to prevent over-stimulation.

The assumed mutual incompatibility of religion and science is completely bogus. Most religious beliefs are metaphorical renditions of general observations about the world. The only people who suffer conflict are those who take things like the Bible too literally, and that goes for both sides. Some religious people take religious texts too seriously, but then again, science so fervently pursues and attacks these beliefs that they push the people into further orthodoxy. People naturally tend to cement their views and close their minds to fresh thoughts when they're under attack. If you attack somebody's beliefs, they will only harden their doctrine, thus defeating the original goal you had to begin with.

Religion is not without fault either though. Just as some scientists have become too obsessed with disproving religion, some religious people have become too indoctrinated or too unfocused to truly understand the point and objective of their beliefs. Things like the Bible may have never been intended to be taken literally. Luckily, it doesn't have to be for the most important messages to be obtained. Ultimately, the objective validity of the Bible stories does not matter, because like any great piece of literature, it should focus on humans and try to explore some dimension of them. And like most literature, the Bible is abound with metaphors and imagery and many other things that serve to structure the overall work rather than creating a definitive historical line. Though some Biblical writers may have striven for some kind of historical accuracy, most likely they did not unless it concerned some theme at hand.

Also know that neither is less guilty than the other. When religion needed weapons science was there to help, and science needed a cruel motivation, religion was there to help. Neither is actually evil, but the practitioners have often been horribly misguided or inclined to atrocities. Bear in mind that neither of these is inherently bad, though the people who sometimes use them may be. Science did not give rise to the nuclear bomb; humans did. Religion did not give rise to holy wars; humans did. These two were just tools used by some humans to achieved desired ends. Lacking any consciousness beyond that which humans supply them, there can be no evil in science or religion, only in the actions of those who do/practice them.

Alas, but I have digressed. Just understand this: science and religion are not incompatible. They have the ability to cooperate and carry humans to magnificent new heights. They both represent dynamic facets of what makes humans great. To reject one would be too reject one of our greatest dimensions. Religion gives us meaning, gives us motivation to strive for something, while science gives something to strive for, gives us a potential source for meaning, or at the very least, a means for obtaining it. We require both, and anyone who seeks to abandon either is likely consumed by madness, or laziness, or sheer ignorance. We must embrace both of our children, for in one lies the future of our physical being, in one lies the future of our mental being, and in both lies the future of our race. Hand in hand, let us march gloriously into a new future, joined as a family and boundless in our potential.

Humanity and the Future

I'm sorry, but yes I'm going to continue on my writings about the flaws of humanity. Before you label me as a pessimist or an apocalypse-preaching ass, I'd appreciate it if you'd at least try to read whatever I say with an open mind. It may be hard to believe, but please understand that I am serious when I say that I have the highest hopes for humanity. That said though, I don't believe that humanity in its current state is guaranteed a bright future; effort may be required. Attaining a greater future is not necessarily going to come easily or freely. More than anything else in the world today, I believe that human ignorance and unwillingness to subdue its ego in any way is going to prove to be the greatest obstacle to our greater future.

Much in reality is subject to chance, or if not chance, than to calculations and effects coming from causes that are beyond our ability to perceive, understand, or predict. Basically, bar any unforeseen catastrophic event that is out of human control or human cause, humanity has the potential to survive in this universe indefinitely (at least until all matter decays, but if that is how things work, than we still have billions, maybe trillions, of years left). Since we all have that basic survival instinct branded into our DNA, we all have some desire to see humanity continue in some way, shape or form.

Here comes one of our first problems: individual ego. Even though all human beings work more or less towards the same goal, because our processes and methods for achieving those goals differ, we all too frequently perceive others as having drastically different and opposing goals. As a result, we have been in a process of killing each other for millennia. The sadness in this is that collective human strength right now has potential, but given our inability to see each other as equal human beings wandering down the same general path, we are in some ways doomed to continue our species suicide. If this is not the embodiment of insanity, I'm not sure what is.

Our individual egos are what cause us to spiral into ignorance and stupidity. When our ego flares, we focus on ourselves, and all too often we get defensive and believe that only we are right and that everything is wrong. When this happens, we shelter ourselves in a veil of our own stupidity, and like an infection, our stupidity spreads to others, causing them to further wall themselves up in their own stupidity. When multiple people are dealing with a similar situation when they are at their least intelligent state of mind, the outcomes are usually less than desireable (unless some randomly fortuitous event occurs that prevents the more or less inevitable outcome). In short, stupidity begets stupidity which leads to stupid events and stupid outcomes.

From any reasonable standpoint, it does not make sense for us to decrease our general productivity. Put another way, if human reactions and actions due to stupidity are hindering a greater and more prolific output, then stupidity is the enemy of our biological and societal industry. Though the massive tree of stupidity has grown to epic proportions, the seeds of it can be seen in humanity, and thus the focal point of our assault can be discovered. The solution though, to the problem of human stupidity becomes a hard one, mostly because we will try to think of something specific and immediate, when in reality, the solution will be something general and long-term. This is something most people aren't willing to accept.

The only real way for excessive human stupidity to be decreased is to force people to accept the existence of other people (believe it or not, but when your ego is dominating your actions, other people are less people and more a variable, and putting their words on an equal level as your own becomes impossible). This is a hard task, mostly because when you make people acknowledge the existence of other people equal to them, they hate you. Nobody wants to be told that as an individual, they don't matter more than anyone else. In reality though, this is the truth. At a both cosmic and practical level, none of us matter anymore than anyone else; fundamentally we are all equal because we all start the same and end the same (we are all born and we all die).

Think long and hard about this. When we become self-centered in our thought processes, it becomes impossible to truly consider anyone else on equal terms with your own interests. It is only when you become disinterested (at least for a period of time) in your own personal interests as they relate to your own needs. Unfortunately, many credible theories (like psychological egoism) make this kind of thing impossible, since they support that people can never truly act without some personal motivations playing a factor (basically, altruism and certain other things become impossible and unattainable). Luckily, these are not necessary for some version of this basic concept to work.

Though we may never truly be able to act outside of our own interests, if we can act without focusing on ourselves, then some measure of success can be achieved. Remember, the goal is not to eliminate stupidity, but to minimalize the damage done by human stupidity. Unfortunately, prescribing some specific method for learning to not focus on our ego is either impossible or unattainable at this present moment (at least for me). Luckily though, the general goal is the general way, and a general pattern can be followed.

In any situation we act out of our general internal thought patterns. Occasionally we can, with effort, observe our own thought processes. The challenge with that is that most people can't stand to witness any flawed part of themselves (which is half the damn problem here anyways), and thus refuse to utilize any form of introspection. Introspection (as I've discussed in previous articles) is crucial, and is really the only way for a person to find ways to contain the rampant ego. Once we actually begin to analyze ourselves though, we can cultivate the disposition to analyze our minds from a disinterested perspective (meaning, we aren't interested in ourselves from an ego standpoint, but rather from an analytical standpoint).

When that ability is attained in some form, we can try to treat others more like we'd like ourselves to be treated. Most of us don't usually aim to treat others as inferior, but it's a result of ego-focused thinking, and when we can get around that in some amount, we can begin to treat others as are true equals. Also, understand that most people don't mean to treat others as inferior, it's just a natural result of our general thought processes. When we have a mission that is important to us (such as survival or any other goal), we perceive things in terms of variables, and anything that seems to be a hindrance is immediately either ignored or becomes an object that must be circumnavigated, attacked, and in some excessive cases, destroyed. Basically, when we become too focused on a goal, people become less than human, they become variable. Other persons and their interests are reduced to the mere x or y in the calculations made to assess and achieve one's interests.

Unfortunately, I have no prescriptive statements or methods to give. Treating other people better is more a frame of mind, one that everyone (myself included) needs to work on. The world is facing desperate crises right now because of basic but crucial misunderstandings between cultures. The sad part is that most of these misunderstandings are unavoidable. If we can improve on our fairer treatment of each other as human beings, then we will have accomplished a satisfying goal. Rigorous self-improvement is the goal here, not perfection. If we were perfect, we'd either have nothing to live for or not live at all. As long as we constantly strive to regard and love the human in all of us, with some advancements over time, then we have done well and met this basic and yet necessary goal.

So we have three basic choices here: we can take the hard route and work to improve ourselves as a species; we can continue to wage war and creat conflicts until we destroy ourselves; or we can rely on nature or reality to determine whether humanity will survive past its infancy on earth. After all, we are but children, with a potentially bright future ahead of us. Why toss that away to the drug of the human ego, to the temptation of laziness and indolence, when we can work and unlock the full of our potential. Out of many species that earth gave rise to, we seem to be the only ones capable of looking to the sky and reaching what is there. I can think of no greater evil than for humanity to be snuffed out so early in its life cycle due to its own ravenous stupidity. Rather, let us look forward with a determined will, and steeling our resolve, move to improve and create a future we all want to have had a part in.