Things You Will Know, Or Not

One of the great joys that occurs on the completion of 68 orbits around our star is that I have had the time to reflect on a host of issues, theories, beliefs and paradigms.  And I have reached some conclusions based on logic and fact and science and math that give me great peace.  I would hope you will learn these truths as well, that you will know, not believe, but know certain things that are extremely clear when the cultural scales fall from your eyes.  Sometimes learning these truths is painful.  Sometimes some are so unwilling to see the truth they will attack the source of truth, much like Galileo was attacked and Copernicus was attacked and Newton was attacked and Darwin was attacked.  But each discovery, each theory confirmed by millions of observations becomes fact.  Undeniable.  Fact.  Not alternative fact.  Not a belief.  A fact.

So here is my list of things I hope you will know as I now know them.  Things that may be different from what you once thought, but things you will know based on science and math and logic.

There is no god.  Never has been.  Humans have invented thousands of gods to explain reality, to provide purpose and meaning, and each group of humans has believed their god is the right god, the only god.  They are all wrong.  There is no god.  God is an invention made by human beings, not a supreme being discovered by human beings or self-revealed to human beings.

There is no life after death.  For that matter, there is clearly no life before birth.  We die like every other life form on the planet.  We cease to exist.  We stop having consciousness.  We end.  I think it must have been funny to Billy Graham to discover at the instant of his death that there was nothing else.

Morality is not something imposed or prescribed on us from some set of mystical beliefs, or via some supernatural being or recorded in some kind of holy book.  Morality is individually adopted.  Atheists are as moral as Hindus, or Buddhists, or Christians or Muslims.  In fact, atheists are probably more moral than most believers.  Everyone who establishes their own moral code based on the belief that there is a god who ordained right and wrong has just empowered themselves to do horrible things to others in the name of their god.  All religions have done this.  Christians do it now to homosexuals.  Muslims do it now to anyone who is not Muslim.  Those acts, by my morality, are immoral.  But believers believe them to be moral because that is what their god said.

All the arguments for a creator are merely circular arguments.  If it took a creator to design such complexities as we observe on our planet and in the universe then by the same logic it would take another being to have designed that creator, and the creator of that creator, and on and on.  If one argues that The Creator randomly sprung full grown with creator abilities, then we must allow that life on earth, including humans, must have randomly evolved the same way.  Any effort to force schools to teach such folly as creationism must be blocked at every turn.  What happened before the Big Bang?  We do not know.  Yet.  But we will.  Basing what we know to be true on science and logic and math does not mean we know everything right now.  It does mean we are not willing to assign mystical and mythical attributes to those things we do not yet know.

90% of all life forms ever on the planet are now extinct.  Therefore, we can become extinct.  We can die from a variety of causes and if we do not care for our environment we will kill ourselves, if we do not curtail our conflicts we will kill ourselves, if we do not curtail our numbers we will kill ourselves.  We are not likely to become extinct because we were eaten by some beast that feeds on us.  We will extinguish ourselves unless we realize that extinction is a real possibility and act immediately to postpone such an event.  Sending a few of us to another planet to live may preserve the species, but we are not able to do that yet and it won’t be any fun for those of us left behind.  Plus my fear is we will send those few with a Bible.

Now that I know all these things, I mean know it, not believe it, know it, I am free to live my life as best I can.  Number one in my moral code is do no harm.  My number 2 is do unto others as I would have them do to unto me.  That influences how I drive my car as well as how I treat people who are hurting and are without power.  That includes homosexuals and transgender and all the possible sexual identifies and preferences.  That includes all men and all women.  That includes all races.  That includes all nationalities.  That means I want everyone to have an education, to have food, shelter, clothing and medical care.  I won’t wall anyone out.  I won’t support depriving others of the technological benefits I have, like electrical power and internet.  There is no such thing as a human being on planet earth that is an illegal alien.  We are all indigenous.

Once I know these things political decisions become very easy, and most of our conflicts become either tempests in teapots or immoral.  Weapons that can be used to kill people are immoral.  Polluting the atmosphere is immoral.  Ordering groups of people to not use contraceptive devices is immoral.  Ordering groups of people how to regulate and control their own reproductive system is immoral.  Insisting that my religious views become law is immoral.  Standard stuff like stealing, assault, murder, etc., remain immoral.  Doing immoral acts for money is truly immoral.

Doing harm to others is immoral, especially if one is doing such harm in the name of some non-existent deity.