Are we all just meat?

.
Every time something horrible happens in the World, like the recent tsunami, various pundits trundle out the tired old question:

.
'If there is a God why would he permit such a thing to happen'

.
which invites the answer that 'Of course there's no such thing as a God. If there was, he wouldn’t permit bad things to occur'
.
Earlier on in the week I wrote a post that attempted to give an answer that was consistent with the Christian, Islamic and Hebrew idea of God. An alternative answer could have been 'Well, maybe there is a God and maybe he doesn’t give a damn.
.
But that would have been a profane and bleak answer. I prefer the happy one myself.
.
I would love it if the media pundits asked a different question for a change, something along the lines of:

.
'Lots of people died yesterday. Why should we give a damn?'

.
The answers to that question would be a lot more interesting.
.
The point is if you have religious belief, or have grown up in a society that is based on religious beliefs, even though it pretends otherwise, you are provided with an answer to that question …

.
Human life is sacred
.

Human life is sacred because religion tells us so. Religion also provides us with worked examples of what constitutes good and bad behaviour.
.
But what if you don’t believe in God? What if you believe the universe spontaneously appeared from nothing, life was generated accidentally from a pool of slime and that humans are the mere result of random mutation and natural selection? What if you believe all of these things and somebody said:

.
'Lots of people died yesterday. Why should we give a damn?'

.
Remember, humans are merely part of a random evolutionary tree that encompasses all life. We keep hearing how similar we all are to animals. We are bombarded with stories about how everything that makes us us can be reduced and explained away as straightforward biochemical reactions. Sure, we have brains but so do chickens. Like chickens, we're just meat. 18 billion chickens were slaughtered globally for food last year. I didn’t see any appeals for chicken relief on TV this week.

.
Ah, but people love, people create, people aspire to the spiritual …

.
But love is a hormone-powered trick to bind us into reproductive units, artistic creation is merely an expression of adaptive capability and spirituality is a self-delusion.

.

Ah but we're smarter than chickens, maybe that's why it's OK to eat them. So, presumably if a force of super-intelligent aliens were to visit us one day it would be perfectly OK for them to use US as food. Come to think of it, I've met some pretty stupid people in my time. I wonder what they taste like?

.
It gets worse. In an atheistic World is there such a thing as good or bad? When a lion eats a cute baby antelope is that bad? If a tsunami kills 150,000 is that bad? If the tsunami was bad it can't be in the religious sense of the word. Maybe it's bad economically? Would the atheist argue the tsunami was bad because it caused the loss of 150,000 potential consumers?

.
Regardless of what atheists and humanists might pretend, a random pointless universe can only contain random, pointless things. I've occasionally pushed this point with atheists and humanists I've encountered and have usually been met with dissonant behaviour, which often degrades to bad tempers and shouting. Admittedly, questions from me like 'Explain to me in atheistic terms why your five year old daughter is any more important or special than that log I just left in the men's room' don’t help.

.
Occasionally, the more enlightened atheist or humanist will point out that it is perfectly possible to develop a moral code from scratch, without reliance on belief in a benevolent entity. But these systems never really work out. They can’t. Where do you start?
.

Maybe with: An action is good because it feels good?
.

Mmmm, like going to the dentists? Oh, but you feel better afterwards. Show me the equation then. How about dying for a noble cause? Does that feel good afterwards? What about Hannibal the Cannibal and the things that make him feel good?

.
Or maybe you could play the selfish gene card: You should treat human life a sacred because it's in your own self-interest as you yourself might be killed in a society that doesn’t value human life.
.

But what if I'm the baddest mother in that society? What's good for a wimp isn’t necessarily good for me.

.
Etc etc

.
Most humanist ethical schemes are crude devices to head-off revulsion at the implications of an atheistic World view. At the moment, most people don’t think about these implications but over the next the couple of generations they'll have to. Science has been having a ball with genetics in recent years. Does anyone really believe that there aren't countless labs out there, staffed by some very dubious people, doing some very dubious things with baby chunks and just biding their time.

.
The whole situation gets worse the more you think about it. If we have become top species through survival of the fittest, then isn’t it scientifically justifiable to sterilise people with mental or physical disabilities? After that we could move onto people with hereditary diseases. Then maybe some selective breeding. We might even consider speeding up the mutation rate a little bit.

.
Scientists have toyed with projects like this in the not too recent past. They were only stopped because a lot of other people thought what they were doing was bad. Bad, as in the religious definition of the word. But religion is superstitious mumbo jumbo isn’t it? A mere crutch for the feeble minded to deal with the reality of their own frailty and mortality. Nonsense like that is holding us back and, what's worse, it means we have to have our shoes searched in airports.

.
So, no such thing as good and bad. Humans no more special than chickens and all our higher aspirations written-off as no more than a quirk of our glands.
.

Sounds like a shitty World to me. Sounds like the World that's being built all around us as I type.

.