Submitted by Levanah on
Derivative Images
There once was a beautiful and contemplative young woman who desired something exquisite to ornament her home, some object which would embody her higher aspirations and symbolize her deper values.
While perusing the items on offer at a loca…l home decorating store, she found what she was looking for: a set of beautifully cut and varnished wooden letters. They read “Truth.”
She brought them to the cashier and innocencently asked him “what is the cost of “truth?” The teller looked at her solmenly and said “sacrificing the bliss of ignorance in exchange for the burden of knowledge.” She stood with mouth agape for a moment.
Then the trickster cashier burst into a fit of laughter and said “I’m just kidding, that’s $8.99.”
*****
Our lives are full of soaring happiness and plunging sorrow, confidence and insecurity, joy and feeling flawed, energy and exhaustion. And with all of this mixed bag of things we feel we “should” and “should not” be, we are absolutely beautiful. Our peace is to be found in the heart of the human drama itself, with all of its complexity, dullness, passion and beauty.
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Life and love seem so bleak in the aftermath of breakups.. and these feelings of deepest sadness and despair that we feel rush through our lives with such intensity upon the severing of ties with those we loved… but the leaves on the trees continue to turn red and yellow with autumn, and the flowers continue to grow, and the children continue to laugh, and we continue along with all of the beautiful whirlings and movements of the current of life. For they say that the night is darkest before the dawn, and it is only an all-consuming darkness that can give birth to a time of new and tender and beautiful light…the awakening of a the Sun from the slumber of Night. And so, we must accept our pain and work through our true feelings, but know deeply, inwardly, that a new Dawn will come… that Light will shine again, and the darkness will fall away once more.
*****
Existence is bounded and limited by space and time; is there is a God, then It does not exist. We have no word for the way in which God “is,” since our notions of being are derived from our own experience of definite, finite things. If an atheist is one who believes that God does not “exist,” then I believe that the only sound position for the true believer in God is atheism. That God which “exists” is not God; it is yet another idol.
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My good friend Cavalier claimed to me that “There is no point to life besides man. Better the Earth itself be sterilized than mankind should not rule over it. For there is no point to life without us.”
This sort of thinking is responsible for a great deal of harm that human beings have inflicted upon the earth and its countless species. I was surprised that someone as usually rational and ethically considerate as Cavalier could claim something so absurd, a position of anthropocentric speciesism.
My response to his claim was the following:
“Do you truly believe that only human life has value or “a point”? What about the countless species of organisms of every quality, ability, shape, size, and unique form? Do they not add richness to the universe? Would the universe or the earth be as valuable without them?
Human beings are one species among many. Like all other species, we exist only in interdependent relationships with all other species within the matrices of countless complex ecosystems. I do believe, along with the “richness theorists” (e.g. Peter Miller), that there is such a thing as intrinsic value and that the basis for this value is “richness” defined as a measure of variety and harmoniousness of interrelationships. Were we to kill off many other species through our irrational, careless and neglectful actions we would greatly diminish the overall richness of the planet and, therefore, its overall intrinsic value.
Humans are not the center of all value, as is commonly assumed. We must move beyond anthropocentric ethics to a non-speciesist ethic that acknowledges the intrinsic value of other species.”
Adam Pearson
https://philosophadam.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/absolutely-beautiful/
https://philosophadam.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/the-dawning-of-hope/
https://philosophadam.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/on-faithful-atheism/
https://philosophadam.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/on-the-intrinsic-value-of-species/
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