There's This Thing Called Being

The Total Amount Of Suffering Per Year In The Natural World Is Beyond All Decent Contemplation. During The Minute That It Takes Me To Compose This Sentence, Thousands Of Animals Are Being Eaten Alive, Many Others Are Running For Their Lives, Whimpering With Fear, Others Are Slowly Being Devoured From Within By Rasping Parasites, Thousands Of All Species Are Dying Of Starvation, Thirst, And Disease. The Universe That We Observe Has Precisely The Properties We Should Expect If There Is, At Bottom, No Design, No Purpose, No Evil, No Good, Nothing But Pitiless Indifference.

There Is Something So Mysterious That It Is Almost Like God. God Is In The Equations. God Is In The Fundamental Constants. And That's Fine. I Mean, That's Just Redefinition Of That Which We Find Mysterious At The Basis Of The Universe.

Maybe Scientists Are Fundamentalist When It Comes To Defining In Some Abstract Way What Is Meant By 'truth'. But So Is Everybody Else. I Am No More Fundamentalist When I Say Evolution Is True Than When I Say It Is True That New Zealand Is In The Southern Hemisphere. We Believe In Evolution Because The Evidence Supports It, And We Would Abandon It Overnight If New Evidence Arose To Disprove It.

It Often Turns Out On Closer Inspection That Acts Of Apparent Altruism Are Really Selfishness In Disguise.

My Point Is Not That Religion Itself Is The Motivation For Wars, Murders And Terrorist Attacks, But That Religion Is The Principal Label, And The Most Dangerous One, By Which A "they" As Opposed To A "we" Can Be Identified At All.