I have a confession to make: I want to fix everything.
Back when I was a Christian, I never really had to worry about injustice. The suffering we endured in our life here on earth wasn't all that meaningful, since we were guaranteed a happy and peaceful afterlife for our faithfulness. I figured that God would make everything work out for the good in the end.
Now, as an atheist, I have no such assurances. I look around at the amount of suffering in the world and I feel simultaneously motivated to do whatever I can to reduce it and impotent to actually accomplish anything meaningful in response to it.
Last Thanksgiving, I spent a week with my parents down in Mexico. On my second to last day there, while we sat comfortably in our condo watching people pass us by on the road, a homeless woman came along with her two children. While my parents commented about how amazing it was that she seemed so comfortable carrying her infant on her back in a sling fashioned from a scarf, I was watching her collect soda cans from trash cans along the street. All I could think of was that this woman was, because of purely random and meaningless circumstance, resigned to a life of struggle and hardship, scraping along with whatever she could manage just to be able to live to see another day. I desperately wanted to figure out what I could do to help her, and as soon as I started to think about it I realized that there must be tens of millions of people just like her all over the planet.
From my perspective as a person living in a first-world nation, this seems to be something that disappears all too quickly from view. There's no reason that I should have a better life than these people, and I shudder to think of all the potentially brilliant minds that fade into the background of the story of humanity simply because they're not wealthy enough to reach their potential.
So... what? Am I crazy to feel guilty about this? Is it wrong for me to willfully ignore these people so that I can get on with my life? What can I actually do to help fix the underlying roots of their suffering? Should I even worry about it?
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Logging you in...
Comments by IntenseDebate
Charlie Gerow · 576 weeks ago
So, if I stay at home and not try to, I can't rid existence of hardship, but If I do try,I don't have a plan, so people may not accept my campaign and therefore the same effect of staying home. If I did have a plan, people may still not listen to me, because they can be stupid aggressive sheep, no matter how nice you are to them. If the normal people listen, the ones in power may not. And If everyone listens, I still may not finish in time for me to insure it's success, no matter what idea that came up with!!
The things that I learned that made me feel suicidal was the difficulty of what I just mentioned, learning that the religion I grew up believing in wasn't true and was made by bloodthirsty hypocrites therefore seeming to undermining my goal, and the futility of doing anything! The same goes with the universe, it will die of something called "heat death" where spread out energy sources like the sun can't keep themselves warm the same way two people keep themselves warm on a cold day.
The term for the act Is called "entropy". I still have some hope left, though. The ideas I came up with I mentioned earlier when talking about people helping me were to 1. Make It possible so Heat death would never occur, 2. Make It possible so stars can't become red giants and kill everything In it's solar system, And 3. Make It possible so that people never age, die, or need to procreate. Or, for a complete alternative, would be to find Irrefutable evidence of an afterlife, so I can't kill myself. Especially when All of the physically living are Ignorant of the hypothetical fact of the afterlife's existence and the fact that I can't come back. I don't want others to fight over my work either, nor for them to stupidly try to prevent my success. All of this makes it almost IMPOSSIBLE for me to decide what to do with myself! I feel empty and need help, but I hope I somehow helped you too and I hope you read this. Thank you if you did.