It's a Beautiful Life.

Our culture offers a plethora of distraction. With cellphones, television, video games etc., its no surprise that most of us don't stop to question what life is actually about. Everybody has a worldview, but few, truly meditate on the implications of the worldview in which they have. We walk through life, with moral beliefs in which we take much for granted, never once, philosophically thinking them through.

Lets take human equality for example. Why would anybody believe in human equality? Lets face it. People are not equal in aesthetic beauty, intelligence, athletic ability, social status etc. Why would we believe that people have an underlying moral equality that transcends the things listed above? But most (not all) of our society walks through life believing in this equality despite those things.

What about social justice? We believe in "social justice" without  really pondering on why something is right or wrong. What makes one decision right, while another decision is wrong? What are the guidelines for determining such a thing? Why is it wrong to do away with inconveniences if it benefits myself or society (E.G. elderly, mentally handicapped, physically handicapped etc.)?  If we are just a product of chance and time, on what grounds can we call something a "moral injustice".

If there is no God, there is no right or wrong. There is only what happens. We may call a hurricane "bad", but we would never call it immoral. We can claim that something is an inconvenience, but we have no grounds for calling something right, or something wrong.

Peter Singer is one of the leading bio-ethicists at Princeton University. He writes the leading text books on bio-ethics. He is also an atheist. He believes that mothers should have 30 days after their children are born, to decide whether or not the child should be euthanized. Now, you may feel a certain moral outrage to this claim, but he is very consistent with his worldview. If we are nothing but the product of chemicals which evolved through natural selection, then why shouldn't we hold such a view?

If a certain area is infested with, lets say mice, the city contracts an exterminator to eliminate the problem. If we are the product of mindless, natural occurrences, we have absolutely no more value than they.

My purpose isn't to convince you whether God is real or not real, but to encourage you to think through your worldview. Why do you have the beliefs that you do? On what grounds do you have for those beliefs?

I will end with this, if God is in fact real, then we have real grounds for a belief in human value, justice, and equality. If God exists, then we have a legitimate reason to celebrate the diverse cultures around the world, because human value transcends geography. It transcends social status, and it transcends what the world considers beautiful.