Funny - to me it makes everything matter more intensely. To me this life is the only chance we get to make things right. (You understand here I'm articulating an emotion, not making a rational argument.) Life isn't fair; I've always accepted it; but justice can be manufactured in very small quantities with intense effort; and we need to make as much as we can - cause there is no place else to balance the books.

To me this life is the only chance we get to make things right.

Actually, I believe this, too. Heaven and Hell aren't really part of my doctrine, just a vague idea that nothing is lost.

justice can be manufactured in very small quantities with intense effort

This is so well put. Just lovely.

This is so well put. Just lovely.

Stolen, now that I think of it, from Michael Moorcock.

(wandering through)

anyone up for a game of literati?

deb, if you still want to play, Sail and I are just about to start a game.

Cool. Where?

Meet us in Semantics and I'll invite you. Setting up table now.

On my way.

(wanders out again, closing door)

Hey! Who turned the light off?

::stumbles about, knocking over the taxidermied goat::

Does that sort of extinction of being freak out other people here

It sure does; I have a really hard time dealing with the death of a loved one because I believe they're completely gone. I don't believe my grandmother is watching me from Heaven. I don't believe she's gone to a better place. I don't believe her soul lives on. I don't believe that she'll be waiting at the end of the tunnel of light for me when I die. She's dead, and she is gone from my life forever. That's a pain that will never leave me.

Perhaps strangely, the idea of my own death and subsequent non-existance doesn't really bother me all that much. It probably will as I get older and closer to it.

On a more positive (to me, anyway) note, I'm pretty sure my admittedly extreme beliefs in nonviolence and veganism come from my disbelief in an afterlife. In my philosophy, no one has a right to take another person's life for any reason because this life is all a person gets, and taking it away means annihilating them forever. The unique person they were is gone and will never exist again. There are no higher stakes than that. A life, any life, is no one's entitlement to take. It's no one's prerogative.

And I'd go further and say that no one has a right to take an animal's life for their own benefit, be it food or amusement (like hunting/fishing). All sentient animals, even non-mammalian ones like chickens and fish, are entitled to live out the natural course of their lives without being killed and/or conscriped forcibly to feed us, since we can live in perfect health without their flesh or byproducts. One life is all they get, too, and it's not my right to end it.

But I understand that I lose most everyone there, even the folks who are as uncompromising about the nonviolence towards humans as I am.

So I'm an athesist

Yeah, no one's been able to prove a thesis statement to my satisfaction, either.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)