Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, October 14, 2010 6:08:58 PM
1) We're nothing more than meat machines, a bag of molecules; animals. We, like all life and the universe itself, are nothing more than the products of natural processes unguided by any transcendent God. Chance mutation after chance mutation has produced us – the ones fit and lucky enough to have had a series of ancestor organisms that survived long enough to reproduce. Our thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions in our brains; our actions the result of those chemical reactions, the chemical reactions themselves being the result of natural processes extending back to when the universe somehow popped into existence from nothing (ah yes… because gravity exists).
2) Our actions are dooming the planet. The human population is growing too fast and causing climate change that will destroy the planet in a few decades.
Some of the very same people who have been loudly and stubbornly insistent that one or both of those are indisputable facts and that they should be taught unchallenged in academia and in the media are now mourning suicides and speaking out against bullying, telling people they shouldn't engage in either.
Why not? Why not bully? Why not commit suicide?
Who are you to judge? Who are you to say you're right and someone else is wrong? Don’t like bullying? Don't do it. Don't like suicide? Don't do it. Who are you to force your morality on someone else?
Isn't it survival of the fittest? Perhaps the bullies are more fit, and those who can't handle or deflect being bullied are not fit to survive.
If we're overpopulated, isn't it noble to commit suicide?
The planet is doomed, and the only way to make things better is through governments we know are ineffective.
The only reason to live it to be famous. Isn't that really what it is important? But how many people will ever be famous? Looks like the easiest way, ironically, is to kill yourself as a result of being bullied.
Clearly, some cultures have esteemed bullying and suicide; isn't it arrogant to say those cultures were wrong?
Shouldn't everyone be able to come up with their own concept of life? And if their concept of life is that it isn't wrong for them to kill themselves, especially if they are unhappy, who is anyone else to say otherwise? Their body, their choice.
Can public schools – or anyone else for that matter – tell anyone why they should not bully or commit suicide without invoking morality?
Now, I can tell someone why they should not bully and should not commit suicide, but my strongest argument against these things is ultimately based on God - someone dismissed by so many of the people speaking up about bullying and suicide as a "sky pixie".
So... all of you enlightened, freethinking brights, who are unencumbered by what you see as Dark Age superstition and ancient folly... Why shouldn't someone bully? Why shouldn't someone commit suicide?