Skip to main content

Why I Am Always Happy

By Larry Spencer ~

Five years ago, my son was in Basic Training to become a Marine. A drill sergeant bellowed at his company:

"DO YOU KNOW WHY A MARINE IS ALWAYS HAPPY?"

"Sir, no SIR!" they shouted in unison.

"BECAUSE IT COULD ALWAYS BE 20 @!#%ING TIMES WORSE!!"

At the same time, a thousand miles away, the Drill Sergeant of Reality was starting to shout some sense into me. Ultimately, I would gain my own unshakable reason to be happy.

Like my son, I had to endure a long period of tear-down before I was mentally equipped to stand straight and face the world. I had to leave a comfortable, 40-year relationship with God and step into the unknown of freethought.

As a Christian, I could not conceive of joy and purpose apart from God. Unexpectedly, as a freethinker I find my joy in living is much greater than it was as a Christian.

I'd like to tell you about just one facet of that joy. It's the aspect to which I always return when I feel myself slipping into unhappiness because a relationship has been strained by my deconversion, or because I'm starting to feel self-pity over the years I squandered as a Christian, or because I'm beating myself up over all the bone-headed decisions I made as a "person of faith."

What rescues my mood? Just this: the realization that it is an incredible privilege just to be alive ... as a human being ... right now.

You say that's not enough to get excited about? Stay with me while I take you on a journey through the cosmos.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of at least 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. Our sun is just one of 200 billion to 400 billion stars in our galaxy. As far as we know, sentient life does not exist around any of the other 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.

What we do know is that the very atoms of your body were gestated in the stars, forged by unimaginable pressure and heat until the stars burst and your first birth was heralded by a fusillade of supernovae. Over time, gravity re-gathered some of the ejecta into a modest clump of semi-molten rock. It was utterly sterile, but chemically it seethed with activity. The primordial elements were combined, stirred and recombined by the heat of earth and sun, the cycle of evaporation and rain, the churn of current and tide.

After eons and eons, the most momentous event in the history of the universe finally took place. Even more eons would pass before anyone could even imagine it. Among the trillions of trillions of molecules on Earth that were combining to form new compounds, a single molecule happened to form that naturally produced copies of itself from the materials in the surrounding soup. Most copies were exact, but some varied slightly. The variants that copied themselves best tended to consume the most ingredients in the soup. Over time, they came to dominate. Life was a long way off, but evolution had already begun.

Other self-replicating molecules joined the dance. Sometimes, their survival and reproductive value were better in combination than alone. Combinations aggregated with combinations. Aggregations merged with aggregations. Each generation was more complex and more capable than its predecessors. Eventually (it would have been difficult to say when, even if we had been there to see it), a threshold was crossed and Life had begun.

Life has reproduced itself prodigiously, but it is still exceedingly rare. Living organisms comprise just 8 millionths of the mass of the earth, which is in turn only 1 millionth the mass of the sun.

If life is rare, the type of life we have -- sentient life -- is even rarer.

Animals make up less than 2% of all life, by mass.

Vertebrates comprise only 3% of all animal species.

Mammals are just 10% of that 3%.

There are 5,000 mammal species, but only one of them is homo sapiens.

That’s us, and we are the only ones who can think about the universe. Every other species -- every single one -- is almost completely clueless by comparison. What a rare privilege, just to be human!

But you and I are even more privileged than that.

Although humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, civilization did not emerge until 8,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture. We get to be part of civilization, with all the richness that entails.

But civilization has not always been easy. For most of those 8,000 years, humans toiled in poverty and ignorance. Less than 20% of all the humans who have ever lived have been born since the invention of the printing press. Before that, almost nobody had the opportunity to learn anything beyond the myopic myths of their own tribe. We do have that opportunity, but we have even more.

Only half of those 20% have been alive for the age of the Internet. In all the epochs of life on earth, from the first proto-cell to the present, the people of our generation -- you and I -- are the only ones who have had access to essentially any information we want.

Did you catch that? Any information we want.

Touch your keyboard or mouse. Are you doing it? Good! You are now touching a treasure for which any emperor of old would have gladly traded half his empire.

There is yet more for which we can be thankful.

Although we are swimming in knowledge, many of our fellow humans do not enjoy the freedom to learn that we have. Some Islamic girls dare not learn more than basic housekeeping, for fear of having acid thrown on their impertinent faces. We in the Christian West cannot feel superior, for it was not long ago that we were burning other Christians at the stake over trivial points of doctrine. Even more recently, Christians were lynching other Christians who dared to assert the equality of all races under law.

Many of the readers of this Website, in their own struggle for freedom of thought, have had to overcome tremendous social and familial pressures. However, most of us are under no physical threat. We are basically free to learn whatever we want, form whatever conclusions we think the information warrants, and spread our ideas.

In the history of the world, this is an exceedingly rare privilege. Even the nobility among our ancestors did not have it.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me glad to be alive. I’m glad to live at this time in history, when I have the information to banish superstition and fear, and the freedom to embrace knowledge and wonder.

Living in the post-Darwin era, we get to be part of the first blink-of-an-eye in which people have a clue about how the universe works and how we got here. We have won the ultimate lottery -- a lottery whose jackpot means far more than money. Now, that makes me happy!


Sources:
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/
http://www.universetoday.com/30305/how-many-galaxies-in-the-universe/
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM75BS1VED_index_0.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/ast99/ast99227.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Biosphere
http://animals.about.com/od/zoologybasics/a/howmanyspecies.htm
http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/sagan.htm

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two