found online by Raymond
From Infidel753:
One of the most valuable things about being an atheist is that I know my life’s purpose is decided by me alone. My life is not cluttered up with some “plan” or “higher purpose” imposed by a “God” — or in reality, of course, by those humans who claim to speak for that God.
“Society” is not an entity or an organism. It is an abstraction, a word we use to quickly refer to a network of relationships among a vast number of distinct individuals. Society and the nation exist for you, not you for them.
This doesn’t seem right at all.
“Societies and nations are abstractions that have no existence apart from the will and belief of the individual humans that comprise them. They have no reason for being except to serve the needs and wants of those individual humans.”
But those needs and wants are varied and conflicting and the directions that societies take are largely defined by those of majorities. With limited resources, we ideally try to direct them where they do the most good, which inevitably means that some people are not and cannot be served.
“To speak of some individual humans as being a “burden on society” is as insane as speaking of how much faster buses could travel their routes if they didn’t need to carry passengers, or how much more efficiently a hospital could function if it just got rid of all the patients.”
Buses and hospitals *would* be more efficient if they didn’t have to serve people who require more resources, like an additional seat or a nurse’s attention. There’s no sense in denying that we can improve efficiency by eliminating those elements that hinder it. However, we must strike a balance between being efficient and serving everyone. On one hand, if we think only of efficiency, we will turn too many people away. This puts each of us at great personal risk as well, since anyone can become a burden in an instant. On the other hand, if we think only of serving everyone, we will burn through our resources and our systems will become slow and ineffective.
“Society and the nation exist for you, not you for them.”
I agree that I don’t exist for my society, but I don’t agree that it exists for me. I am a negligible percentage of its whole; I therefore have no authority to direct it as a whole toward my ends. If society is “an abstraction… we use to quickly refer to a network of relationships among a vast number of distinct individuals,” then it doesn’t really exist *for* anyone. It simply exists. Anything beyond that is what we make of it.