Subject: re: article
Author:
Posted on: 2022-12-02 04:10:37 UTC

I see other folks have already hit the commercialization-yes-bad-but-proselytizing-no-also-bad, so I won't harp on that any further. Okay, I lied, I want to put something into words: AW says, ". . . they need Christ in their lives to give it meaning . . ." but life is inherently meaningful; the fact that Earth has developed this complex web of exchanging and recycling matter is amazing and wonderful and beautiful. The living is the meaning. To me, the "give it meaning" language implies that we need an outside authority to tell us why we exist, and that no reason or purpose we find on our own is valid—in other words, it's a very authoritarian sort of meaning to seek, and devalues our own view "from the ground," as it were. And the thing is, we don't even need our own reason to exist. There doesn't need to be a point at all! It's okay for us to just be alive, to be tiny, unimportant components of this complex life web, who coexist with earthworms and weeds and bacteria and pond scum, who aren't any better or worse than those other organisms, and who just get to be alive for a little while before we return all of our components back to the soil, where they came from in the first place, and disappear and never exist again. It's okay to be unimportant, to just be a terrestrial ape with a complex language center for a while, and nothing more! The living is the point.

Also, holidays are boring. Except Halloween, of course. Halloween be bumpin'.

Oh, one other minor thing to respond to: AW refers to commercialism as a mask that conceals the true feelings underneath, but see, I've never been one to express much emotion*. To me, the obligatory good cheer is the mask; I would much rather have another ordinary day on Christmas, working, enjoying stories, and minimizing social interaction.

—doctorlit is a temporary carbon construct, and that is enough for him

*Except when I'm screaming at hoses at work, but I'm getting better about that! Remarkable how much easier it gets to learn to control your temper when one of the zookeepers you frequently work with has major PTSD over people yelling!

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