Dignity for 3A

[Pharaoh Cat]

"3A" is my pithy little term for atheists, agnostics, and apatheists.

Consider that other "Dignity" thread to be the Bizarro version of this one.

How grand it is to be 3A!  Majestic is our spirit!  From the center of individual sapience ascends into the sky an ego untamed, wings spread to catch the wind, a power unto itself, taking what it will by talon and beak or giving out its own throat a portion of its own meal.  I am that which I am, and will be what I will.  I see what I see and think what I think - stand back all mindless parrots of the long dead!  Advance no further lest you burn in the heat of my stern unyielding certainty of self!  Shall I look to the whole to validate the part?  Never!  I am part of the whole and without it cease to be - yet I declare myself the validator!  I can neither undo the whole nor make it new, nor wrest governance of it nor make one of my own, yet this I can do: I can separate the gold from the dross by my own judgment, hold the gold in my own hands, and walk away from the dross with my own feet.  Who will deny me this?  Speak and know my disdain.  Only this will I allow - that you too are validator, separator, dross-abandoner.  You too are the rightful judge of all you survey from the heights of your own sapience, equal in dignity even to that which burns in space and whose embrace the very worlds cannot outpace.


(Edited to make the last word rhyme - for my own amusement.)


 

[Pharaoh Cat]

Dignity is a meal I cook for myself.  The stove and the pot and the ingredients are under my control.  Everything else can be taken from me but my dignity can only be given away.  Try as you might, you cannot filch my dignity by stealth nor plunder it by force nor starve it by siege.  You will never lay your hands upon it unless I grant you access.  It is impervious to luck and indifferent to circumstance if only I understand how to make it so, and this is how: by conquering my fear.  What doesn't frighten me can force me to the floor but cannot make me grovel.  If I am brave enough, I can seem to stand tall, even if I have no legs.  It is often grindingly hard, but never impossible to shake my fist in the face of cruel, ridiculous, grotesque fate, and merely knowing it is within my power to do so can be enough to teach me mirth where others learn only misery – and oh, what a victory hilarity is.

[Pharaoh Cat]

As a whole, nature is neither hostile nor friendly to us, but indifferent.  In its myriad parts, it throws assailants at us from the left, and benefactors from the right, no rhyme nor reason as to how many of either, or from where either comes, or when, or why, or how formidably.  Such is nature, holding doom up its sleeve and salvation in its back pocket, ready at the flip of a coin to hand us one or the other.  All is luck.  Nothing is planned except as we plan it.  Neither lessons nor tests beset us, except as we perceive them, for nature is no teacher, and has no wisdom to impart, except as we discern it by the power of our own sapience.  Neither penalties nor rewards rain down on us from on high, for nature has no opinions.  No future is guaranteed, glorious or dismal, for nature is all whim and impulse.  No fairness can be found anywhere, except as we impose it, for nature is no referee, and isn't watching at all.

Yet precisely here is where 3A dignity emerges.  Knowing hostility and friendliness are both equally foreign to nature as a whole, I can take up one or the other as my approach to what stands before me, as I choose, with nothing to gainsay me.  Knowing I can never predict from what direction help or harm may come, I can practice the virtue of prudence, and train myself in the art of strategy, and develop weapons and tools I can keep ready at hand.  Knowing all is luck, I can stack the odds in my favor by sowing seeds of good will wherever I can, so luck may more often be a Lady to me.  Knowing plans are made by humans or not at all, I can surround myself with planners, and be one myself.  Knowing I will only learn if I first pay attention, and question and imagine, and theorize and experiment, I can become a scientist of life itself, of happiness, of victory.  Knowing nature has no opinions, I can form my own, and make myself my own judge, and the judge of all I survey.  Knowing the future can be anything, I can manipulate the present with my desired future in mind.  Knowing nature is no referee, I can choose to become one myself, and be an agent of fairness on the earth – or not, as I choose.

I can take up the challenge of nature's indifference and grow strong in the struggle, and thereby earn by my own merits that thing which no one but I can place in my hands, a plate full of dignity, salty and hot and ready for the eating.

[Ateo]

Any chance of you putting that to music?

You need dignity if your a loser. Hold your head up and all that shit. It would be nice if the winners had just a little humility. Your a non-theist, therefore you have won the only thing you can win, your own freedom from an unbelievable, overbearing mean prick myth. Not a god, not a person, a myth.

What I want now is to see that the lunatics don't get control of the asylum, that they don't get the political backing to legislate christian ethics into law, teach intelligent design in schools, that sort of thing.