The only reason we don’t just suffer endlessly is that we take care of each other. Parents take care of children; men and women take care of each other; relatives, friends, the free market, the structures of society take care of them all. Or, at the very least, provide some sort of underlying structure and laws, and I don’t mean strictly in a judicial sense. And God, metaphorically speaking, takes care of those structures. And if there is no God, then whatever else is at the top of the meaning hierarchy takes its place and becomes the guiding principle for the whole thing. That usually tends to be the State or the ego or an amalgam of those things which manifests as authoritarianism, tyranny, slavery, and in general - crimes against humanity. In other words, Hell. So there’s nothing trivial about any of this, and there’s certainly nothing trivial about the notion that God is dead. Even if God doesn’t exist, even if God is just a codeword for a set of moral and ethical guidelines, or a personified explanation of the Natural Law, or a description of the Most Good Being - without it, we’re lost.

Related: #1026952 #1005582