Let me be clear. If I am an atheist, I am not of the scientistic, brutalist, nihilistic type. I suppose you would call me a humanist, perhaps even a transhumanist.

As self-conscious animals, were are unique and anomalous on this planet. Probably not unique in the Universe, but other self-conscious beings, indeed other life, would be just as anomalous given that the Universe, it seems, is largely inimical to life.

But we are here, we evolved here and this world is, for now, our home.

Any properly-functioning human has long ago abandoned the rose-coloured glasses and accepted that suffering and evil are merely the other side of this complex equation. Balance must be the aim. Without good, we are raw power bent on destruction. Without evil, we are weak and passive. Evil is what gives us the strength to fight worse evils (as in WW2). Good is what allows us to let people once deluded by evil find their balance again, rather than destroying them alongside those who misled them. We did not enslave the German people as Hitler woud have done to us. But hard decisions had to be taken, people had to die, or Hitler would have won.

The answer to finding the balance, for both the individual and the species, does not lie outside us, but within and among us. The potential to transcend both good and evil, perhaps even to transcend these bodies and become more.

Because these are human problems and require human solutions. God is not, cannot be, human and thus their answers won't serve us. There is nobody but ourselves and each other to rely on, and that is how it should be.

If death is the end, so be it. A persons' death isn't the end of Humanity, just that of an individual. Humanity goes on.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

And our little life is rounded with a sleep."