We’re all just meat sacks animated with electricity for a little while. Once our brains quit sparking, there’s no consciousness left and no meaning left. The whole world disappears every time a brain dies (the world being only a subjective construct). This being the case, morality is just another feature of each brain’s construct of reality, not a real objective thing outside of ourselves. In other words, it’s not real, and anything and everything is totally permissible because any suffering that is caused is only temporary and will end in oblivion as if it never existed. Because there’s no enduring, conscious perspective in the universe, nothing matters in the end, which means nothing ever mattered from the beginning. There is no cosmic justice. All of our “justice” is just the tinkering of clever apes—accidents of physics.

This is only theoretical until you summon the strength to live according to this reasoning—or rather unreasoning. Steal. Cheat. Indulge. Kill. Nothing matters.

If everything in you balks at this conclusion, and you’re unable to live as if nothing matters, then you must reconcile yourself to an explanation of why that must be so (if you want anything to make sense). And the only explanation is that an enduring mind, distinct from the chain of causality in the universe, will continue to perceive all things and understand transcendental values that apply universally. Put simply, in order for anything to matter, objective value must precede the universe itself, and must be forever perceived by an infinite mind. The word we use for that mind is “God.”