1. mimagesThere is no meaning to existence or anything in the universe.  Life is an accident and has no divine significance (though it’s obviously important to the living).
  2. Nonetheless, many living beings give meaning to the universe.  It’s just not inscribed in the things themselves.
  3. All life will pass away and be erased.  Our sun, for example, will eventually expand and devour all life and culture in a fiery end.  It’s unlikely that inter-stellar travel will ever be realistic or possible given the vast distances of space, so all sentient life and artifacts of culture will be gone when this happens.
  4. There is no afterlife in any meaningful sense (yes worms will use our corpses as food to continue their life but that’s not me).  When you’re dead you’re dead and that’s it (though maybe the trans-humanists are right and we’ll develop computer technologies capable of uploading selves and thereby establishing a materialist immortality; I doubt it, but who knows).
  5. There are no purposes in being (in the Aristotlean, Platonic, and Christian Sense), nor is there any goal or aim of history.  All eschatologies are thus shams.  With that said, organic and technological beings arise in nature that appear to create purposes and goals for themselves.
  6. There is no plan to being, but rather it’s all anarchy and accident.
  7. There is no supernatural causation of any kind, nor any genuinely mystical experiences (e.g. astrology and merging with the totality of things) so anything that posits deep meanings, supernatural causes, purposes, and so on ought to be treated with disdain and ignored.
  8. Nonetheless, people do have “mystical experiences”.  They just aren’t caused in the way they suppose and are perfectly ordinary natural/neurological events (the oneness with everything that certain epileptics describe after a seizure resulting from all their neurons more or less firing at once).  Buddhist meditation is therefore a good psycho-neurological therapy.
  9. Dark ontologists experience wonder, awe, and a reverence for things precisely because everything is an accident and meaningless and therefore irreplaceable.  There’s nothing “spiritual” about this, unless one wishes to abuse language and, indeed, spirituality often dulls our ability to experience wonder at things such as the existence of life despite its improbability because it thinks there’s a designer behind these things.
  10. Nothing takes place in being that doesn’t have a physical or material substrate.  There’s no magic.
  11. There’s no particular wisdom of the ancients.  They just had techniques for producing effects in the minds of others through a different form of transference.
  12. The Greeks don’t hold a candle to the accomplishments of the last three hundred years in the sciences, social and political thought, mathematics, art, etc.  Heideggerian and hermeneutic reverence for the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle is therefore silly and myopic.  The Greeks should live up to us, not we to them.
  13. Everything is in nature, including culture.
  14. No God will save us.
  15. We’re very likely have ringside seats for the end of this particular chapter in evolutionary history because it’s not clear how we can respond to the crisis of climate change.
  16. If, as Caputo says, religious texts are like comic book stories that provide valuable life stories and ideals, we’d do better to draw our examples of such things from great literature than horribly written and poorly organized sacred texts that invite superstitious, non-materialist brutality and ignorance.
  17. There will never be a progressive form of spirituality as any discussion of the divine is always recouped as a justification for various forms of oppression (e.g., fundamentalists enlisting Hawking’s and Einstein’s statements about God for their own cause).  As a result, moderate believers are often worse than fundamentalists as they enable these dynamics of power.
  18. It’s cynical to say people are dopes and need to believe these things so we should make political use of them.  The people we say this about also sense that’s what we think.
  19. The worst abuses of history arise from believing that we’re acting on behalf of a goal or aim of history or an afterlife.  Once the permanence of death is erased in thought, the most horrific abuses of life are all justified as this world doesn’t matter, and when we say that history has a goal we justify doing anything in the present to reach that goal.
  20. This world is all we have.
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