/lit/ - Literature

Suppose there is no God.
(I don’t want to discuss theology or the notion of God here, so let us just pretend for a second that the notion of the non-existence of God has been proven beyond doubt).

Suppose there is no God. Suppose also that we know that the universe will eventually die and humanity cease to exist. Now suppose that two people are arguing over if it was worth it or not for humanity to come into existence. One of those people, A, argues that even if all life and all history and all that ever was is a dream that will eventually end, it was still better than nothing, better to never have existed. There was beauty, and love, and pleasure, and even pain, not simple void. There was not only something rather than nothing, but also things that make one feel good in this something. For all the pain and suffering there were countless moments of pleasure and bliss, and moments of beauty (beauty is relative, but to an uncountable number of brains many things in the universe produce chemical reactions associated with pleasure).

But then the other person, B, argues: that’s alright for one to say if one had bad and good moments in life, if there was something more than just pain and torture and suffering. But what about those lives, animals and humans, who mostly just suffered? What about, for example, a baby bird that got out of the egg sick and deformed and lasted for some 3 painful weeks until it was eventually eaten alive by a swarm of ants. Wasn’t better from this creature’s perspective for the universe never have existed since all it ever tasted of the universe was just pain? For all the life forms that suffer the same fate, in light of the fact that there is no God and other life and rebirth and karma, what can be said to this poor grains of brief life to justify their existence? How one would justify and defend the something rather than the nothing when something was just pain?

>What books and philosophical arguments and films and plays could refute B’s perspective?

Post your favorite quotes, verses, poems, prose excerpts, play or screenplay speeches about the sea.