I see my life as a wandering. The wanderer starts of at the foot of a mountain by a lake and as it should be, there is music from John Williams playing in the background. As all wanderers, I (since I'm telling the story I get to be the wanderer!) set out from my cabin next to the lake. The moon is bright and the evening-sky is cold and dark. As I walk through the woods and up the mountainside I meet and talk to other people and learn the secrets of the land. Sometimes I even decide to walk alongside someone and camp with them for a while, sharing thoughts and resources. The problem with walking up the side of the mountain like this is visibility. You can't really see to far ahead, and definitely not to far to the sides. The more interesting part of this is when you reach a hilltop. Suddenly you look out towards the path you walked a few days earlier and realize there was a much easier path, but it doesn't really matter much now.

This can go on for a long time, walking the path that others have laid down or climbing stiff mountain-walls that have never been climbed before. But eventually, you will reach the top, lay down in the snow, die and slowly become a part of nothing or everything.
Now this is where my problems arise. I am an atheist, I firmly believe, (smell the irony) that there is no God or Godlike creature. But here I am talking about an all-knowing state of mind at death, where you end up as a part of a great everything.. And this everything is whats bothering me.
Is it just the realization in the second you die?
Or is it the fact that you body is a prison restraining you from knowing everything the universe has to offer?
We certainly know that there are a lot of things we can never understand because our brains are created to understand the world that surrounds us now, and not some other world. But it's hard to look at the body as a prison, or a tool without introducing the concept of a soul..

Well I guess, I like my wandering-metaphor and I don't like to introduce unknowns.
So why don't I just get back to you on that whole dying thing later?

As I heard this, I had to tell her that I probably knew what was wrong, and that I could fix it for her.
But why, do I feel this urge to help? The motivation was not sexual, I have a girlfriend for that. It cant be because I wanted something of value in return, although she gave me a free coffee. But I couldn't have know that. Then, I turned to Richard Dawkins for answers.

In "The God Delusion", Richard Dawkins suggests that we are a race that have specialized in living in groups. In these groups, we usually lived with our family, and therefor we were usually surrounded by, well, our family. Now, one could naively suggest that helping others would benefit the "helper" since the "helped" would usually give something back. But that is not always the case. According to Dawkins, this is quite simple. If my family and I live together, any random person in the group would be family. So helping a random person, would in fact, be helping someone in my family. If you help someone, you usually increase their chances of survival and reproduction. Since you share a lot of genes with your family their survival and reproduction will in a way help make sure that many of your genes will survive.

My answer, or more to say Dawkins' answer, to this question is therefor simply, evolution. We adapt to survive, we help others because that is a way to adapt. One could argue, that this behavior should disappear now that we no longer live in large family groups, since there is no big evolutionary advantage of not helping others.
Luckily, this has not yet happened.

PS: I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment on the psychological motivations to this question. I will post back on this when I'm done. There is always more then one reason for baking a cake.

No when you find yourself in a place of anger and dispair, you might start to think. And this, is bad. It's bad because as a species, we suck at being depressed, or that is we do it to well. We tend to feel sorry for ourselves, and discontinue all creative and constructive thought.

Now this is a turning point, to realize that all your thoughts are self-pitying and destructive. What next? Well, anything I propose will be selfish and unjustified. Well now I'm worried. How can I get out of this systematic destructive behavior? There is one way, and one way only in my humble opinion..

Awesome.

Or that is to say, awesomeness, and feeling it. As a great man once said. "When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead." Now this is constructive. Completely stupid and carefree, but immensely, awesome.
Then you ask, how is this done?
How do I just feel awesome?

Well you need to find your "fuck yeah" place. Mine, is walking down the street, an easy breeze, warm weather, sun is up, I've got friends and beer waiting down the road, and all around me, hot chicks are walking by me and smiling. AC/DC's "thunderstruck" is bursting out of the speakers of a car driving past me. Now this might be hard to belive, but this is where I always am. (Except off-course when I'm pissed of and thus writing on my blog) There is always some party in the future, the sun will always shine eventually and you better know that the world is filled with beautiful women. There is never anything worth ruining a day over. Now Today I was pissed at my bank for not giving me a loan after all. Well, fuck them. I'm having some beer with my friends this weekend, and summertime is coming on, FAST! Beer, always finds a way.

Stay awesome

What if evolution was the foundation for the current day religion. We would prohibit anyone with hereditary deceases to breed. We would certainly not allow homosexuality, or fat people to survive. Only the perfect, the athletic, the strong, the clever would prospere in such a society. But would it be possible to have all these qualities in one single person? Or would we deliberately create different races. One hard working and strong. One clever and wise. One creative and beautiful. No matter how frightening the idea of killing the innocent to create the perfect, it would certainly be a baffling world.

Anyway, my point is, that it might not be religions fault that people have killed in its name over the centuries. We are, as a spices programmed to get rid of the weak and admire the strong it is, probably, how we got this far. The only problem is, that for as long as anyone knows, we have had one or more religions to tell us what makes up a successful person and what does not. Now religion is finally slipping away back in to the history books and we realize that killing someone of another religion might not be justified.
But now what, where should we look, to find our new ideals?

1. Do not accept all friend-request on MSN or Facebook, if you don't know them, its a fat chance that you will like them. Especially when they run of with your MSN account.

2. Never put stuff in the "shared folder" on your computer if you don't want the world to see it. I once found a nsfw video of a neighbor that was "borrowing" my parents internet-connection at the time. She was not to happy when I made her aware of the situation. Just so we are clear, when you are on a network everybody can see the content of this folder.

3. When ever you get an email saying that you have to send you password to the email account the them, don't. If a random man stopped you on the street and asked you for the password to your ATM-card so that your account wouldn't be canceled, would you give it to him? The to scenarios are closer in relation that you think.

4. The golden rule of Facebook. If you are a parent and ever feel the need to comment on your child's status-update, shoot your self.

5. I know that the "what music I'm listening to" feature on MSN is quite awesome, but remember to turn it off when you start watching porn, that comes up as well.

6. If you are one of the stone age people still using Limewire and such. Remember to check if your sharing your entire hard drive. You know there's a lot of fancy files there, with passwords and so forth.. well.. not a great idea, if those pics of you wearing a male-thong finds their way on to the internet.

7. If you think you can win an argument in some forum about some topic, don't. You have already lost.

I've got to say, there has to be a lot more of these, feel free to add them as comments. The Ignorant can not be warned enough, and in my opinion there should be an internet license just to be allowed to turn a computer on...