As we ate lunch the other day, my dining companion, Alan, who has been an atheist for decades, asked me (we had been discussing the relationship of human action to climate change), "Why do modern human beings make such poor decisions about the future of the world?"
     Although the short answer, put simply (and perhaps simplistically), is the effects of sin, the more thoughtful answer is that, as I suggested to him, when humanity abandoned its belief in the possibility or even the presence of the metaphysical, it unwittingly jettisoned any notion that there was anything beyond what it could, on its own, be.  We became the problem, but we also came to believe that we are the solution.
     While this seems logical, it also seems circular.  Letting go of the metaphysical is more than a rejection of God, although it is that.  It is rather a decision that there is no greater thought, imagination, or intelligence than what we currently possess:  we are it.
     Yet this leaves us, as the existentialist Paul Sartre pointed out long ago, as little more than "useless passions" lost in a lonely and meaningless universe.  And if this is true, how can we ever say who we really are?