Your assumptions are absurd
Which?
I just refuse to believe that humans are in fact the most significant entity in the universe.
Significant to WHOM? To whom???
No humans == no humans to assign value. There is no such thing as value without a human to attribute it to something in the first place.
Sure, I have no proof of such claim, but the theory that we are the best, brightest, and most noble race amongst the stars is arrogant and self-righteous.
So the first human being or other-world being you meet who is of greater nobility than you, you will subjugate yourself to?
I'm trying **painfully** to explain to you that values, morals, 'judgments of significance' require _two_ existents. The thing doing the judging, and the thing being judged. You cannot have just the thing being judged, it makes even less sense than science without scientists.
And all life is equally valuable, Sythe
Valuable to whom?
If all life is equally valuable (to you), then why haven't you sacrificed yourself for any of those -- be they human or animal -- who are presently dying?
Things of perfectly equal value are exchanged without guilt, thought, or pain. That is the definition of equally valuable. If you have a chocolate bar and you value it equally to a newspaper, then you are perfectly indifferent to the exchange of the two. Were the cashier to give you the chocolate instead of the newspaper you would not raise a fuss, and the same applies visa versa.
So let us apply this to your evaluation of life. If all life is equal then you should not differentiate between the saving of your own life and the saving of someone else's life.
Is this what you mean, then?
or did you miss a Biology class?
Clearly, if this is what you call biology.
Without these things you call 'fucking trees' and the plants to process the carbon dioxide in the air, we would not be able to live, so regardless of the fact that they are not thinking, sentient beings, they still deserve our care as we would not be here today if they were not here.
OK, where are your facts (to back the claims in bold above)? And even if these were the case, what of it?
I put it to you that it is a perfectly random occurrence that trees exist. And it is an equally random occurrence that humans breathe what trees produce. Life exists. Life exists via the exploitation of other life. It is called the food chain. It has no inherent value, other than that which you give it.
Were it the case that we were a race of sentient dung beetles, you would declare, in the same unthinking scientism, that "the horse is higher than manbeetle, because manbeetle requires the horse's dung to survive." When actually, this is simply the way manbeetle had evolved, and this fact is of no inherent value or importance outside of its truth value -- I.e. that understanding that "manbeetle requires dung to survive". How it gets that dung, and the value it attributes to all things, including its own life, is up to it.
Now were it also the case that humans could only get their oxygen from trees, and their sunlight from the sun, and so on and so forth, then it would still not follow that these things should be of higher value to man than man himself. For if they were of higher value, then man would be forced to kill himself that these things might exist without his interference. It is precisely because man values his own life over the lives of trees and other things that exist in a state of nature that he builds farms and structures of production, to promote that which is of the highest value to him: His own life and his family and his offspring.
Now, before you call me naive again, I request that you come down a notch, before you begin to sound like a religious fanatic.
Yes it is perfectly valid to be religiously fanatic about the preservation of one's own life. Perfectly valid because it is perfectly true, and perfectly within the nature of man.
I'll close with this statement:
Have you actually thought about this ... at all? Because I have given it significant thought. And if all you have to offer is prejudice, then we might as well skip to the end.
Incidentally, I am trying to help you, as I am trying to help everyone in this thread. You have been taught not to respect man, and therefore not to respect yourself. And yes, your life will be pointless precisely up until the point you assign it value, as is proper to one who assigns value.
Value is ultimately subjective -- requiring both a thing to evaluate and a thing to do the evaluation (yes things have objective attributes, but the valuation you assign to these attributes is solely up to you.)
You are a being capable of assigning value, you exist, and you think, and yet you have assigned no value to your life. Simply put: why?
