You are a man, endowed with rational thought, if you choose to exercise this faculty. Thinking is never easy, if solutions appeared always in front of us, you would have no need for the most advanced piece of machinery yet observed in the known universe. Putting aside the problems with such a machine making this observation about itself (there may be more advanced machines out there, I don’t need to worry about them unless they get in the way of my rational action), being human is about the best thing the universe can offer.
Nothing is forbidden to us. We only need to understand the laws of nature, and bend them. There’s a difference between breaking a stick and bending a stick, to bend a stick requires some understanding of the elasticity of the stick. You need to have an intuition or better yet a precise mathematical understanding of the stick’s tensile strength, you need to be a part of nature (so as to tinker with it, or run experiments) and be a dispassionate observer of it as well, so as to draw the right conclusions from these tinkerings and from these conclusions will flow sacred knowledge: how far to bend.
Nature, including man, is driven by certain inalienable laws. You have to respect these laws but an understanding of them allows you to arrange your existence in a manner that suits you best. You are not some helpless ape, you are Prometheus, thief of the undying flame on Mount Olympus.
God does not fear you, he does not look down upon you, he does not seek your blind servitude, he seeks your respect and that you may earn his as fellow creator. He comes before you, but expects you to be a perfection of himself. You are man, a thinking ape, the only ape that does this.
I am not too concerned about whether my origins are stochastic or deterministic, my mind is real, it apprehends everything around me. Why should I fear death when I could conquer it tomorrow? I have not yet discovered a law of the universe that requires my death, if no such law exists, immortality could soon be a choice.
There’s a law that tells me how fast I can travel through space, and men are trying to bend it as we speak, for their own ends, because that is what we do. We pay our respects to this arena by playing to our heart’s content, each of us a master of his own fate.
Life is truly beautiful, it is only the things we do not understand that bring an end to this great fun, those things of nature and evil men. Men without empathy, greedy people, human beings who are not at peace with themselves because they fear the Universe, the only home they have ever known, this great puzzle and adventure. Those people seek control over others because they do not trust their minds, they do not trust that we can value them as fellow rational beings.
Every person who trusts herself abhors the idea that some men should be enslaved, we are all wanderers after all. We can only live in peace and let each discover their own adventure and meet to share tales from time to time. We are human.So to all who find themselves here, in this place we call South Africa, I say do not fear. Retrieve the flame from Olympus and banish this present darkness, it is only temporary. It is time to prod each other out of fear, it is time to abandon your silence, it is time to sacrifice for a stranger, it is time to be good, it is time to love, it is time to think.