An image of a baby lying in a rented hay box is so far removed from the world’s view of success that it can only come from another place, and mean something completely different.

Imagine for a moment that there is nothing of worth in this world, as worth has no intrinsic meaning. Each human, like each worm or bacterium, is simply a product of chemical reactions occurring over millennia—biological mass.

Eventually, inevitably, they end up replicating certain patterns, as almost any alternate configuration decays its structure, returning it to a chemical soup. Movement of charged particles between some cells results in the contraction of others, or avoidance of nearby objects once in motion, or a state within our neurons that increases the potential to preserve the pattern and replicate it. At its complex level in humans, we term this ‘thought.’

The state that enhances preservation and replication we can call ‘self-gratification.’ It is also called greed—a drive to enhance oneself through the use of other objects. If we are simply chemical constructs, then this is all that matters. Those objects can be anything—rocks, plants, or other humans. The object does not matter in itself—other humans become meaningless chemical constructs unless they closely share the same genetic code.

What matters is that their use makes replication of the genetic code that determines our patterns more likely, so that it will persist through further generations. Codes that express greed most effectively may replicate more effectively. This means accumulating wealth and power to safeguard descendants. In this view, our relationship with all other matter only has meaning through its enhancement of ourselves. We are programmed for short-term gratification.

The other consequence of viewing humans only as biological mass is that when a body’s internal environment deteriorates to the extent that it can no longer maintain itself, it ends as a specific entity. It is not death, as life never really existed. A highly complex set of chemical reactions ceased to be self-sustaining and another cascade took over, breaking down the physical structures the former had produced. The neuronal circuitry we call the mind disintegrates, and what we call thoughts stop. This end seems like looking into a void of blackness, except there will be nothing to look at. The horror or fear this may induce is not meaningful in any way—just a product of more chemistry tuned toward persistence for self-replication.

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