Well, I suspect most of us have some reason to be grateful to our parents, if not for the "wouldn't be here" factor, that at least for the caregiving.
Another related conundrum is...is it reasonable to think "oh, if only I had been born to different parents"...I mean, could it still be YOU in a meaningful way? If you don't believe in a traditional non-material soul it can be a tough question...one I've answered by thinking that my sense of self is largely an illusion, or at least my "self" is not the shorthand I use for it.
Yeah, after writing the entry, I thought up of your first paragraph. I think the caregiving side does deserve a good deal of gratefulness.
You also bring up a good philosophical conundrum, Kirk. I guess along with that one comes the fact that if someone doesn't like themselves, maybe they would have rather had different questions.
I guess there comes the part about the person who, in many ways, has had to do a lot of self learning to like themselves. I guess for this one might come to the point of figuring out is what makes YOU in a meaningful way, in the first place?
Thinking about the non-material soul and that kind of thing strikes huge amounts of existential fear into me, honestly. I'm very curious, but I'm also very fearful of whether some kind of conscious reality exists to us outside of this ephemeral life of ours or not.
At the same time, though, I don't necessarily feel the need to fall back on a religion or system that will tell me what happens outside of this reality. I guess, in many ways, I still have something of an empirical philosophy when it comes to things not of this material reality.
Examining deeper into my thought process, I begin to see something that feels like a contradiction, but I'm not sure if it is one. . .. I guess part of it comes from a certain realization that this is the way things are, and I don't have the power, at least now, not make a difference so I might as well act as moral as possible and try to make things a bit more ideal while not unreasonably forcing some kind of world view onto other people unless the other people try to force an unreasonable world view onto me.
I'm probably screwed if God doesn't want homosexuals to marry and doesn't like birth control or abstinence and wants us to multiply without end and use up all the resources as fast as possible and destroy the planet that God created. I'll probably find out sooner or later, though.
Nonetheless, it's a lot more comforting to think of bad things happening to people, especially good people, not as God inflicting wrath upon them. Otherwise, I'm not sure if God and I would get along, and I don't think I want to pick a fight with God.