Problem of good and evil for an atheist

[Existentialist]

Does the self have any boundaries at all? We are used to the idea that a person can lose so much of their identity that when they lose their job, their partner, their child, the blow can be so traumatic that they become intensely depressed. People often talk of losing a part of themselves. The rationalistic version of events is that the self forms relationships with loved ones and employers and the loss of the relationship can threaten the self-interest of the individual so much they feel intensely vulnerable, but the self remains intact, the losses are external to the self. A looser set of constructs, perhaps more romantic, might indeed acknowledge that a person who has lost a child has lost a part of themselves. ("Only if they were pregnant with it," says the rationalist). But the other extreme, one I favour, is that the self has no boundary at all - that everything we see and experience is part of ourselves. This is a completely subjective position, one that asserts that everything that happens to us is just a projection of our own personalities. If you're walking down the street and a dog jumps out at you from behind a bush and bites you on the leg, the event was a projection of your own being; if you visit an internet forum and an existentialist atheist and a rationalist atheist are bickering, that's just an expression of your own internal conflicts. I don't live my life like that, I think it would be difficult to do in the highly boundaried western hemisphere, but I sometimes think life would be a lot easier for me if I did.