Simon Clare was recently walking through the Brighton city centre (near London) when he heard some Christian street preachers. It gave him an idea:
Street preaching is synonymous with intrusive statements about how sinful we are and how the only way to guarantee eternal life is to give yourself to some religion or other. But what if street-preaching could become something we no longer mind encountering? What if the messages preached were ones that added to a sense of how great we all are?
So he gave himself some ground rules: No knocking religion, no confrontation, no catchphrases.
Then he went to work:
I would say there is nothing mere about human life, human consciousness.
If you look out into the night sky, you can see vast numbers of gigantic objects. Beautiful stars, all going about their spectacularly huge, significant business. Stars may be huge, really really huge but they are dead. They don’t even know they are there. They really are just mere matter.
…
The rarest and most valuable thing this universe has to offer any of its atoms is one lifetime of consciousness. One life. Just by simply being alive, we are jackpot winners in a cosmic lottery. Every atom in the universe enters this lottery and the winning atoms are the ones that are here, inside our heads.
There’s no audience that sticks around for his words, but there’s also no vitriol thrown his way. I’d consider that a win 🙂