Recently, I began receiving this Financial Times newsletter in my email box. I was awestruck by the image, and I still am every time I see it.

The sorts of people I hate & loathe would look at that as a scar on the planet. Those whom I consider stuck in dead-end, primitive superstition and fairy tales downplay such potential as "merely" the work of man. For me, it represents the path to the very highest ideals achievable by man through molding and leveraging physical reality, capital, values, and relationships in the pursuit of his highest moral purpose: the advancement of his life, ultimately reflected back in happiness and genuine, long-term well being.

You want to go to heaven? Look right up there. It’s actually achievable; not through repentance to and redemption from either mother nature or imagined gods, but rather through reason, capitalism, individualism, and the exchange of values to mutual benefit.