I would like to have some non-theistic response from you about the value of life. (I don't know if people asking about the "meaning of life" are asking what I want to ask, but I'll try to be specific.) One thing is the value of other people's lives. I am not concerned about this: I'm pretty sure that homicide is a terrible crime even in the cases I will mention next. A different thing is the value of one's own life (the value of life for the person living it). Of course, many people have good, rewarding, happy lives. Such lives are very valuable. But many other people have no such lives. I would like you to consider two cases. The first case is that of very ill and depressed people, continuously and permanently suffering with their illnesses, or that of incarcerated people, tortured from time to time, without any hope of getting out of their suffering: I mean people who will commit suicide if they have the courage and the chance to. I think that those lives have no value and that, for instance, if we could not change one of those lives but could help that person to commit suicide, we should do so. The second case is that of people whose lives are just bad, unhappy, without being terrible as those that I referred to before. I believe that many millions of people have such lives. People who have to work too much for a barely decent living, who are part of unhappy families or live alone, people who have no hope for a better future (and have no reason to have such hope), and aren't resourceful enough to change their lives or even other people's lives for better. I suppose there is a non insignificant percentage of people who qualify themselves as "unhappy", and I believe a good part of them has definite reason to think so. What is the value of life for those people?