The above is one of the two most-cited bad/cliche endings in amateur writing (the other being "...but it was all a dream!"). Most comments towards it do note that such an ending can be pulled off effectively in certain cases. (I would imagine one such case being if the story regarded how people respond to an alien, hostile, indifferent universe, or something along those lines... but most would say that's been done enough.)

The fact of the matter, of course, is that such endings happen all the time in real life. People die for random, mundane reasons, all the time. Take the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota a few days ago. Yes, there was a reason -- engineers and politicians and many other people were certainly be investigated and held at fault -- but for the people who died crossing a bridge they crossed every day, it was random, irrelevant to each of their personal stories. It just happened. Now seven people are dead.

Let's try this again.

I'm a religious atheist. What follows is just how I view the world. I'm not trying to present it as fact, but I'm not going to throw in a bunch of IMOs because it'd get tiresome and I think you can figure that out.

Humanity, unique (as far as we know) among life on Earth (and possibly the universe), is sapient. That is, it possesses the ability to think and reason beyond instinctual programming. (Many animals are sentient; many animals can learn. These are not sapience, however.) This causes two problems for us: the problem of absolutes, and the problem of purpose.

(I love critical analysis, and I really enjoy doing little mini-reviews on Facebook. But those are unstructured, stream-of-consciousness pieces done just to get my mind engaged and thinking about whatever I watched/read/played. So here I'm going to try to convert those pieces into full-fledged reviews, as well as discussing some of my thoughts on reviewing, from the stand point of someone who knows very little about the theory of it -- perhaps useful, most likely not, but I'll do it anyway. This first one is from almost a month ago, Facebook told me -- still long after the film itself originally came out.)

Over the years I've spent a lot of time thinking about religion -- some of that has come up here -- but only in the past couple of weeks have I really began to organize my thoughts into a coherent theology that I think I can live with for quite some time. It'll change, of course, as everything does, but nonetheless I want to record it here, organize it and write it down for the first time so that I might not forget where I came from.

The protagonist's titular antisocial act in Crime and Punishment leads to much discussion of his theory regarding "ordinary" and "extraordinary" people, a philosophy that seems an almost perfect restatement of Nietzsche's over-man decades before Nietzsche formulated his own theories. Of course, most of the characters in the novel recognize this theory as absurd and dangerous (upon declaring that he wanted "the right", Sofya Semyonovna says, "The right? The right to kill?", clearly horrified), and I think most people in reality would respond similarly.