Cocaine’s cheaper.
No. Took a couple minutes the other day considering the finality of it all. One day I’m going to shut my eyes and never open them again. There’s not going to be any next life or any debriefing session about how you thought you did. Nope. I’ll close my eyes and that will be my last thought. I will be dead and will not get to experience the rest of eternity. Not easy to think about.
Here’s where we differ. There is real value in knowing and understanding life. I feel it gives me a better appreciation of the world around me than if I could have just explained it as “God went click.”
Yeah, but death is exactly the state of non-existence you were in before you were born: if not being around didn’t bother you then, why should it bother you after?
There’s no doubt that from time to time, I look a bit wistfully at the believers and the simplicity of their world. But it never lasts long, tbh.
I think we are perfectly comfortable up here, Doctor Jones.
I think the idea that we have invented an afterlife to be so ridiculous.
“What’s the deal with death?”
“Don’t worry, when you die, you just keep living!”
“Sweet!”
“But you have to be good, then good things happen to you in the afterlife! And if you’re bad, then bad things happen to you in the afterlife!”
“Double sweet! Well, that’s all right then.”
Yeah, like that wasn’t thought up in an afternoon by a 12 year old.
I’ve listened to all the science talk from Big Bang to hydrocarbon molecules lingering by hot sea vents to the first single-celled organisms to fish leaving the water, wings from fins, Darwin’s missing link, and so on. (And, what have those sea vents done for you lately?) Anyway, to me it’s amazing how people so openly accept this. How can so many so-called accidents of nature and events of random chance evolve into all we have today? By that logic, if one believes only in science, then one must believe in the mathematical law of a Gaussian distribution, right? Obviously, these accidents should happen on a bell curve. And, we should be finding an equal number of genetic screw-ups and blobs of protoplasm as we do the diverse numbers of fully-functioning creatures. (If you argue survival of the fittest, then I argue where are the fossils of the screw-ups? Twisted piles of flesh and bones? Why haven’t we found one? Wouldn’t the bell curve apply here, too?)
In short…when’s the last time man’s screw-ups generated an apple? I think the best screw-up for which Man can take is that pseudo-sticky glue on the backs of little memo pads. Seems to me what man is just now beginning to make in the lab doesn’t happen by accident. Ask any researcher. Were they trained in how to perform scientific chaos or the scientific method in the lab? Seems to me it’s no accident.
Now, I cannot deny life is full of injustices. However, it is not for us to say. I once heard it said in a secular setting, something like: “We are but a garment on the loom ever being woven. We may not understand why each individual weave may zig when the next may zag until the garment is complete.”
Once, I didn’t believe either. No one tried to push me one or another. I didn’t suddenly find G-d, or anything. It was a slow, maturing, aging process. And, the more I saw and experienced life, the more convinced I became in the existence of a Superior Being. Today, I can believe in G-d. …It’s my fellow man I simply cannot believe.
The decision to believe or not to believe is in your hands. And, either way, yeah…your life is a limited engagement on this planet. It is good to question things. But, as you seem to be finding yourself, there is no satisfaction in not believing. Without believe, we are just blobs of protoplasm all surviving in a completely Darwinian world - all by accident…just one big mistake!
From my little corner,
- Jinx
When I read the sadness about missing out on an afterlife, the Peggy Lee song came and got stuck in my head:
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is
I lost my faith at the traditional college age. Yes, it lead to a lot of turmoil for me, and I had to rethink a lot of things. But it didn’t lead me to be unhappy with my lot. Sure, it’d be a lot more straightforward if I could believe that my moral and ethical obligations sprung from a big sky-bound authority figure, but I worked my way to a philosophy I could live with.
As for that afterlife, what happens to me after death is irrelevant. I have no way of knowing in this life what it is. I work on the assumption that the entity I fondly think of as ‘myself’ will no longer exist except as historical data, and that’s okay. The world will go on. What matters is that I spend the life I do know I have in a way that meets the criteria I have figured out or am figuring out for living well, now. I do my best not to waste the time I have. This should be the same even if I still had my faith.
Finally, I love this quote about the afterlife from Camus: “If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
Implacable grandeur. That’s pretty damn good.
Livelong atheist here.
That’s what family, friends and society as a whole are for. On the whole, they’re much more useful than gods, and they tend to have more reasonable rules.
It’s only erased for you. See above.
How is that worse than bad things happening just because god wants them to for reasons that are impossible to figure out? Besides, most bad things aren’t really random, which means that it is/might be possible to prevent them, provided you don’t give a shit what god might want. See: medicine, earth quake predictions, irrigation, psychiatry etc etc etc.
Yeah. I know. Sorry. Can’t be helped. On the other hand, I’ve never been able to make sense of an afterlive where positively everybody ever lives on forever. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Well, it’s not necessarily better or more useful to be right and depressed, but at least if you work according to what’s actually happening instead of relying on some all-seeing sugar daddy with a bad temper, I think the chances of improving your life and that of others are higher. Of course, that means you have to do the hard work yourself, but at least you can also take the credit for the results. 
I get the feeling you’re really reasoning about this from a very selfish perspective. It doesn’t matter that you’re not objectively a very special little angel and being angry about that is childish. People are social animals and morality is/should be mostly rules about how we treat each other. What matters a lot practically, morally and psychologically is how you interact with others.
I find atheism to be liberating.
I don’t have to worry about afterlife rewards or punishments,
I don’t have to worry about having some kind of obligation to my people, my species, my community members, etc. Well, IF I do, they are self-imposed obligations.
I don’t have to lookover my shoulder for approval.
I can marvel at the foolishness of religious people.
All in all, a good deal.
There is plenty of satisfaction in not believing, I should know. Painting evolution as a series of random events means you’re either ignorant about it or knowingly misleading, but even if it was true, that still doesn’t mean it’s “just one big mistake” since evolution, like every other natural process has no objective and cannot make mistakes. Only intelligent processes can make mistakes, and only intelligent processes (like us) can create goals and meaning. So make your own goals, meanings and mistakes! Show some creativity.
Well I was brought up in Catholic Ireland.
My memories of being a child and being told about religion are mixed. Yep, there was some nice feel good feelings about a guy up there looking out for you but there was also hell, purgatory, judgement, pain and fear. There was also a lot of religious people(Priests, nuns, majority religious lay-people) I knew who were so far away from what I was told about Jesus as to make the whole thing just seem stupid to me.
There being nothing after life doesn’t really concern me as I didn’t miss it much before I was here and that’s what it’s going to be like when I’m dead so nothing really to worry about there. The process of dying concerns me but even with religion I’d have to go through that.
I have a nephew, he’s 8 years old and has recently been diagnosed with an untreatable degenerative genetic disorder. His whole life he’s had serious learning disabilities, and they’re just going to continue to get worse, the peak of his cognitive skills was the ability to string together a couple of words, and he can’t even do that anymore. His future is dim, this disease will take his life in 10-15 years, and he’s not exactly going to have the best life until then either.
If there’s a God “looking out” for us and making sure bad things happen for a “reason”, God better damn well hope he doesn’t run into me on a darkened street corner.
Nothing noble about it. Bunch of wiggly molecules produce other wiggly molecules, you are one of the latest carriers of the same and by no means the most efficient. Labelling it as “noble” is just a childish attempt to keep away the scary darkness by slapping an anthropomorphism onto a purposeless random process. Now that’s a sad and contemptible prostration for a self-proclaimed rationalist to engage in. :dubious:
Survival of the fittest is exactly why you wouldn’t find fossils of the screw-ups. Let’s say you have two creatures, A and B, one that gets a good mutation, and one that gets a bad mutation. A goes on to have children, then grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on. B dies, and has no children. In order to find fossil evidence of the good mutation, we can find a fossil of A or any of its millions of decendants. In order to find fossil evidence of the bad mutation, we have to find a fossil of B.
[Morbo] Natural selection does not work that way! [/Morbo]
I’m glad there’s no god.
Primarily, because that means there’s no greater plan for us. I don’t want to live just to be someone’s slave, I want to be able to do what I want with my life.
Also, I think the lack of an afterlife makes this life more meaningful, not less. What do our actions here matter if we’re going to spend an infinite amount of time in the afterlife? Our actions here continue in how they affect the next generation, as other have said.
You’re not a properly depressed atheist until you realise that not only will your life be erased when you die but eventually the whole species and planet will go phut. Cheery, no?
I’m working on the campground rule, trying to leave the world a better place than when I arrived. I think I’m just about managing it, in lots of little ways. As for the rest of the species, well…that’s their problem.
I don’t even really have enough faith to be an atheist, but here’s what bothers me about religion: Someone’s child gets sick, and they pray desperately, every day, for the child to get well. All of their friends at church pray for the sick child. They send out the sick child’s name on “prayer circles” so that strangers who don’t even know them can pray for their sick child. One day, the child gets better. Thank God, everyone says! Our prayers were answered!
What the fuck? So that means that the other kid who got just as many prayers, but didn’t recover, didn’t have his prayers answered?
Not having to try to rationalize why a just and loving God would be that arbitrary, and not having to wonder if maybe it was just because they didn’t get quite enough people in the prayer chain, and not having to wonder if maybe it was something sinful that the child’s family did to cause God to be vengeful? All of those things make me really glad not to be a believer. Because that shit will make you crazy.
I don’t know if Life really is random. It appears to have some kind of self motivation to survive. That doesn’t sound random to me. I don’t know what it is, it’s not a purpose or a goal, and doesn’t explain its origins, but it certainly suggests something beyond “random”.