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What would make you think that I as a Christian don't live my life as "best and happy" as I can? I find that as a Christian my beliefs greatly enrich my life and enhance my happiness. EVEN IF THEY PROVE TO BE COMPLETELY FALSE, they will have greatly enriched my life and enhanced my happiness. You, on the other hand, sound like a completely miserable human being.
Are you such a clueless juvenile that you think the wealthiest 5% are somehow immune from the life struggles the rest of us face? I wouldn't trade places with a multi-billionaire if I had the chance. I don't feel the need to strut my personal struggles and heartaches on this forum, but they are precisely what give life its depth and meaning. What you see as proof there is no God is precisely what I see as evidence there is a wise and caring creator.
I don't have to imagine living in such a world. I live in one. What your educator friend teaches is precisely what Christianity teaches. The depths of human depravity are bottomless.
You sound utterly miserable - liberated from the delusions of Christianity into the dark, whiny pit you now occupy. Again, EVEN IF MY CHRISTIAN BELIEFS PROVE TO BE COMPLETELY FALSE, they will have benefitted my life far beyond what your atheist belief system seems to be doing for you. Thankfully, I happen to hold a strong and well-informed conviction that they are not completely false. You sound to me like a tormented, deeply conflicted soul - and I suspect the conflict relates to not being nearly as certain about the nonexistence of a deity and the meaninglessness of life as your posts suggest. I mean, come on, you were claiming to be a Christian less than a decade ago and I saw another post where you were saying you were no longer a Christian but still held spiritual beliefs. Your newly adopted atheist fundamentalism sounds as sophomoric as your former Christian fundamentalism.
I cannot respond in depth without getting to far flung from the topic of the thread. All I can say is if you have found happiness and your loved are still here with you then you are one of those rare fortunate individuals who has managed to elude the pain and suffering of loss that befalls the rest of us. If your religion has built some kind of protective magical shield around you and your loved ones then by all means stick with it.
The laws of physics say that matter can’t be destroyed—it can only be morphed into another form
So people who have died have only been transmuted into another form
Because we humans have only defined/limited senses we cannot be certain how that transmutation happens and what the final form is
There could be another dimension we are unaware of that their spirits escalated to—
What some people might call Heaven/Hell
If Robert Heinlin’s YA novel “Red Planet” there are Martians living in two forms and some of the characters in the novel come to see/believe there is a third level of Martian existence which incorporates a “spirit” world
I seem many people who are supposed very religious and most of them can’t accept having a loved one die even if they think they are going to Heaven—I don’t know they are any better off than an atheist
Yes, taken in its starkest form, our loved ones' elements do return to the earth to help fertilize flowers and trees. One can bury a loved one in the back yard as they used to do, watch a tree spring up and then imagine that tree is their loved one reincarnated and go out and have a one-sided conversation with the tree.
Others say that their loved ones live on in the memories of those who loved them. As a cold blooded pragmatist I find these approaches ridiculous and could never find any comfort in beautiful memories--nothing suffices for me like the physical presence of the person. But to each their own. We each find ways to cope with the loss of loved ones and if those ways work work for the individual then that are the best medicine available under the circumstances. I am 72 now and mentally preparing for my own demise. I hope beyond measure that my dear wife lives 30 years beyond me and that the large amount of money that passes to her on my death will suffice to make all her dreams come true of traveling the world that she's always wanted to do except for being held back by my various infirmities.
Lovely. That's immortality for many of us. Our kids, our grandkids and if we are lucky enough every kid, every grandchild.
I think many of us take comfort in the fact that after our deaths, our life's works will live on for a time. For one, in the form of memories. Hopefully, positive memories, and the common desire to be recalled fondly shapes our behavior. Again, this is evolution at work, and this is an example of repurposing evolutionary drivers to useful ends.
Of course, there will be a gradual fade. Surviving mates and friends and children will remember us well. Grandchildren less so. Great-grandchildren less so, if at all. After that we might survive in a sense for a time in our lessons and practices passed down, and in some of our possessions and creations that continue to exist. Then we become mere names and dates in a family tree. Eventually? Oblivion. At some point even Lincoln and Saladin and Aristotle, seemingly eternal from the viewpoints of our brief lives, will be obscured and disappear from history.
I think it's important to understand that we have to use faith REGARDLESS of whether we choose yes or no, simply because there is no evidence. (Faith = a belief without evidence)
Everything here turns on one's definition of "belief" and whether a belief is inherently "active".
I don't form affirmative beliefs without evidence. As such ... on a technical level the jury is eternally "out" for me on the conclusive answer to the question of the afterlife -- until it can be evidenced.
I would not declare the afterlife a known non-fact because it's one of those things that not only isn't evidenced, but can't be, inherently. But what I DO conclusively know is that I've never heard from the dead people I knew in life, their bodies are all moldering in the grave, and no one can describe a plausible hypothesis whereby their being somehow could still be preserved, nor how some parallel spirit world would exist alongside ours where they (or I, in the future) might reside with them. I know for a fact that humans have an incredibly strong survival instinct and have very motivated reasoning in the direction of an afterlife, which makes many (most?) of us prone to embrace it. I know that people offing themselves to join their departed loved ones is, mostly, not a "thing" either -- if believers believed as strongly as they claim, Christianity would likely become a suicide cult. So we see that even ardent belief in afterlives is actually fairly shallow, for the same reason that my lack of such a belief exists. There's nothing to support it but pious hope.
As a cold blooded pragmatist I find these approaches ridiculous and could never find any comfort in beautiful memories--nothing suffices for me like the physical presence of the person.
I do not mean to imply that anything truly suffices for the absence of, say, my son.
However, neither will I allow the fact of his death, however ghastly and obscene, negate his entire life or my fond memories of him. He was a good man, a good and dutiful son, kind and generous and resourceful. Nothing can change the mark he made on the world in general and my life in particular. So yes, I unashamedly find comfort in that. In doing so, I in no way endorse or celebrate his demise.
I think what you are struggling with is the leftover influence of the hyper-idealism that religion (and, in fairness, some aspects of romanticism since probably the 11th century) bestowed on you. It's a dubious gift. It makes you inflexible when the way things actually are violate the way they supposedly "should" be.
There is no absolute objective "should" or "ought". I respect people with lofty goals and high standards who strive for great things, but the danger is that when some event in life runs counter to those ideals, you simply collapse around it rather than adapt to it. As if adapting or integrating a loss is somehow saying that loss was okay. Acceptance and sorrow are not mutually exclusive. We can "do" both at the same time.
I think even the most staunch athiest, look at it this way.... Athiest has gun pulled on him to his head, killer says "I'm counting to 5.... " Every human being I think would say a little prayer to SOME sort of higher being for those final seconds of life.
I'm not the staunchest atheist, but when I was in that kind of situation (what appeared to be imminent death with nothing I could do) my mind went only to hoping everything would be okay. I didn't make any appeals or prayers to any god or gods, spirits or overlookers. I didn't even think about my reaction until weeks later, but it confirmed that I don't believe.
There is a weird idea among some Christians that every atheist is secretly a believer who is pretending. It's just not the case. I think they are just trying to comfort themselves that everyone thinks the same as them, even privately, because people who think differently are a threat to the idea that it is true.
One of the hardest realities I had to come to terms with when I became an atheist was knowing that my beloved wife would be no more when she passed away. Unlike Christians who have this crazy belief that their loved ones' spirits will survive and be waiting for them in heaven when they die, we atheists know that the lack of any scientific evidence for a spirit existing pretty much clinches the deal that when we die everything that made us "US" is gone forever. It must be devastating to think that your loved ones, so vibrant and precious to you now will disintegrate into nothingness one day. It almost makes it tempting to deceive oneself into believing as the Christians do that their physical bodies do possess a spirit that will go on living forever in some mythical heaven.
To see how the world operates--that all of evolution exists by one set of creatures feeding on other creatures, that pain and suffering exist in this world to such a degree that it does, that evil and immorality are at such unimaginable levels on this planet that it boggles the senses, that evolution caused the creation of such nightmarish creatures as giant leeches, giant hornets, giant centipedes, etc.--all this makes me think that this whole enterprise called earth and everything in it was a gigantic waste, a mistake; that there simply was no point in it; that we didn't ask to be born into this gigantic cesspool called earth but we're here anyway, and so every day we should be trying to squeeze as much happiness out of it as we can before we all die and disappear into the ether until the universe itself burns itself out and is one big dark empty void.
How do you atheists cope with such devastating knowledge? By not thinking about it? By just training yourself each day to accept that's the reality of the situation?
There's no rule book telling you what you have to believe. My brother is an atheist and very much believes his passed wife is still around. Feels her presence.
And the truth is none of us knows for sure what happens at the end of all this.
I don't believe we are all going to meet up with our middle aged loved ones in heaven.
I wrote quite a harsh post along these lines recently and instantly regretted it because I'm never here to upset anyone. But I think you can believe whatever sits comfortably.
I certainly don't believe life is pointless by any stretch, very much the opposite. Every second should be appreciated. The chances of us being here at all are probably incalculable. Take the time you have and run with it and cherish it. As to your loved ones - they live on certainly in your memories and fortunately enough for our generation in photos and videos... and in your heart.
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