Atheism is a struggle. It must recognize that not everything in nature has a purpose, that nature is indeed fantastically wasteful, and that we are not, after all, the heroes of some personal epic leading to eternal glory, but rather flawed and fragile animals with an existence brief in space, time, and understanding.
The evidence for this surrounds and permeates our history and our lives, we are bombarded with it constantly in the behavior of our fellow humans, and in our own manifold foolishness and inconstancies, but the fear of truth is almost invariably stronger than our perceptions. The overwhelming majority of mankind has wasted their lives digging in the dirt from nameless birth to forgotten death. Even reproduction, which supplies purpose in so many lives, is a futile iteration of an originally futile action. Yet our emotions, if not our intellects, are satisfied only if we have hope, if we have the sense that we matter somehow to someone - that we have importance - and those are needs that religion is well-suited to answer.
To me, this is itself a proof of a godless universe what creator would design our minds to be so resistant to reality? Our desire to believe in one is inefficient, wasteful, extraordinarily damaging to the sustainability of human society and civilization, and, ultimately, simply absurd.
I will not bother with debating the issue on the basis of logic - the faithful are impervious to logic on a matter of principle (not infrequently regarding such imperviousness as a cardinal virtue - they're frequently more than a little smug about it, too), nor will I debate the nonexistence of god on the basis of such things as facts or evidence. Debating the existence of god is an exercise of the profoundest futility for an atheist - if your opponents could be moved by reason or evidence, they'd be agnostics.
Oh well. We have to share the world regardless.
The evidence for this surrounds and permeates our history and our lives, we are bombarded with it constantly in the behavior of our fellow humans, and in our own manifold foolishness and inconstancies, but the fear of truth is almost invariably stronger than our perceptions. The overwhelming majority of mankind has wasted their lives digging in the dirt from nameless birth to forgotten death. Even reproduction, which supplies purpose in so many lives, is a futile iteration of an originally futile action. Yet our emotions, if not our intellects, are satisfied only if we have hope, if we have the sense that we matter somehow to someone - that we have importance - and those are needs that religion is well-suited to answer.
To me, this is itself a proof of a godless universe what creator would design our minds to be so resistant to reality? Our desire to believe in one is inefficient, wasteful, extraordinarily damaging to the sustainability of human society and civilization, and, ultimately, simply absurd.
I will not bother with debating the issue on the basis of logic - the faithful are impervious to logic on a matter of principle (not infrequently regarding such imperviousness as a cardinal virtue - they're frequently more than a little smug about it, too), nor will I debate the nonexistence of god on the basis of such things as facts or evidence. Debating the existence of god is an exercise of the profoundest futility for an atheist - if your opponents could be moved by reason or evidence, they'd be agnostics.
Oh well. We have to share the world regardless.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
salome:
Thanks for the sweet comment. If the nasty tag came from who I think it came from, pfffft. That girl is a train wreck and her insults mean nothing. On to brighter and nakeder things. 
salome:
It's true, what you say, that dogma liberates you from freedom. And (I think) that was probably the point I was making. We're on the same page.