Philosophy quoting Dr. Greg House and Jewel…^-^
So I got into it a few days ago with my grandmother. I don’t know what spurred it, more than likely it was some assinine comment I heard on television which painted a terrible bleak, emo version of the atheist world. But I said.
“You know, I’ve seen more beauty in the world since I’ve become an atheist than I ever did before, when i believed there was a god.”
My grandmother, who is not naive, but after a long life of sorrow honestly seeks the simplest answer to all of life’s questions, wanted to know why. Well, it’s because when you believe that there is a god who controls everything, then you are also believing that everything that happens is predestined by him. You are resigning yourself to the fact that there are no coincidences and there are no random acts of kindness. Man becomes a pawn who is helpless and unable to do anything, well, human.
For me, when I see good in the world, it is because man has finally decided to do something good, in spite of all the terrible occurences which we live with everyday. Life, at that moment, takes on this cliche effervescence, but I’m so caught up in it that the cliche is beyond me and my jadedness, if even for a moment, goes away and I can see life through those rose coloured glasses which Tori Amos referred to in Almost Rosey
Then there’s the entire concept of an afterlife, or heaven, or eternity, or whatever you want to call it. Not to criticise Christians, but they are the most proximate religion to myself, so I will use them as an example. They try to make it seem like life would be so morbid if you did not think there is ’something more’ afterward. However, after my soul-searching and hearing other’s opinions I have come to my own opinion.
Thinking that there is somewhere better that we are going after this, makes life so trivial (as if it needed to seem more trivial than it already does in our pop culture driven society). If this is all prelude to something bigger in the cosmos, than what is the point? Why would a divine creator, who supposedly loves man over all other things, put him here to live and then make life, seemingly, meaningless in the grand scheme of things? To sum it up nicely, I will pull from one of my favourite television series, House MD.
When asked if he finds it comforting to think that this is it, House comes back with:
“I find it comforting to believe that this isn’t just a test.”
Isn’t it true? I also find it comforting to believe that this counts for something. Think about in the theatre, when you have a dress rehersal, yes, granted it is important, but that is simply in relation to the ‘real’ performance later. If things go wrong it’s not a big deal, you fix them, but you do not linger over them, because, of course, you will fix them before the ‘real thing’. But during the real performance, there is no room for error, you do the best that you can, because this is it, there is no other time to fix the glitches. It’s sink or swim.
Not to mention, this religious obsession with the afterlife causes people to live only for that. Talk about morbid, they literally live to die. Everything they do, they are doing while thinking of what it will do to help or jeopardize their place in their heaven. They can’t do what they really want to do because they are too worried about their otherwordly self. In the words of the modernday philosopher Jewel:
So, what can we do for ourselves, if god has predestined it? How can we live our lives if all we think about is dying? These are big questions. Questions that will never have a definitive answer that fits everyone, because opinions differ. I don’t claim to be correct for you, but I do claim to be correct for me. This is what I believe, as an atheist, a happy atheist. I will die a happy person because I will know that everything I have done while on this earth was from my goodness and not from the goodness of a divine ‘it’ that i simply tapped into. I live for people, not for some invisible god who sits up in heaven, waiting until the inevitable moment that I die, so that my ‘real’ life can begin.
~kiki
I like the studious intellectual (and human!) approach to religion taken by Jeff Sharlet and the Revealer:
Oh, and speaking of this life versus the next in our culture, check out today’s New York Times, “Cemeteries Seek Breathing Clients”:!
Look into ‘Branch Theory’, I think you would find it as an intriguing opposition to the idea of predestination.