Atheist Talking Points
Part 1: The
Atheists
Monty Python movies aside, there is meaning in life, including in the Atheist life. In my life it was the attempt at self-differentiation in an environment of relativism produced by the belief in “nothing”. As shown before, and assuming the Atheist is behaving Atheistically and not co-opting a different ethic, the Atheist fulfillment is solely through materialism and pursuits of the self. A randomly assembled life-form in a randomly assembled universe has no purpose beyond self-gratification and perpetuation. As a philosophy, this is without much substance. Here are some statements by Atheists to reflect upon:
“There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.”
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one
hundred percent.
R. D. Laing
“The only philosophical question I cannot answer is why I don’t commit
suicide.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“Some of my conclusions have been found shocking, and not only in respect of animals. In Germany, my advocacy of active euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants has generated heated controversy. I first discussed this in Practical Ethics; later, as co-author, with Helga Kuhse, in Should the Baby Live?, 1985; and most recently in Rethinking Life and Death, 1995. Perhaps it is only to be expected, though, that there should be heated opposition to an ethic that challenges the hitherto generally accepted ethical superiority of human beings, and the traditional view of the sanctity of human life.”
"...but if I've discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You've got to take things as they are. Moreover, to say that we invent values means nothing else but this: life has no meaning a priori."
Jean-Paul
Sartre
“To me, that is firmly planted in the real world. The real world is so wonderful that I don't want more than that. And I think there is no more than that. But anybody who thinks they want more than that, I'm inclined to say, ‘How could you possibly want more than the real world? If you only you could understand how grand and beautiful and immense, and yet still incomprehensible the real world is. How can you want more than that?’”
“For,
confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality),
life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something
essentially amoral – and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the
eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether
worthless…”
Frederiche Nietzche
“Life
is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is
whether you have had enough of it.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
“I can use Sunday mornings much more efficiently than going to church.’
“I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for
myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part.”
Shirley MacLaine
“When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one. Those who imagine that the course of cosmic evolution is slowly leading up to some consummation pleasing to the Creator, are logically committed (though they usually fail to realize this) to the view that the Creator is not omnipotent or, if He were omnipotent, He could decree the end without troubling about means. I do not myself perceive any consummation toward which the universe is tending. According to the physicists, energy will be gradually more evenly distributed and as it becomes more evenly distributed it will become more useless. Gradually everything that we find interesting or pleasant, such as life and light, will disappear -- so, at least, they assure us. The cosmos is like a theatre in which just once a play is performed, but, after the curtain falls, the theatre is left cold and empty until it sinks in ruins. I do not mean to assert with any positiveness that this is the case. That would be to assume more knowledge than we possess. I say only that it is what is probable on present evidence. I will not assert dogmatically that there is no cosmic purpose, but I will say that there is no shred of evidence in favor of there being one. “
Bertrand
Russell
“Philosophy proved a wash-out for me.”
Bertrand
Russell at 90 years old.
But
helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-Board of Nights and Days:
Hither and thither moves, and checks and slays
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Omar
khayyam, quoted by Clarence Darrow
“Nobody lives in this world to himself or any part of himself. Nobody fashions his body, and still less is responsible for the size or the fineness of his brain and the sensitiveness of his nervous system. No one has anything to do with the infinite manifestations of the human body that produce the emotions, that force men here and there. And yet religion in its cruelty and its brutality brands them all alike. And the religious teachers are so conscious of their own guilt that they only seek to escape punishment by loading their punishment onto someone else. They say that the responsibility of the individual who in his weakness goes his way is so great and his crimes are so large that there isn't a possibility for him to be saved by his own works.”
“That is what life is, rising in the morning and washing and dressing and going to recitations and studying and forgetting it, and then going to bed at night, to get up the next morning and wash and dress and go to recitation, and so on, world without end.
One might get a focus on it from the flies. They are very busy buzzing round. You don't exactly know what they are saying, because we can't understand fly language. Professors can't teach you fly language! We can't tell what they are saying, but they are probably talking about the importance of being good, about what's going to happen to their souls and, when. And when they are stiff in the morning in the Autumn and can hardly move round, the housewife gets up and builds the fire, and the heat limbers them up. She sets out the bread and butter on the table. The flies come down and get into it, and they think the housewife is working for them. Why not?
Is there any difference? Only in the length of the agony. What other? Apparently they have a good time while the sun is shining, and apparently they die when they get cold. It is a proposition of life and death, forms of matter clothed with what seems to be consciousness, and then going back again into inert matter, and that is all. There isn't any manifestation that we humans make that we do not see in flies and in other forms of matter. “
“When I die, I
shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could
conceivably be good forever. I do not
believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.”
H. L. Mencken, from Laurence J. Peter, Peter's Quotations:
Ideas for Our Time, quoted from James A. Haught, ed.,
2000 Years of Disbelief
“People say that what we are all seeking is a
meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that
what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life
experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own
innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being
alive.”
Joseph Campbell, Myth and the Modern World
“According to
Schopenhauer, aesthetic perception offers only a short-lived transcendence from
the daily world. And moral awareness, despite its comparative tranquillity in
contrast to the daily world of violence, is not the ultimate state of mind.
Schopenhauer believes that a person who experiences the truth of human nature from
a moral perspective -- who appreciates how its spatial and temporal forms of
knowledge generate a constant passing away, continual suffering, vain striving
and inner tension -- will be so profoundly repulsed by the human condition,
that he or she will lose the desire to affirm the objectified human scene in
any of its manifestations. The result is an attitude of the denial of the
will-to-live, which Schopenhauer identifies with an ascetic attitude of
renunciation, resignation, and willessness, but also composure and
tranquillity.”
Arthur
Schopenhauer, From
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#2
“To be human is to long for God; or, if you prefer it, humanity is fundamentally a desire to be God.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, from McGrath, “The Twilight of Atheism” 1st Ed, 2006
Part
2: The Meta-Atheists
“What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.”
Albert Einstein
[ex-Atheist}, Mein Weltbilt, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934. From “Ideas and
Opinions: Wings, 1954.
PESSIMISM says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.
G.K. Chesterton [ex-Atheist]
"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."
C.S. Lewis
[ex-Atheist]
It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they
believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
Malcolm Muggeridge [Ex-Atheist]
Part 3: The Major Religions
Hinduism: To live well enough to
overcome bad Karma, so that the cycle of reincarnation can be broken, while
ignoring the Karma struggles of those around me.
Buddhism: To accept contradictions in order to become
a buddha, at one with nirvana (that great nothingness), where one becomes
omniscient, thereby knowing everything about nothing.
Islam: To do the work defined by Allah’s Prophet,
and if possible jihad, gaining entrance to Heaven and bypassing Hell.
Christianity: To live as much like Christ as possible,
understanding that perfection is not possible for humans; to be good stewards
of God’s earthly creation; to look forward to the translation from this life
into the life that continues beyond these dimensions.