What Do Atheists Live For?

What an amazing individual! I am so impressed and quite inspired by what he has shared. Could you imagine what the world would be like if every single person had the same attitude he has? It would be a wonderful, beautiful world, and it is MY hope that, someday, it will be a reality.

I love this. Love love love. I’m stealing it for future use.

Brilliant and beautiful. I have been thinking lately of some of the language and terminology we have been immersed in and that seems inescapable. Here are some that I find particularly irritating!

“People of faith” – I personally don’t know anyone who doesn’t have faith. Faith is what gets me out of bed in the morning! Faith is a usually deeply held feeling that the world, and the way we comprehend it, has some stability and continuity. Unfortunately, “faith” has become entwined with “religion” although they don’t automatically have a lot in common. A better word for this phrase would be “churchgoers”. It’s clearer and everyone knows exactly what it means.

“Spirituality” – Means how we develop a personal understanding of the unseen but understood parts of the universe, and how we develop an individual point of view of what may happen after death. Also should not be entwined with “religion”, although there is some overlap.

“Religion” – (Particularly “organized religion”) is an authoritarian, hierarchical and usually patriarchal system of social control that claims to deal with spirituality, and while there is some overlap, they don’t really have much in common.

Thinking about these things gives me hope!

“What do atheists live for?

Chocolate, what else?

theology  —     fantasy in search of a rationale

Wanting/wishing to live forever is natural. Unfortunately, it is not the way life is. Living a life of illusion has its benefits and its costs.

I also am very confused by your definition of faith. I’ve never seen it that way and frankly it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. I don’t understand the universe or how it works. And thoughts of the universe definitely have no bearing on how I live day to day. If anything, they entertain my imagination once in a while, but that is all.

What gives me hope is all the outrageously beautiful Sunday mornings I spend not sitting in a church – and, knowing how precious they are because they will come to an end some day. As for Mr. Tarte, I like that he traveled so far down another road which could have ended much differently for him and backed up. I hope he can share more of his wisdom with us.

I don’t think boredom would be the problem with living “forever”. There would always be something to read; there would always be something to learn (well, for a good, long while, at least).

Continually losing loved ones would get you down eventually, I would think. I wouldn’t want to live forever in some kind theocratic, or any other kind of tyranny. I wouldn’t want to live forever if things were like The Road.

But boredom wouldn’t be much of a problem. 

another great video Edward!

I don’t think it would get boring. Think of how much has happened in just the last couple decades, not to mention the past few centuries. Imagine what the next few decades or centuries may hold.

you rock man, great attitude good luck enjoying the rest of your life

I have people that rely on me and of course I don’t want to die before my time mainly for their sake. I hope I do have a couple (maybe even a few) more decades left but deep down I’ve accepted and am comfortable with the idea that we all get some time on the stage and then we have to get off and let others go on. That is just the way life works.

No organism lives forever. The closest to immortality that physiology offers is to reproduce which kind-of re-sets the clock for the next generation. But all individuals die. Flies die, cats die, and humans die. That is just the way it works. I was just never socialized to expect anything other than that eventuality. I view death kind of like gravity. Sure it would be nice to fly around unrestrained by gravity but I don’t lose any sleep about existing within the gravitational field of the Earth. I also don’t lose any sleep about the notion that I won’t live forever.  It is possible not to have that “wanting and expecting to live forever” mindset.  Once you are free of that, you can just concentrate on the here and now and enjoy life without any nagging dread over about what might happen next in some kind of afterlife.

Misattributed to Marcus Aurelius, that is. The first clue I noticed was the ending of a sentence with a preposition, something that was never done in Latin and something a professional translator would never do when translating it into English. More on the misattribution here: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius

Incidentally, the thing that made my brother realize that religion was bullshit was when his sunday school teacher told him that “Imagine” was the work of the devil because the utopia it imagined was apart from god.

Even at 15, he knew that there was something much more Lennon’s meditation here than there was to the supernatural bullshitters.

I’d like to start with a few hundred thousand years so I can visit some exoplanets.

And despite all new events and people you can watch, study and interact with, there would still be a lot of repetition. People would do, say and write about the same things over and over again.

Sounds like Pascal’s Wager in reverse.

I hate it when people pull the, “you have no hope” bullshit.  They fail to see that hope and fear are two sides of the same coin, both equally worthless.

Ok, but here’s the dfference- Tolkien’s elves did not live in Heaven, they lived on earth (or Middle Earth, rather). Of course living on earth forever would be terrible, and certainly no Christian is saying that that would be a good or even desirable thing, let alone something that is going to happen. If you’ve ever listened to the Lord’s Prayer, you would realize that it asks for an end to suffering, hate, evil, et cetera, ie. The end of earth, and the coming of Heaven. And no, there would be no need to frivilously entertain yourself in Heaven like we do on earth. It seems to be a common misconception that Heaven is boring. There is much to say on this topic, but I think that Lewis’ book “The Great Divorce” hits the nail on the head when he describes the people who all live perfectly normal but excrutiatingly boring lives as the ones who are experiencing the pains of Hell, certainly not like Heaven, which humans have no ability to concieve the likes of.
Just wanted to get that straight 🙂
PS
Tolkien was a DEVOUT Catholic. I’m fairly confident LotR has no atheistic underpinnings…

This is wonderful.

My bio mother was just diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, which is genetic. I have a 50/50 chance of having it to.
I feel like atheism has helped prepare me for the test results. Even if I test positive, I will keep living every day to the fullest. The world around us is so beautiful, and whether I live 40 years or 100 years, it doesn’t change that.
I imagine if I believed in a god I would be feeling so resentful right now. But without god, there is no blame. There is no anger. And that’s really nice, because I don’t think I could handle those negative feelings right now. 🙂

I find that most atheists are super-literal and limited when it comes to their interpretations and arguments against religion.   If the Bible, for instance, is taken for a book of poetry and metaphor meant to give an idea of existence to people that had no frame of reference to discuss God and particle physics, the ruling out of a creator because the book doesn’t reference quantum mechanics or dinosaurs falls apart. The idea of a boring afterlife is based on 3 dimensional limitations put upon a soul that would obviously have to exist outside of 3 dimensional space. A human being can’t conceptualize a 4th spatial dimension and no one knows why we experience one directional time, yet the atheist argues against a specific afterlife tied to that experience based more on the words of men making their money preaching than the Bible. People don’t get bored with bliss.

Why then would you a devout atheist, help the poor or try to make this place better for future dwellers on this planet. I am an atheist as well, and I would like to take what you said a step further… If you see as clearly as I do, you realize that helping the poor is unnecessary and genocide and euthanasia are topics that are evidently okay. Think about it, NO GOD means the ideas of morality and the idea of a conscience is a hoax. Live your life according to how you please, and when you see that beggar on the street, I dare you to say fuck you like I do. Our lives should be characterized by selfishness ALL THE TIME.