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At the end of the day we are all cowards and no one person is better than anyone else so ppl shouldn't be so hostile towards one another dang it!!
(taking me outta my "tranquil" character!)
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Lol! Jk!
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BUT seriously, we're all cowards.
My position on gods has nothing to do with fear. Au contraire. I learned to live without false reassurances, and now feel quite comfortable without any god belief or expectation of an afterlife.
Atheists don't want a better place, from what I understand. They care about this life, their wealth/power/success, and desperately try to ignore this reality:
- If you die and there is no afterlife, everything you do is wiped out. This does seem comforting as it seems to free you from guilt. But actually, rather than living life to the fullest, it ultimately condemns you to a life of apathy, as anything you strive for is gone, only a worthless life where you don't work for anything is made better by the lack of even the worst afterlife. But it doesn't end there. If you do not believe in the world beyond, you believe in the world. You're stuck because not only do you have the above angst, but everyone from schoolteachers, to bosses, to kings, to those Christians you have misgivings about can lay a judgement call on your life and your entire life must consist of defending the worth of your life. This is what secular people (and many Christians, esp the works doctrine) have to deal with. But this isn't what Christianity is really about. This is how the secular world measures us. Our grades, our credentials, our previous jobs. Never our intrinsic worth. This is the path to suicide.
- If you die and there is an afterlife, and everything you believe about how evil Christians are, you will be punished by the god you rejected.
- If you want to actually not be afraid of what comes after, you must therefore believe in a God that not only has an afterlife but also gives Grace. Are religious people still afraid they are wrong? Yes! But they are able to believe in something beyond this life and the endless judgements of other people, the pointless and callous nature of this world.
What do you have to say to people that don't need the comforting that you seem to think we do? Religion has nothing to offer me. I am perfectly content believing that I am mortal, finite, and that when I die, experience will end.
I expect the next 13 billion years after death o be a lot like the first 13 billion were before birth. There is no reason to believe otherwise, and it is not difficult to live with, but I suspect that one must start in the first half of life. After a lifetime of religious thinking, it's probably all but impossible to shake up your worldview and social arrangements, many of which depend on you continuing to profess the same beliefs or face the scorn and rejection of so many of your friends, family, and church members.
What I admire most is the person who rises from his knees and takes his proper place in the universe as the bipedal ape that he was born to be, in possession of some but not all of the answers, and content saying that he doesn't know what is not known.
The enlightened ape realizes that there may be no gods watching over him from afar, that his existence might end forever with his death, that the universe might not care about him or know that he is in it, that we who populate the surface of this planet may be all the life that there is for light years in every direction - lives that are insignificant everywhere but here on earth and even here, insignificant to all but a handful of people and animals that may love us, and that things on earth won't get better by putting our hands together and hoping, but by making them better ourselves.
Because as far as we know, that's how it is, and after decades of living with these ideas, I am fine with them - quite comfortable.
Also, instead of telling atheists how we think and what we believe, how about asking us? You didn't get very much right in my case. For example, you wrote, "
If you want to actually not be afraid of what comes after, you must therefore believe in a God that not only has an afterlife but also gives Grace." I am living proof that that is incorrect. I am not afraid of what is to come despite holding no such belief. My life is better for it. I wouldn't trade it for the religious life I left over three decades ago, which was obviously not satisfying if I left it, and doesn't seem to be doing much for the religious people I know.
You're also very incorrect about what somebody like me wants. I want no more money and no more power. I successful enough by virtue of being happily married, having more good friends than a person has a right to expect, living in a beautiful place populated by relatively happy people (we expatriated from America almost 10 years ago), some of the best weather in the world, all the freedom I can use, and means that easily support the simple and humble life style that we prefer. I have no fear of death.
But I'm not here to sell you on my way of living life. As I indicated, if you're not still a young woman, making the transition that I made so many decades ago will be much more difficult and disorienting for you than it was for the younger me - perhaps impossible - with much less to offer in return. Perhaps your belief in an afterlife is indispensable to you now - a lifeline you can no longer risk letting loose of for fear of incurring an existential crisis that can no longer be dealt with without religious beliefs.
It's a lot like quitting smoking. It's easy at 20, a lot harder at 40, and often impossible after age 60.