Consolations of Atheism
CONSOLATION TWENTY-SEVEN: WILDERNESS REJOINED
My last two posts, on the Newtown massacre and the movie "Amour," have gotten me thinking about mortality and my close contact with it every two weeks at the hospice hospital where I volunteer. The "Wilderness Rejoined" subtitle above is a follow-up to my earlier Consolation Four, "The Wilderness," posted May 19, 2011, in which I define wilderness as every natural object, event, and evolution that has or will come to pass in post-Big Bang, cosmic spacetime. There I also define mortality as a rejoining of the atoms and molecules that comprise every percipient being after it dies with this cosmic wilderness and further argue that the human species, like all other species, randomly evolved from inorganic matter and merges back into it at death.
Now that I'm approaching my seventy-seventh birthday, I feel like giving mortality more attention than I have in the past and hence in future will probably write occasional posts like this one that focus on it. While I realize that relatively few people choose to ponder their own extinction much, I hope that those who do and who happen to read this blog will be joined by others interested in seeing an aging materialist wrestle with the subject. So until I'm either too depressed to write about dying any more or have said all I have to say about it, I'm afraid my readers will have to put up with posts like this from time to time.
Every two weeks I spend Wednesday mornings at the hospice hospital sitting with actively dying patients. Patients who are "actively dying" have been so classified by the medical staff because they're within minutes, hours, or at most a day or two of the end. (Here follow circa 1500 words describing my regular routine at the hospital and recounting my shift last Wednesday with a brain-damaged prisoner who'd been transferred there from the city jail after suffering some kind of blow to the head. The complete text, originally posted 3/28/13 on my personal blog, can be viewed by clicking here onto: [consolationsofatheism.blogspot.com])
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Comment by Michael on August 21, 2011 at 4:59pm -
Your universe is a scary place. We can be obliterated any moment by asteriods or a giant solar flare.
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Comment by Rocky Oliver (LotusGeek) on August 21, 2011 at 5:57pm -
Being rational, being a humanist, living this life to its fullest because it is the only one you have, is much more comforting that the thought that there's some god-daddy who willfully puts his subjects through the crap this world and its inhabitants have been through - and then claim that this same deity "loves us".
If that's love, I'll take hate.
Oh, and if believing means that you also believe that humans, at their very core, are evil, then that is a cold and depressing way to view your fellow humans. Me? I believe in the inherent good, worth, and dignity of all humans, and that "evil" is an aberration, not the norm.
Furthermore, if by extension this means that the only reason a "believer" good and moral is from fear of this god-daddy deity - then what a sad, petty, shallow person a believer must be. I know that my family and I are good because of our own self-motivation and sense of worth (and aforementioned belief in the inherent worth and dignity of others), not because of fear.
No, I'll take this life, this here-and-now, and I will make the most of it. I will be the best person I can be, and by extension I will try to make the lives of those around me better; and I'll do all of this because it is the right thing to do - period.
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Comment by anti_supernaturalist on September 22, 2011 at 9:18pm -
the universe shows no purpose, provides no comfort
Neither physical nature nor human nature demonstrate anything about a superordinate, supernatural realm populated by creators or law givers. Nor is nature “God”.
Nature is silent. There is no concept of truth in nature. There is no concept of morality in nature. There are no concepts whatsoever in nature. Nature knows nothing.Nature is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Neither a source of comfort (natural theology) nor a source of despair (existentialism). Both are rooted in the same mistaken presupposition that supernatural meaning can be found by searching the heavens for gods or quarrying human inwardness for moral laws.
• Instead, religions belong to cultures embedded in nature. And cultures are our distinctive human-all-too-human handiwork. Religions are obsolete, unnecessary cultural artifacts.
the anti_supernaturalist
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Comment by Mabel on April 12, 2012 at 3:27pm -
Wow. You are a regular Jack Lalanne. I enjoyed reading this.
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Comment by Rocky Oliver (LotusGeek) on April 12, 2012 at 6:28pm
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I am way confused. Why does it seem that many, many of us responded to this last year - to an obviously different topic - yet this was posted 08 APR 2012?
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Comment by SteveInCO on December 4, 2012 at 12:11am -
And now again, brand new topic on December 3 2012, but there are comments--totally irrelevant to this post--back from 2011....
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Comment by Cara Coleen on January 18, 2013 at 11:56pm -
hey Richard! you coming to our meet-up the 21st?!
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Comment by Diane on January 19, 2013 at 7:22am -
I think if the original poster edits the post and saves it, it gets re-posted with the previous comments intact.
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Comment by SteveInCO on January 19, 2013 at 8:24am
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Diane? With the date changed?
Hmmm... I should experiment on one of mine.
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Comment by SteveInCO on February 2, 2013 at 12:27pm
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So I guess this guy has found a cheap way to post over and over again.
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