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Sunday, October 11, 2009

The Clock is Ticking, Dudes...

Once in a great while, some atheist takes it upon himself to point out how stupid and ignorant I am, either in person or blogospherically.

I'm always a little amused in a sad sort of way. I don't particularly want them to wind up where they're headed, you know. But I'm still a little amused, somewhat bemused, really.

Because the clock is ticking.

When I tried selling life insurance back around '95, one of the things I was taught is that one out of three people does not make it to retirement age. If you make it to sixty-five in this country, the odds are excellent that you will live to about eighty-five or so. That's why the average is about 73-74. The oldest man in the world--the titleholder changes every few months, you know--is usually around 115 years or so old at time of death, so that seems, at this point, to be the outside limit to man's earthly life.

So, 115 years of earthly existence, max, and quite probably much of that in a state that you may not particularly care for. I deal with the elderly quite a lot, you know. It's true that if you have good genetics, take care of yourself, and are quite lucky, you may not wind up in a wheelchair with COPD and/or diabetes, stewing away in your own juices courtesy of an unchanged Depends undergarment, but then again, that just might be how you spend the last ten years of your life. Rather a lot of people do.

And, for the atheist, what, after that? Nothing. No consciousness, no nothing. No seeing what has happened to your descendants. No caring about anything. No existence. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. In an atheistic universe, the dead cannot care. Therefore, any caring they may do must be done in this life, the only life they have.

And why might they care? About anything? To whom do their lives matter? And for how long? Does the cold, atheistic universe into which they arrived by complete accident care? Does that same universe have a purpose for them? The very thought provokes laughter. Even if someone misses them once they're gone, that will matter for less than a hundred years, too, probably less than fifty, since those people will die and not care about anything, either. And eventually, their country will pass away, then the planet, then everything, and none of it will have mattered, none of it at all. Their morality, such as it is, will have served no purpose other than to perpetuate the species before the planet is scorched when the sun turns red, and that, for no reason at all, it simply being what happened by sheer accident.

Atheists have a limited, very limited window of opportunity, a very short time in which to enjoy the accidentally-animated sack of protoplasm they walk around in, and absolutely no reason whatever not to do whatever they please, as long as they can get away with it.

And what do they choose to do with that limited period of time? An astonishing number seem to have arrived at the absurd conclusion that the best, most enjoyable (apparently) use of their limited time is to try convincing theists that they're wrong. That's right: their mission in life seems to have become convincing people about whom they will shortly cease to care, people who will, in turn, shortly cease to care about anything themselves, that there is no God.

Good luck with that one, atheists. Last time I checked, though they disagreed on much about God, you have a couple of billion people, at least, to convince of His non-existence. And for what? So that they will have--you think--better lives in the short period of time remaining to them on this miserable mudball? In the most literal sense possible, why care? It will matter to any particular individual for a maximum of 115 years, and then--poof.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking. I hope you enjoy your time. Because, as far as you know, pretty soon it's poof! for you, too.

4 comments:

  1. I think that a lot of time is wasted by those on both sides of this debate in trying to convince the other side that they are wrong.

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  2. Heh. You ought to take a look at what's passing for commentary on my previous post on the subject. As I alluded to in this post, there are people who have nothing better to do in their lives than to try to convince believers that they're wrong.

    What a life. Googling every day to see if you can find someone new to argue with.

    Whether the time is wasted or not depends entirely on whether or not someone is objectively right. As has been pointed out, if the atheist is right--so what? If I'm right, on the other hand, any time spent trying to convince the atheist is a mercy to him.

    If you take the position that no one can know who is objectively right, or that there is no objective right (? God exists--right or wrong? Doesn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room) then, yeah, you might be able to make the case that the theist is wasting his time in trying to convince the atheist.

    But to a degree, I see your point. I've never experienced any great success convincing atheists, or non-believers of other stripes, for that matter. I once had the remarkable experience of spending about four hours in conversation upon the subject with a pagan--literally, he was a neo-pagan--who ended up by saying, literally, in so many words, "I cannot refute your argument, but I still won't believe it!"

    From that time on, if not before, I've been convinced that my arguments are of small moment. God may use them to open some hearts, or He may not. He is God, I am not, and He knows best what to do.

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  3. How about convincing other believers that their beliefs are wrong and only your version of morality, justice and higher salvation are correct?

    The reason atheists spend time debating or discussing with theists is because theists spend so much time and energy trying to impose their religiously justified morality onto a society that may not want it.

    Do atheists disbelieve in horoscopes? I would hope so. But unless some atrologers start trying to get the law changed so that it is illegal for a Gemini to marry a Capricorn then they can carry on believing their nonsense without a bunch of non-astrology believing people harranguing them on the blogosphere.

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  4. The reason atheists spend time debating or discussing with theists is because theists spend so much time and energy trying to impose their religiously justified morality onto a society that may not want it.

    So? Even if true, which I think is debatable, so? This will matter to you less than--what, how old are you?--well, almost certainly less than seventy years, and you will vanish, having left not a ripple on the society you leave behind. Nor will have, according to your presuppositions, those with whom you differ. The universe will not care whether anyone's morality was imposed on anyone else. You will certainly not care--not about imposed morality, not about your descendants, not about anything, not even whether or not your coffin is comfortable or whether you taste good to the worms. Worm food doesn't care about anything. Nothing matters, save for the eyeblink of time that you feel the need to eat, drink, and procreate, and even those needs serve no purpose. They were arrived at by sheer accident, they are not part of a plan, they have no design, and you have no purpose--well, perhaps your purpose is to waste your time online. As I said, what a life!

    Who cares what an animated bag of protoplasm thinks?

    Enjoy yourself 'til you die. In your case, it's all you've got to look forward to.

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