That Problem No Skeptic Can Explain

Can you explain to me how you see religion filling the hole that you talked about earlier? I’m not sure I understand what changes between belief and non-belief to fill that void you speak of. Isn’t that lack of lasting remembrance the same either way since you can’t go back?

I would say that it isn’t that I don’t want anything to do with God as you say, rather it is that all physical evidence points away from his existence and I feel my senses are too flawed to make an assumption that he exists without proof. Were he revealed I would believe without question, although I would need a reason to worship (belief being much different in my eyes to subjugation).

I have often wondered how a God can be considered loving when he would be willing to cast you into eternal torment for being unwilling to trust the very flawed body he gave us and the cryptic evidence of his existence he presents. After all eternity is an awfully long time. I think though, that I’m too stubborn to take the “safe” bet. I also realize that insincere belief is probably worse than sincere disbelief. Does anyone know of theological study of this topic? If you are unable to sincerely believe is it better in Gods eyes to be honest or not? I would suspect honesty is morally superior in nearly any religious context.

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Well, here I am again. I’ll try to elaborate on what I think about the meaning of life.

I’m struck from your comment that you mention needing to be remembered or needing a lasting impression on the world to feel purpose. I would be interested to know why it is that religion helps you in this regard? Is the hole filled in by the knowledge that God, at least, will remember you or is it bypassed by the fact that your life will essentially continue forever in a different form? It doesn’t seem to matter here on earth what we believe, we still get forgotten eventually, but I am curious how this need for recognition is filled by belief. To me it seems to just bypass the question by assuming everlasting life. The hole is never filled, the road just goes around it.

I take comfort in the fact that I am small in the grand scheme of things. I’m a part of possibly one of the greatest things in the universe, Life. Although statistically there are probably other places which contain life they are still the vast minority in the universe. I find the process amazing, the ability of life to recycle everything, the ability to colonize nearly every environment. On the grand scale I’m in awe, and somewhat humbled, that this process includes me, and in some ways I will always be here. I will always be here in the same way that the cereal I ate this morning is part of me by the end of the day. The cycle is incredible. I can think of nothing more humbling than realizing that I am not quite as important as I think I am.

And what is religion for anyway, it is either there to mollify this feeling and make us feel bigger, or it is there to awe us into feeling small enough to feel we must love others. I’m at peace with feeling small, I feel like I’m doing my part. Being small makes you realize how much we need others, how much we need to love and help others. If we don’t there is noone else out there to love or help us. Our lives only matter to one another, so we’d better make them last and weave ourselves together as tightly as possible. The universe certainly won’t groan if an asteroid boils the ocean and extinguishes our species, but if we stick together with some love and tenacity that doesn’t have to happen. We are lucky enough with our intellect not to be bound by the whims of fate quite as much as other animals, but we need each other to make it work.

This grand need to come together informs me on the micro scale as well. Of course I would like recognition and to have my name mentioned through the eons, but I’d rather it were mentioned like Buddha, as a unifier of people, rather than like Attila the Hun or Julius Ceasar as conquerers and dividers. I want my children and friends to have a wonderful future. I want to see what we can acheive and hope that they will continue the effort when I’m gone. I am genuinely excited by our technological advances and hopeful that we won’t be blinded by our sucess in other areas to our dire failures in others. Sure, I’d like to be able to see it like a fly on the wall after I’m gone, but just like moving to a new home you leave some things behind that you can’t come back to. In the same way that you grieve that, you grieve the moment that you have to die. But, it doesn’t scare me, or worry me. The world will go on without me just fine. Even if heaven exists there is no coming back to catch up, so you must be at peace with what you’ve done at the end anyway.

I hope that my contribution will be a good one. I hope that I can use my skills and my mind to further our knowledge and solve some of the pressing problems of our time. I also hope that the bricks I lay will be a good foundation for those that follow me. In order to best do this I must learn to work with people, to love them despite their faults and my own. I must do my best to enable people rather than bring them down. I must be a teacher and bring out the best in people by making them think. I must expect the same of myself and challenge myself to do the best I can at learning and challenging my beliefs. I cannot rest easy since my time is finite. I must find enough time to be happy and make others happy since I don’t have an eternity of bliss ahead of me to look forward too.

In coming to grips with my mortality and deciding what it is I want to accomplish in my life I have begun to fill in the hole that I mentioned above. I haven’t gone around it, I’ve just decided that the meaning of my life is implicit in my actions and depends on future generations for fullfillment. I must trust that my accomplishments will help future generations, but I have an entire lifetime to be sure I’m on the right path.

This isn’t to say that religious people can’t, or don’t, fill in that hole. The values I stated above are universal to nearly every religion and culture there is. People love, share, heal, teach, and comfort each other all over the world. What religion promises is eternal life (or nearly perpetual life in the case of eastern religions). The pitfall in that, for me, is that this does not equate to filling the hole. You still die, you still can’t come back, and you might be wrong. In fact, I might be wrong.

There is always a chance that your belief is wrong, that you’ve misjudged your senses and believe an untruth. After all, according to the top two religions in the world a majority of the world has misjudged and will not be granted everlasting life. Such is the nature of exclusivity I guess. But if you misjudged, if your senses failed you here on earth as they so often do, would you plead forgiveness to a God that didn’t want you to begin with, or would you be at peace knowing that you did all you could using the best tools you had at your disposal. That you tried to understand and better your world without relying too heavily on your own flawed senses and psychology? Would it be worth it to prostrate yourself to a God you never believed in on earth, simply to fill the hole you didn’t fill while you were there.

After all, faith is just faith. I have faith that my ball glove will catch the fly ball before it hits my face, but I might be wrong, and have been once before. I’d rather spend my time studying the ball and making sure my mitt lacing is secure than focus on what I can’t control.

The point to me is that you fill your life to the best of your ability with doing good for others and yourself. If you can do that, you’ve succeeded and you will be remembered for a while. You can die knowing that you’ve done your part in the biggest game we know of. What more could you really ask for aside from a chance to succeed and feel you’ve helped someone else. Anything else is just a gift to be accepted in good faith if it comes to that.

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