FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Not too long ago, I missed an opportunity to appear on a BBC discussion on atheism — although I’m more properly described as an agnostic, since I find atheism to be as baffling a faith-based belief as any religion. I mention this now mainly because a blog post by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis infamy gives me the opportunity to do so.

Reacting to the idea that Richard Dawkins would like to see an “atheist bloc” in the United States (no idea, offhand, if that term is his or that of the news report to which Ham refers), Ham describes Dawkins’ message this way:

What a great message of hope for the world — “enjoy life, rejoice in this world, because then you die and you won’t know you were ever alive, and you won’t know you knew anything, and everyone else who dies who knew you then won’t know they knew you and they won’t know anything or know they ever knew anything — and then you die; the whole universe will die a heat death, and no one will know they ever existed or that this universe existed—so drink, eat and be merry because this is all there is.”

Up front I should state categorically that the idea of dying, of potentially not existing anymore, scares the living shit out of me. Even a stray moment pondering the possibility can move me to a near-panic state within fifteen seconds. It’s entirely an irrational panic, of course, since if one ceases to exist when one dies, one isn’t around to distress over what it’s like to not exist anymore.

But like many irrational things, that’s besides the point.

In the main, I find it curious that there can be such divergently opposed opinions on the meaning of being alive in a world where this might be all there is.

I’ve written about this before, a number of times, and my own personal notion comes down to the paraphrase of a Joss Whedon character: If nothing we do means anything, then the only thing that means anything is what we do.

For those like Ken Ham, this is incontrovertibly a recipe for “hopelessness and purposelessness”. They can’t conceive of it as anything else.

“Such a message will lead to despair — people who understand the consequences will recognize there is no point in living,” Ham bleats. “Why not do what you want? Why not kill people if you want — get what you want if you can get away with it? Why not?”

The reality, for me, is that where Ham sees a lack of hope and purpose, people like me see more hope and purpose in such a world — because any hope and purpose we find in such a world will be that which we create, on our own or with others, by sheer force of desire and will.

In other words, it is hope and purpose which we own, and which exists because we make it so. It isn’t hope or purpose which is imposed upon us from outside — by an unknowable and distant father figure or an of the many self-described prophets who claim to understand His will.

The prospect of one day not existing anymore scares the living shit out of me. But the prospect of living in a world where hope and purpose can be taken away, or their rules arbitrarily changed, at the whim of Someone who might be no more than a ghost or bogeyman, or (perhaps worse yet) by His self-appointed guardians?

That scares me a whole Hell of a lot more.