I would dearly love to believe that there is something other than oblivion waiting. However I know that my yearning for this doesn’t make it true, and that yearning is probably the source of the fairy tales everyone tells about this.
If I had proof that the afterlife existed and I faced either eternal joy or eternal suffering based on some dogma I had to obey…? Fuck that’s oppressive. Makes me feel like some cosmic kid’s action figure. What does my choice matter with that kind of coercion? Maybe oblivion isn’t so bad after all.
The only thing I really believe about the ‘afterlife’, or whatever you want to call it, is that what we observe as ‘reality’ is only the tip of the iceberg of actual reality. In practice, it’s unknowable and therefore not worth worrying about. What’s happening right now is the only truly knowable thing, and right now I need to get off my arse and go to work.
Yeah I’m not fool enough to call myself a gnostic atheist, and I do agree that there is much we don’t know. Recently I’ve thought a lot about what a narrow band of sensory experiences we rely on to perceive a vast and complex world around us. So I think what you say is true even in a very literal everyday kind of way. We barely have a pinhole to look at this universe through. Science is all about working around that so we can understand more.
I would dearly love to believe that there is something other than oblivion waiting. However I know that my yearning for this doesn’t make it true, and that yearning is probably the source of the fairy tales everyone tells about this.
If I had proof that the afterlife existed and I faced either eternal joy or eternal suffering based on some dogma I had to obey…? Fuck that’s oppressive. Makes me feel like some cosmic kid’s action figure. What does my choice matter with that kind of coercion? Maybe oblivion isn’t so bad after all.
The only thing I really believe about the ‘afterlife’, or whatever you want to call it, is that what we observe as ‘reality’ is only the tip of the iceberg of actual reality. In practice, it’s unknowable and therefore not worth worrying about. What’s happening right now is the only truly knowable thing, and right now I need to get off my arse and go to work.
Yeah I’m not fool enough to call myself a gnostic atheist, and I do agree that there is much we don’t know. Recently I’ve thought a lot about what a narrow band of sensory experiences we rely on to perceive a vast and complex world around us. So I think what you say is true even in a very literal everyday kind of way. We barely have a pinhole to look at this universe through. Science is all about working around that so we can understand more.