Howard

Well fuck. Now I have something else to add to my worry list. Thanks a lot.

Unbeatable

I doubt I'll ever understand that point of view. IMO, the luckiest ones are those who were miscarried before their brains even had the opportunity to develop consciousness. If you're capable of making up rationalizations about how people who will never experience pain or know what they're missing somehow have it worse than you, then you're the unlucky one. The never-born don't need support threads or words of comfort to reframe their reality into something more palatable, and they don't need religion and other sorts of nonsense to distract them, because they're spared the burden of having to deal with the whole mess in the first place. Life isn't a privilege. It's a prison. The lucky ones are the ones who don't get locked up in the first place. Second place goes to those who manage to make the most of their sentence, those who can trick themselves into believing they're not in prison at all, and those who successfully escape.

Lógos, it's unfortunate that you had to go through a traumatic event to see reality for what it is. On the bright side, the fact that you needed a big event to bring this to your attention leads me to suspect that you are not one of the unfortunate many who are temperamentally wired to perceive reality this way by default, which means that in time you may well shift back to whatever relatively positive perspective your default perception had been before, and barring other traumatic events, might even be able to sustain the belief that existence is good for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Lógos Sokratikós

So, you don't see the privilege of having a cup half full, you prefer to dwell on how unlucky we are of having emptiness in it?

Sure life is toil and suffering, but I have the chance to meet fine folks like you. My tears are for the good I will not have anymore from grampa. I still have everybody else. I'm actually excited of meeting many more.

My grandad was the last of his siblings, and nearly all of his childhood friends are gone. But, you know what? The hospital had a lot of trouble that night with all his children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren there. It was a very hard to manage crowd there. His funeral was just replete with folks, too. Even after death, his cup was overflowing.

Just a thought. And thank you for your condolences! : )

Classical

I doubt I'll ever understand this point of view.

This post is without question one of the most pessimistic, depressing views of life I've ever read.

I much prefer Auntie Mame's opinion: "Life's a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death." Sorry you're missing out on the banquet! But reading your profile I should have expected this.

Classical

Jehanne

No, the lucky ones are those who are born and who are able to experience death.

I wish that there was an afterlife, I really do. But, to quote Dawkins, such is an "extreme improbability." So, we're faced with an unpleasant reality. What to do? We can accept Reality and deal with it the best we can; or, we can have it impose itself upon us. I choose the former. Here's a great quote from the late Carl Sagan, available at The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe website:

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -- Carl Sagan

http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

EthnAlln

Hey, don't mention it. I'm just a regular ray of sunshine, with my constant expectation of nuclear Armageddon in the Middle East. Anyway, the way I see it, each of us has a duty to spend about an hour a day in futile worry about threatening situations we can't change. I like to vary mine, say spending Monday mornings from 9:00 to 10:00 worrying about global warming, and Tuesdays from 2:00 to 3:00 worrying about an asteroid collision. I don't even get around to terrorism until late on Saturday, most weeks.

Howard

I tend to keep my worrying on a more personal basis, such as checking that my balls are still in place eight or ten times a day.

Is it just me or have we drifted a tad off topic?

GenesisNemesis

Who in the world said Atheism was supposed to comfort anyone?

BadBadBad

Sorry Logos, I don't buy it. Atheism doesn't say anything about life. It only says something about religion and gods. You can be an atheist and still believe any other fool comforting thing you want to believe. Why does life suck if you don't believe in gods? Why don't you just believe in magic? Perhaps you should have just convinced yourself that you could cast a magic spell and your grandfather would re-incarnate into some other person. Then you could convince yourself that some other arbitrary person was the re-incarnation of your grandfather. Wa la, you could continue on life with the comforting thought that your grandfather wasn't dead, and you could still be atheist if that makes you feel better.

What does an arbitrary belief in gods add to the picture that's so valuable? So say you believe there's a god. Yet your grandfather still dies the same death. How is that comforting? What if it was your child or wife? What if the death was particularly cruel, inhumane, and senseless? It seems to me that for every comforting thought of death from religion, there's ten times more grief in death from believing some heartless con job story about a loving god. It's religion that sucks because it's false. It's a lie, and what it says is nothing more than a sick con job on the living exploiting the honor and memory of the dead as bait for the con. It's not the lack of belief in this pathetic con that sucks.

fatpie42

I guess he's a traditionalist. Or too much of a stereotype. Take your pick.

P.S. I am too. As are a great many of the atheists on this thread. Traditional denial of supernatural entities and afterlives, not to mention pixies and fairyfolk.