Hello again Mark. Let me try to address some of your points.

If I was dying of cancer I certainly would not delude myself into thinking there is an after life just so the last few moments of my life were happy. Happiness is a state of mind brought about by furthering ones values, primarily life. Non-directed happiness is hedonism and is not happiness at all and is no different from a drug induced euphoria. My closest friend, Rosalie, is a hospice nurse in Maine. I am very close to her and love her dearly and we regularly have serious, profound and disturbing discussions about her patients, the kind of discussions that must arise from confronting a very real thing, the cessation of existence. Rosalie is an atheist as well, and was bothered by death as a nurse in training. Admiringly she chose hospice intentionally because of that, because you don’t run from the worse problems and bury your head or evade or delude. You stand and face them head on, stare straight at them in charge into them. She sees patients of all kinds, devoutly religious people and devoutly a-religious people, most maintain that state right up until their dying breath, and each are usually more convinced of their existing position the closer they are to death.

It is not my place to tell that dying mean what to believe, and Rosalie never does that sort of thing either. It is not my place to decide what kind of torture a man can withstand before giving in either, but no problem of the world has ever been solved by ignoring the problem, by pretending it does not exist. Personally I would rather that man base his beliefs on reality, as I believe all people should, with an appropriate grounding in logic and reason.

You say that to accept death for what it truly is probably lies beyond the scope of the human mind, and I agree with you. Death is the cessation of existence, no existing entity can possibly simulate a state of non-existence. You say that if I were to truly accept death in my deepest conscious self that I would go mad, and that since I am not mad I must not have accepted it. That is a strange logical assertion and I would not agree with your premise, and thus not your logical conclusion. Certainly as much as a human mind is capable of it I have understood and accepted the idea that I will die. You on one hand assert that atheists tend to be sad and angry because they know they will cease to exist yet on the other hand assert that they couldn’t possibly know they will cease to exist or they would have gone crazy. Yet what is a better example of madness than all the modern conceptions of after lives proposed by various religions?

I do not believe that technology will save me, but I hope that it will, and that it will save the people I love and care about, and eventually all people. But after a few thousand people were killed by Katrina, and four hundred thousands were killed a mere 9 months ago, I am very well aware of death and it is ever present in my mind, both my own impending death and that of everyone I care about. Because my own life is my highest value and the greatest threat to it’s existence is death from aging, I will devote my life to fighting that. I do not presume I will succeed, that is contrary to every presumption about the future I ever make. I would not presume that any more than I would presume my motorcycle company will be successful and thus engage in a pre-emptive spending spree. I am not in the habit of assuming something will turn out a particular way (technology will end death) and then changing the course of my actions on that assumption (acting as though I will not die) the exact opposite of what you suggest I am doing and not unlike you and theists, who do presume that life exists after death and thus alter their course of actions (not doing anything about dying) based on that assumption.

You may have seen many sides, but only one side is real.

And yes, thoughts do have an affect on reality but only indirectly and only through guiding actions. Thoughts alone do not have any impact on reality. But I think you should check the foundations of your statements, atheists, for instance, are statistically under-represented in prisons. Why is that? It is not merely ‘god’ or ‘afterlife’ that a strong belief in makes you live a happier life, it is a strong belief in something positive that has that effect. A strong belief in the highest possible to humans. A cynic who believes in god will still be a depressed person. An atheist who believes he is a bag of chemicals will have no self esteem, just as a theist who believes he was born into guilt will as well. I think you peg it perfectly when you say ‘how you think’ influences how you feel, and not just ‘what you think’ It’s how we think and to what extend we think these particular things that influences how we feel and consequently how it affects our outlook on life.

You confuse altering meanings of the word faith. Faith can be evidence (e.g. ‘I will land the plane’ ‘how will you do that, you don’t know how to fly!?’ ‘have faith’) and faith can be based on evidence (e.g. ‘I will land the plane’ ‘of course you will, I have seen you do it ten times, I have faith in you’ ) Certainly my goal is the same, but that does not mean I believe that my goal is destined to be true, unlike people of faith. I have a clearly defined course of action for the rest of my life which will enable me to work toward that goal. If I fail then I will die. If they fail they will still see everlasting life (according to their ‘faith’) So we are clearly not doing the same thing, they are going through the motions of the effect to try to acquire the cause I am going through the motions of the cause to try to achieve the effect.

And most people throughout history certainly were theists of some sort, but my point was that the more they deviated from faith (i.e. belief without evidence, or belief as evidence) the more progress was made. And now we face the greatest problem humanity has ever faced, death, and it will require overcoming the hardest and last remnant of theism to resolve, belief in an after life. Why try to conquer death if you do not believe you will die in the first place? The first steps of progress made by humanity were that steps that did not infringe on anyone’s faith, creating tools and harnessing fire. The next steps were the first to encroach on faith, agriculture usurped the tribal chieftans prayers for good food gathering. Irrigation usurped the witch doctors rain dances. The philosophers of ancient Greece demoted gods and mysticism to reason and experiment. The natural philosophers of the enlightenment formed medicine where before was only destiny, prayer, and suffering. They collected, labeled and identified things that were in the realm of mysticism, laying all the ground work for modern science. And every step of the way the men of faith opposed them, knowing they were trespassing in their territory. Describing and predicting the heavens, they demoted the god kings to merely oppressive rulers, and gave men a say in their own lives. Every step of the way the continuum of knowledge moved from mystical to rational, with one extreme embodied in the dark ages and the cave dwelling savages of ten’s of thousands of years ago, and the other extreme conquering the material world, creating long healthy lives with free time for art and to perfect their tools and crafts, putting men in control of their own destiny, and ultimately conquering disease, aging, and death. Our standards of living are directly proportional how much we embrace reason and reality and inversely proportional to how much we embrace mysticism. What is a greater manifestation of increased standard of living than an indefinite lifespan. A lifespan which will not be achieved as long as that last mental stumbling block remains.

Michael