An Atheists says, “This world is f’n amazing. There is no reason to make stuff up about it!”
by Don Lacey on Jun. 24, 2012, under Atheism, Creationism, Critical Thinking, Education, Environment, Ethics, Faith, Freethougth Quotations, Logic, Materialism, Nature, Reason, Sanity, Science, Separation of Church & State, Skepticism, That's Life!
A friend of mine, Philip “Space Museum” Olson, provided this for inclusion into this blog. Philip is a fellow member of Tucson Atheists Meetup Group, Skeptics of Tucson Meetup Group, FreeThought Arizona and is a panel member of the Desert AIR Podcast. As I post this, he is out in the desert with about ten other people. He is looking for wild life and enjoying the night air. He is sharing his love of nature with his friends and has promised to share future observations with the readers of this blog.
Whenever I talk to religious people, they tell me that for them, religion is a way to experience something wonderful and mysterious, and to glimpse the unfathomable. What’s unfathomable to me is that they have to look to religion for that. I’d be lying if I said every bit of science made me feel that way, but I think it’s no exaggeration to say that every single day, I get that feeling from science. If you can’t be bothered to read a book or go outside to see it for yourself, there are many, many videos out there on YouTube you can find that will give you the same feeling – Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, videos showing relative sizes of stars, and much, much more.
As has been pointed out many times by people much smarter than me, one of the big reasons people dislike science is because it constantly tells us how important we are not. We don’t live on a flat earth with us at the center. The Sun and other planets do not revolve around us. Our Sun is not the center of the Milky Way, and ours is only one typical galaxy out of hundreds of billions in the known universe. Our species, despite any appearances to the contrary, is no different from any other at least, in terms of how we got here. No one created us or put us here for any purpose and that’s the crux of it all for me. The universe doesn’t care what I do with my time. It’s not going to pat me on the back or wag its finger at me. There is no evidence whatsoever that there is a being up there in the sky to appease or anger. In the end, we all live in a world where we’re on our own. Our lives aren’t meaningful due to some external, supernatural force. If we want our lives to be meaningful, it’s up to us to make them so, and I think that’s pretty f’n amazing. That’s the only kind of world I’d want to live in.
Well said, Philip!
