Just because his faith is misplaced does not mean we return to a cold nothingness. People can believe what they wish, but man is said to be God's crowning achievement, and our struggle in this life is a struggle between good and evil, overseen by a God who can not and will not deny us our free agency. Christianity is based on the notion that any evil, any suffering, in this life is an experience that will help us in the next. I've read far too many near death experiences that are so incredibly consistent (regardless of cultural backgrounds) to discount a life after death.
As one scholar wrote “If this is what liberation from the [Christian] ‘myth’ makes you—a vulgar and sometimes duplicitous crank, cackling with malice and spite—then I would prefer to spend the few brief years left to me (before I dissolve into the irreversible and never- ending oblivion many [atheists] prophesy for me and all humankind) with people who have not been liberated.”
He also noted:
A neighbor and friend was stricken with multiple sclerosis in her midtwenties and now, in her thirties, lies bedridden in a rest home. Barring some incredible medical breakthrough, this is her life. Absent hope for a life to come, this is all she will ever have to look forward to. My own father, for the last six years of his life, blind from an utterly unforeseen stroke suffered during routine and relatively minor surgery, was incapable of any of the activities in which he had once found satis faction and pathetically asked me, every few weeks, whether he would ever see again. What comfort would there be in saying, “No, Dad. This is it. Nothing good is coming. And then you’ll die.”
Of course, something may be unpalatable and unpleasant yet accurate. I can certainly understand coming to the sad conclusion that this is in fact the truth about the human condition: That we live briefly, then we die and we rot. That so, too, do our children and our grandchildren. And that so, also, does everything we create—our music, our buildings, our literature, our inventions. That “all we are is dust in the wind.”
But I cannot understand those who regard this as glorious good news.
He quotes famed playright, philosopher and author Albert Camus, a noted and prolific atheist:
If we believe in nothing; if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance. There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.
At the point where it is no longer possible to say what is black and what is white, the light is extinguished and freedom becomes a voluntary prison.
A good friend of mine knew Camus during the war and up until the time he died in an automobile accident. He said that at the time he died, Camus had completely rejected his views of atheism and was even contemplating entering the Catholic priesthood. I studied several of his works, including The Myth of Sisyphus, a cynical look at religion. My instructor, also a dedicated atheist, never told us that Camus reneged on his atheistic beliefs.
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