JWCart
Atheists are prepared to go only till their scientific tools (which are dependent on your senses) can go. That means if an atheist is happened to be around a man whose senses do not work, then the existence of this very atheist will be in question!
As the writer points out, atheists will cherish their own beliefs in privacy. For many of them, this life is all there is. There is nothing before, after or any time else, and following death, its a return to nothingness. Some atheists offer themselves whimsical comfort by saying that before this slice of life happened, there was an infinite period when we didn’t exist and after we die, there is going to be another infinity when we won’t either. Nevertheless since there is no evidence to the contrary we may find ourselves continuing in some kind of post-mortem existence, with no overtones of paradise, retribution or any kind of divine paraphernalia. Of course, this is an area that only fringe researchers explore, yet even some prestigious scientists, notably the impeccably credentialed Ian Stevenson, who was director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia, have endorsed it. Among other things, he devoted the last 40 years of his life to the scientific documentation of past-life memories of children from all over the world. In the end, he had over 3, 000 cases on record in his files and many people, including sceptics and scholars, agree today that these offer the best evidence yet for life after death. But here is the twist: almost all non-spiritual atheists regard his work or the evidence he may have garnered over a lifetime as nonsense, while conveniently forgetting that Dr Stevenson was as much an atheist as any of them, if not more. Its just that some people believe in a far richer non-theistic experience than one that has only an arid landscape on the horizon with little other than chance and nothingness calling the shots.