About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.
Stichwörter: life existence morality meaning-of-life ethics god religion faith atheism afterlife self-respect existentialism naturalism respect materialism secular-ethics debate supernaturalism
I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.
Jess C. ScottStichwörter: life truth love passion dark paranormal-romance darkness self lust emotions emotion dark-humor desire paranormal gothic supernatural envy emotional succubus urban-fantasy emotional-plague incubus dark-lover dark-divine supernaturalism gothic-fiction paranormal-fiction emotionally-scared gothic-romance
One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies.
“They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.
Stichwörter: life love passion death dark paranormal-romance darkness self lust emotions emotion flowers dark-humor desire paranormal gothic supernatural dying envy emotional truth-beauty succubus urban-fantasy emotional-plague incubus dark-lover dark-divine supernaturalism gothic-fiction paranormal-fiction emotionally-scared gothic-romance lilies truth-love-hope
For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.
Thomas HobbesStichwörter: belief religion atheism rationality skepticism materialism roman-empire paranormal spiritualism fairies catholic-church heathen supernaturalism
Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design creationists] have learned is what not to say.
A major element of their strategy is to advance a form of creation that not only omits any explicit mention of Genesis but is also usually vague, if not mute, about any of the specific claims about the nature of Creation, the separate ancestry of humans and apes, the explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophic global flood, or the age of the earth - items that readily identified young-earth creationism as a thinly disguised biblical literalism.
Stichwörter: science philosophy ignorance evolution naturalism superstition materialism supernaturalism pseudoscience
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