afterlife

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.

Christopher Hitchens

Afterlife exist in the unidentified substances.

Toba Beta

After losing faith, even an atheist feels a yawning void in his soul that needs filling; there is nothing imaginable that he can fill with it. It was all along meant to be filled with the sacred, with the unknown and unknowable power. That's the curse or blessing of humanity

Bangambiki Habyarimana

After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.

Arthur Schopenhauer

A good friend is someone who gets ya drunk and then walks ya home afterward.

Michael Monroe

A joke is a witticism or play on words that’s meant to be funny. I say ‘meant to be’ because most jokes aren’t funny. They range between mildly amusing and grimace-inducing annoying.

Michael Monroe

A leader’s first duty is to look after his or her people, especially those who are sick, hungry, or thirsty.

Michael Monroe

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away, and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

David Eagleman

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

Walt Whitman

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