A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
Well its not written by me but I would agree with almost every point.
Continue Reading - hereWHY I WON’T VOTE FOR BUSH
By Nelson Ascher
Let me be straightforward here. I’m an atheist and a secularist.
By atheist I mean that I take the possibility of there being any kind of transcendence, anything supernatural, anything that is not explainable or that won’t be eventually be explainad by the laws of physics (which I don’t pretend to understand fully) to be infinitesimally small. I’d really love it if there were something else besides what I can see, because what I can see if suffering, fear and crap. I’d like to think I’ll meet my loved ones who disappeared into nothingness or, to put it even less metaphorically, have disintegrated, don’t exist anymore, are not. It would be nice to imagine that I will outlast my mortal bodily being. But I can’t. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination. The trouble with atheism is the same as with learning to play the piano. To be able to play it well, you’ve got to learn it before you have time to fall in love with music. When you get to love music, it’s usually too late for your fingers to learn the right movements. In the same way, one becomes an atheist before one learns what fear, finitude and mortality are.
As a secularist, I simply don’t want other people’s beliefs dictating my behavior. You don’t want to eat pork? Fine, but leave me alone with my Spanish “jamon de jabugo” or “pata negra”. You dislike spirits? OK. Even so I’ll drink my cognac. Sex outside marriage is sinful for you? That’s your trouble, not mine. Live and let me live.
When I became a conscious atheist (I think that was when, for the hundredth time, in spite of my prayers, God almighty didn’t grant me the grades I needed at junior high school) I also started to militate. I couldn’t admit anyone disbelieving in my disbelief. I thought: I’m so smart and they’re so stupid. Eventually I came around to the conclusion that I couldn’t be so smarter than almost everybody else: a bit maybe, but not that much. So, the conclusions I arrived at could also have been arrived at by most people, living, dead or still to be born. If they took another way, they must have had their own reasons for it. Probably much comes down to temperament, a disposition we’re born with and cannot do much to change.