What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with an Atheist?

Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason ?

.................

I don't know why, but I have been thinking about this subject lately. It takes my mind off my troubles.

I seem to be a magnet for religious proselytizers. In the past week, I have had a visit from a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, and have had to fend off the conversion attempts of a fundamentalist Christian. I normally find social interactions with strangers to be difficult. But when I am dealing with this type of interaction, I feel more free to be myself.

These people mean well. I respect their opinions. They are nice people. They just can be a pit pesky and they find it hard to take no for an answer. Quite honestly, I am finding the new atheist movement to have become equally as obnoxious. The other day. I witnessed a Christian standing on the street corner handling out pamphlets. I saw another fellow go up to him and read him the riot act. Called him every name in the book and told him religion was pure bs and started carrying on about reason being the highlight of human existence.

The philosopher David Hume correctly observed that, "Reason has never motivated a man to do anything." What he was saying is that when it comes down ot it, we are all creatures of instinct and emotion. It is here where the new atheist movement misses the mark entirely. Reason alone will never provide the sustenance to keep hope alive.

I admit I find the intellectual weakness of the religious position as the reason I reject it. It simply sounds too contrived, too absurd, too hokey. It appeals to our base instincts of fear and guilt. But it does appeal to the human psyche on a deep level. It supplies hope and relief. I just can't accept the proposition on an intellectual level. The stories come across as exactly what what one would expect to hear if they were contrived by frail beings afraid of their mortality.

So, are religious people deceived as the atheists tell us? Perhaps.

Stupid? No. I know many bright people who are religious.

The main motivating factor seems to be fear of death and suffering. I fully expect that whatever thoughts and memories that belong to the thing called 'me' will cease to exist once my brain expires. It is not a pleasant thought, but it doesn't really bother me that much. Nobody worries about where they were before they were born. Where were you? Nowhere. There was no you. Nothing was around to contemplate its own non-existence. Why then does the idea of not existing after the demise of the flesh present such a conundrum? The obvious answer is that we are sentient creatures that have the ability to comprehend such a thing. A dog has the instinctual desire for self-preservation, but it does not wonder where it goes when it dies. It has no need for religion. If it had the ability to employ reason, it would no doubt conjure up the idea of doggy heaven --a land flowing with milk bones and honey.

The way I see it, we are already assured of immortality. Every action that we have performed, no matter how small, is fixed in eternity. No action can be undone. We came, we saw, we existed. One cannot undo a life.

The oft-ignored truth that stares us in the face is that most of our suffering is at our own hands. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. There is no devil to make us do it. We are the ones with our hands in the cookie jar. We did it--sometimes collectively, sometimes as individuals. I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.

Shakespeare was fond of telling us that life is a ale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Life is full of sound and fury, indeed. Whether or not we are idiots is a matter of perspective. What our lives signify is not for me to say. It is for others. A life is a life.

I am often content to just sit on the sidelines and watch the show --whatever this thing is that we call the cosmos. Perhaps there is a cosmic designer and purpose or meaning that transcends human existence. I just cannot grasp the idea that such a purpose involves individual and unique personalities--ones that are so small and short-lived as to be rendered almost trivial in the grander scheme of things.

You mean well and I wish you the best. But please, stop knocking on my door. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

................

End of random esoteric jibberish.