Men consider their mortality in a manner that is most inconsistent with the very instincts that press upon us. We so strangely shun our will to live, our desire to feel love, and the comfort that ensues when our relatives and friends have physically expired. Everything within us cries out to reject mortality and affirm immortality. But we do not.
One might reply that it is better to live in truth than to adopt belief in immortality. One might reply that if we believe in immortality, this is just an exercise in self-delusion meant to suspend fear of the unknown, and internally aid us in time of struggle.
Such an answer seems to negate the importance of the question of what is often regarded as one of the most important in philosophy. What is the purpose of man? The importance of a question can sometimes be measured by its' answer. In this instance, the answer that atheists have imposed on us is, "There is none." We are confronted with nothing more than, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "the bare, valueless fact of existence."
Since the answer to the question of our existence is devoid of meaning, the question itself becomes silly. There is no purpose to mans' life. Natural selection; a fortuitous concourse of atoms, has dictated every thought that occurs to us and every action that we take. We do not make decisions. We react to a previous natural cause.
If this is the case, nothing that we do is "significant". Other human beings do not have value, just because I happen to give them value. For if on my authority, I deem human beings valuable, and a serial killer deems them dispensable, who is right? It seems to me that the obvious answer is that it is relative to both of us, and therefore neither of us is objectively right. So others in our lives are not "significant". We give them feign significance as an aid to survival. But any deeper meaning is illusory.
It has occurred to me that this act of distributing feign significance to the lives of other human beings is no less an act of self-delusion than that of believing in immortality. The question that follows from this is, if there is no immortality, and if we ought not live in self-delusion, why live at all?
Now that we have succeeded in answering what was previously the most pressing question; the question of our existence, we are faced with the consequences of the answer. We are the accidental by-product of nature. We are faced with the valuless fact of existence; infinitesimal within the expanding perimter of the universe, doomed to perish relatively soon.
The question that I pose before any atheist who comes across this page: why continue living at all, when any significance that we give our lives, our loved ones, our career, our children, our moral framework, is completely illusory? If I die now, or a couple of years from now, what is the difference? What is to stop me from committing suicide?
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