Death Makes Life More Meaningful
Religious believers seem to think that if life is finite, then life is meaningless. As an atheist, I think the opposite is true. The very fact that life is finite is the very thing that makes life meaningful.
If we had eternal life, then what would be the point of it? We strive and work hard in life because life is short and so we feel an urgency to live our lives with passion. Every moment has value because once that moment is gone, it will never come again. By taking death out of the equation, religious believers also take the passion out of our existence. If we were to live forever, then a moment is just a moment and we have an infinite number of other moments ahead of us.
However, all this is aside from the obvious fact that regardless of what has more value has no real determination on what is actually true. As a point of fact, there is no evidence to suggest that life is infinite.
No one would suggest that all maggots have a choice between Heaven and Hell. Christians have a hard enough time telling children that there is no Heaven and Hell for dogs. Whether believers like it or not, humans are just animals with more developed mental capacities. So the question for believers is, what makes us any different than the cockroach? The theist answer, we have souls. Oh yeah, prove it. An eternal life is neither desirable nor is it true.
Filed under: death, responsibility
