The pictures in question is from a series titled "Famous Quotes from Famous Freethinkers" from the website Truth-Saves.com. It features a number of well-known celebrities and intellectuals with their thoughts on religion. Here are a few of them:
(Please visit Truth-Saves.com for the complete series)
From these pictures, my friend JP asked me these questions to answer:
"So what about stuff that science can't explain or prove?"
"So this life is it? There's nothing afterwards? We live 60 maybe 80 years then that's it?"
The first thing I noticed about his line of questioning is how he tried to put "science" and its shortcomings on trial, when the celebrities and intellectuals were not even unanimously advocating science as an alternative to religion. This is typical of devout Christians when they see an attack on their faith, they will try to exploit the fact that science does not hold the answer to everything (yet). As if that will in some way add validity to the truth value of their religion.
To diffuse this line of questioning, I explained to him that science answers with: "I don't know, and I don't pretend to know." Science admits to its limits while continuing to observe, research, study those questions left unanswered!
As to the question of "life," well that all that depends on how you define "life!" One perspective is that as sexually reproducing biological entities such as ourselves, life continues through the cellular process of meiosis. when your parents die, they still live on through their children! This makes life more meaningful, and we cherish life because it is so brief, and our time with our love ones are so limited!
While, another perspective is the short sighted view that life is limited to an individual's consciousness, and that they "hope" that once their temporal bodies have expired, that somehow their consciousness lives on in a magical place where all their fondest wishes comes true! Which is kind of greedy for my taste!
And I posed him this question:
What is the point of an "eternal" life? Why not die now, when all the best thing comes after death?
To which I got no reply!
I followed up with the following statements:
"Personally I am grateful that out of the billions and billions of sperms and egg cells throughout the history of time, that through a series of chances and combinations, it produced a line that eventually lead to me, and that for a brief period of time, I get to live and experience all the wonders the universe has to offer, even if it is only 60 - 80 years!"
and quoted Richard Dawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientist greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
JP then followed up with what I can only assume to be directed on the concept of evolution, and the typical misunderstanding (to be painful honest, it is more like failure to understand) by Christians as being a process of chance. He asks:
"Do you believe that you came into existence because of chance and circumstance and not for a reason or purpose?"
To which I gave him two perspectives to consider. First,
"From a biological standpoint, most definitely yes! Do you understand how sexual reproduction works? How the fact that the nano-second of your father's ejaculation determines which sperm cells get the chance to be inseminated into your mother's womb?
Besides, I am not that egotistic to believe that the whole universe contrived just to create me; or that it deviced specifically for my father to meet my mother; or made them have sex at the exact moment so that the particular sperm cell that leads to me being born is the one that fertilizes my mother's egg cell; or that it safeguard them from all the possible viruses, diseases, accidents. Nor did the universe specifically safeguard my grandparents from World War II, the Japanese occupation, the rise of the Communist in China. Nor did it safeguard their parents before them, and their parents before them, and so on and so forth."
Secondly,
As for reason and purpose, we are not machines or robots built with predetermined uses or functions, like a vaccuum machine or a floor polisher.
From a biological standpoint, living life for the sake of living is reason enough!
As for an individual perspective, I chose my purpose in life, the same way as atheists like:
Warren Buffet (3rd richest man in the world) chose to pledge 99% of his wealth to charity or,
Bill Gates (once the richest man in the world) chose to give away over $26 Billion to charity (effectively losing the title of richest man) or,
Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie chose to work with charities and even adopt children from the most poor countries and share with them their love and wealth.
And just like all of these atheists, I chose my reason and purpose, to be good and contribute to humanity, not for some fantastic reward of an afterlife, but merely for the sake of good itself alone!
Then I returned the question to him: "How about you, are you only a good person, for the sake of a reward in the afterlife? do you think that type of goodness is sincere? just like when parents promise their children some kind of reward for behaving or doing good in school."
Again, no reply! So I enlightened him on some famous atheists, with their reason and purpose, have greatly affected our lives.
"As a sidenote, let's be thankful for the reason and purpose of atheists like:
Ely Buendia, for creating the best of OPM that we grew up with;
Steve Jobs, for releasing, even while fighting cancer, the iPad 2; and
Mark Zuckerberg, for creating Facebook and letting us have this conversation!"
To which he ends our discussion, and takes his leave by saying that he will need time to read everything that I have written.
I hope he does!
