On the end of lives « No God Blog

On the end of lives

First off, thanks to Blair Scott for blogging while I was on vacation. Now on to the cheery subject of death.

This wasn’t a vacation for me, really, it was a “visit” — one of those yearly mandatory vacations to Florida to see your aging parents and other family members. The last time we went down was during the election, and since then things have gotten worse.

Dad has cancer and is 83. His body has withered from age and war injuries, but his mind is still sharp. My mother in law is is perfectly healthy, but her brain is going fast due to Alzheimer’s and she is beginning to lose her grip on reality. Their respective spouses are overwhelmed an terribly sad.

We returned in time for me to appear on CNN to talk (coincidentally) about life after death, which was soon canceled due to the deaths of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon.

So as you can see, death has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I really wish it would go away. It’s times like this when I envy the theists who think they are going to live forever. Wouldn’t it be great if I had secure knowledge that after the eventual passing of my family members, that they’d somehow “be ok” forever? You can certainly see the advantage there.

I’m not one of those people that “accepts death as a part of life”, which it clearly is. Rather, I hate death. I wish it were gone. I can’t stand that some people hold back medical science like Stem Cell research which could prolong life in the name of an afterlife! There is no invisible place in the sky for our souls (don’t exist) to go. Death is death. That’s why it’s a tragedy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 10:25 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

171 Responses to “On the end of lives”

Krystalline Apostate says:

July 7, 2009 at 15:33

JCC is giving religion more (or any) than its due by saying:

Yeah, it’s called the Bill & Melinda (a practicing Roman Catholic) Gates Foundation. Interesting how that foundation didn’t come into being until after she entered the picture.

Yeah…right.
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Believer%27s%20Corner/meet_a_few_atheists.htm

Warren Buffett

The multi-billionaire, financier, atheist and business man. The following is taken from–Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, by Roger Lowenstein (Doubleday, 1995), page 13…
“He did not subscribe to his family’s religion. Even at a young age he was too mathematical, too logical, to make the leap of faith.”
“He adopted his father’s ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity.”

Bill Gates

Microsoft Cofounder and CEO, was interviewed November 1995 on PBS by David Frost. Below is the transcript with minor edits…

Frost: Do you believe in the Sermon on the Mount?

Gates: I don’t. I’m not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I’m a huge believer in. There’s a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very, very positive impact.

Frost: I sometimes say to people, do you believe there is a god, or do you know there is a god? And, you’d say you don’t know?

Gates: In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Gates was profiled by Walter Isaacson in a January 13, 1996 TIME MAGAZINE cover story. Here are some excerpts compiled by the Drudge Report:

Isaacson: Isn’t there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?

Gates: I don’t have any evidence on that.

More blatant mendacities. Oh, will it ever end?!?!?!?

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