Atheism

 2012 07 20

I no longer wish to engage in arguments or even friendly feisty debates on the subject of God/noGod. I am an atheist and profoundly anti-religious. To those who gleefully point out that atheism is in fact a "belief system" I will happily agree since there is no way to conclusively demonstrate to 100% certainty either side of the proposition. That notwithstanding I choose the path of rationality and, in public, to be an atheist; in private I'm 99.99% an atheist - pressed hard enough (among friends) I cannot avoid
admitting that when all is said and done it is
impossible for me to know whether or not some
fragment of my humanity will survive the collapse
of the flesh. Virtually all the empirical evidence
points to "not" but obviously all things are not yet
known. The religious will say, "How can you be
sure? No-one has ever come back to  inform." I
would suggest that the fact that no-one has
delivered such an enlightening message rather
speaks for itself. (I reject the Christian resurrection as patently unverifiable.)

2012 09 01

To be less than hardbound in my atheism would be intellectually dishonest. However, when we get to the inexplicable in science and physics, e.g., quantum theory, it is obviously necessary to mess around with imaginative ideas, as long as they remain unmagical and in some fashion tied to reportable phenomena, such as the continuing flow of information from CERN etc.

 2012 07 20

One of the more annoying aspects of atheism is that I'll never get to say, “I told you so!”.
Having come to personal grips with the
implacable inevitability of oblivion upon death, I must
acknowledge that the spiritually vulnerable who
have spent their lives believing in some sort of
afterlife will also experience the same oblivion and
thus never get to hear the taunt I won't be
delivering.

Ah well, c'est la vie!