in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels, one of the central unifying themes is the search for the meaning of life. notoriously, the answer that the computer Deep Thought comes up with is "42", which of course, means nothing w/o the question, and the question can only be calculated by the supercomputer known as Earth, running a millions of years long program. that being said, it is a wonder to me how it is that the religious prefer to be told what the meaning to their personal journey is by a 2,000 year old book of fairy tales and long dead "authors". or, more appropriately, it doesn't cause me to wonder so much as it causes me to feel pangs of guilt. guilt that i'm not doing more to free people from the death grip the jesus cult, or the mohammed cult or the abrahamic cult have on them, and guilt because while every moment in my life is special and precious to me, never to return or be duplicated or be saved (pics and video are poor recorders of human emotions, after all) i have failed so many seeking to free themselves from that goddamned tyranny. not from lack of trying, mind you, but because like most things human, there's no idiot proof way of accomplishing that task. for some, ridicule makes them think over their positions again. for others, a kind word, gently spoken seems to do the trick. in short, we fail, as atheists, to bring the light of reason to so many of our brothers and sisters because we're human. and because despite the lies the religious are taught to repeat, the atheist life has THE most meaning to it, and one of the things that give it that meaning are our struggles with ourselves.
sadly, the theist has no such struggles. each and every single 'sin' is something that most people fall into at one time or another, and as such, are not struggles--there is no struggle when the outcome is known; you either accept, or you refuse to, and therefore, to say that there is a struggle in resisting the urge to covet your neighbor's wife, for example, is really a conflation between the struggle to accept that your neighbor's wife is hot, and the forced pseudo-morality of the alternative--to deny one's very real, very human, drives. you're not struggling to find your neighbor's wife hot or not. that's already a done deal. what you're struggling with is accepting that you're a human being, and you're driven to looking at and wanting an attractive woman, vs. denying that you're trapped in a machine evolved to do so.
of course, there's more to it: if one comes from dirt, and women from someone's rib, you are nothing more than dirt-inanimate, unattractive (in the metaphysical sense, not the physical one), and to most ways of thinking, profoundly unappealing. if however, you accept that that dirt is the accumulation of atomic debris from the explosion of stars long dead, that every atom in you at one point or another was created inside a living star, (and as someone recently pointed out to me, the hydrogen might conceivably be primordial in provenance), i would put to you that it is only then that your life can have meaning: it is only after accepting the reality that science makes available to ALL of us, that you can realize that yes, you're dirt-some of the most special dirt that has ever existed. that one day, millions of years ago, the atoms that make you, you were inside many different stars, some perhaps in other galaxies (due to galactic "collisions"), and that soon, perhaps a few million years, that 'dirt' will be engulfed by our sun as it expands, and will explode out of it, or perhaps become part of the neutron star our sun will become. all of that (and don't quote me, i'm not a scientist, so i'm going on dimly recollected snippets from science articles and documentaries) leads you to the conclusion that each breath we take, each nanosecond we get to see our son's smile, each first step, each building that is erected, each human milestone, from exploring the Challenger Deep to our first asteroid mining endeavors, all of it, every jot and fucking tittle is ultimately unique, and to be cherished, and sung, and lived. if there were a place where life lasted forever, every single thing i just mentioned would be ho-hum, 'oh, another atom'. that's what religion gives you--the single most devastating devaluation of human life and the human experience that ever could be devised.
still, we do what we can, and that's all that can be asked of us. there is no one telling me to do or not do anything except myself (OK, along with the chemical reactions that occur constantly in our brains), but those aren't intentional agents. they're the result of that damned evolution thingie ;).
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