BELIEF is not complicated. (Introduction)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Thursday, May 29, 2008, 12:34 (5808 days ago) @ Cary Cook

Cary, I'm sorry to learn that, due to your own experiences, you have such a depressed view of life the universe and everything. My own experience is more mixed. - Since I can find no evidence for a creator, but think the universe is just the way it is because it can be no other way, I do not have anyone to blame or praise. I just have to put up with it. - I'm pretty certain that this life is all there is, and indeed perhaps I should spend more of my resources on immediate pleasures, though I find I get a lot of pleasure from intellectual activities (such as arguing on discussion forums and solving puzzles) and that delayed gratification is often worth waiting for. - I still have a lot of things I would like to get completed before I die, though it seems unlikely now that I will ever get many of them done. So I have plenty of incentives to go on living and do not feel the need contemplate suicide. Only very bad health and great pain I think would set me down that route. - I don't see why you think that indulging in pleasures would lead to "karma" catching up on you, unless you mean overindulging in smoking, eating, drinking and sex; but then overindulgence is not pleasure. - You propose gambling on the remote possibility of an afterlife. This is not a bet I would take. You say "a person may reasonably buy a lottery ticket if the jackpot appears high enough". I've never bought a lottery ticket, and as something of a mathematician would certainly not agree with your reasoning here. I would only go in for a competition where I had a reasonable chance of 
winning something. - For me this life that I have is probably the only one I'm going to have, so I'm certainly not going to throw it away for a remote and unlikely possibility. - In my experience if atheists commit suicide it is because they are in great pain and bad health or have got themselves into a impossible situation, emotionaly or financially. On the other hand one reads regularly of believers in an afterlife who commit suicide, often taking their children with them. This I find horrendous. Possibly even worse than suicide bombers.