the general atheist thinks they know that Natural Selection is at the heart of all existence and that somehow that should be enough for everyone.

I have yet to meet any atheist who would make a statement as meaningless and religious-sounding as “Natural Selection is at the heart of all existence” (or capitalize “natural selection”).

But to address what I think is your larger point, the natural universe is all there is. It doesn’t matter whether some humans think it’s “enough” for them or not. We can believe in souls and yearn for “higher” meaning all we want. That doesn’t mean those things exist.

The humility that comes at the edge of the end of thought is the secret knowledge of what that one step beyond death is–ultimate transcendental (meaning unknowable) release.

How is it possible to have knowledge, secret or otherwise, of something one defines as unknowable? Actually, of course, it is unknowable, since by definition no living human has experienced a post-death state. However, observation gives as a fairly strong basis for an educated guess about “what that one step beyond death is”. Damage to a particular part of the brain usually leads to impairment or total loss of whatever ability that part of the brain performs. By logical extrapolation, total cessation of all brain activity (such as happens at death) probably produces exactly the result it appears to produce: total cessation of all the mental functions the brain normally performs, that is, the end of consciousness and all the other components of the mind, meaning the plain and simple end of that individual’s existence. If you start a bunch of complex programs running on a computer and then smash the computer, the programs don’t go anywhere, they just stop. If your brain completely stops functioning, most likely, the same thing happens to you — you just stop.

And yet, people that are firmly convinced that there is no God, Jesus was only a really cool guy who had a good line of BS, find it easy as hell to believe bullshit like aliens from another star system.

Actually, my impression is that most flying-saucer nuts are religious. Most first-person tales of encounters with aliens are thinly-disguised rehashes of religious wish-fulfillment — 500 years ago the same people would have been reporting encounters with angels or demons.

As for actual scientists, ten or twenty years ago it was actually quite rational to believe that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, based on our knowledge of the universe at that time. But very few actual scientists were among those claiming that aliens had actually visited the Earth.

And I don’t believe Jesus was “a really cool guy” — most likely he was completely mythical. As far as I know, there is no evidence suggesting that Jesus ever existed at all.

My point is that the atheist, as an observer, is generally still mentally standing as an entity apart from the observation at the end of their argument. They say that death is the ending but they have not yet ended themselves. Once the realization actually occurs, there is no longer an entity there to observe. The ego has actually “died to the waking moment” and this transcendental action is a movement inwardly in all directions at once.

Greetings Josh,

I’m not sure I do understand your point here. It’s true that when we accept the fact that biological death simply means the permanent end of consciousness, we do so without having experienced the permanent end of consciousness, since this is something which, by definition, no conscious entity can “have experienced”. Indeed, we can’t really even imagine the permanent cessation of our own consciousness — our brains aren’t structured to be able to do that. But so what? We accept the reality of, and can even say we “understand” (to an extent), many things which we can’t truly imagine. We can’t really imagine how large the solar system is, or the nature of quantum mechanics, or the conditions at the center of the Sun, or even exactly how the sex act physically feels to a person of the opposite gender. Yet we can claim some empirical knowledge of such phenomena.

In any case, none of this refutes the obvious conclusion. We can observe the behavior of the world around us and realize that biological death almost always means the permanent cessation of conciousness. The validity of the conclusion is unaffected by the fact that we can’t experience or imagine what that would be like.

To me, it’s somewhat academic since I don’t expect to ever die — but that’s a whole other issue.

I’m working on a rebuttal to this but have to let it process. Love these exchanges…very challenging to the morals, ethics and personality.