I could never really relate to atheists like Weinberg or Nietzsche in the way that they miss it or feel a loss.. Religion in my life was always kind of a burden. My parents weren't too religious, but I grew up in a small Louisiana town (in fact, Marguerite Perrin from Trading Spouses lives in this area), and I ended up associating it with body/mind starvation. To this day, I still wonder, why isn't the journey of life enough? I get pleasure from learning, being recreational, creating, meeting and conversing with people, being with family, etc. I've learned to take the good with the bad because without the bad, there would be no good (as cliche as that sounds).
Of course science won't give you meaning.
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Losing Our Religion
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Tyson is a commanding public speaker, which is why his fellow astronomer Carolyn Porco, the head of the imaging team for the Cassini space probe to Saturn, nominated him at the conference to be the first minister of her proposed (although not very seriously) "Church of Science." She thinks science is a perfectly adequate substitute for religion. "Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is as grand and inspiring as it gets," she says. "No religion offers anything comparable." To the promise of immortality, she counters with the proposition that all the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy. That's what we should be teaching our children, not fairy tales about angels and seeing grandma in Heaven. "If anyone has something to replace God," she says, "I think scientists do." Of course, it's not clear that anyone else is looking for one.
© 2006
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