For atheists, this life is enough

There are several salient points in this piece, but overall it seems to have more to do with not thinking about death... or at least not worrying about it....

"This life is enough, if you are here for it. The people worried about death are the ones not truly living. They are the ones who know in their hearts that they need more time."

"The kind of further existence that religions offer me tends to be in a place where we are no longer hungry or horny, where we have wings instead of desire. But who are we in a place where our troubles no longer trouble us, and we no longer need balm for the wounds of it all, nor medicine for the madness?"

"I like being alive. As far as I know, I always will be alive. I understand that this sounds strange but think about it: You will not know it when you are dead, just as you did not know it before you were born, so it is none of your business. As far as you are concerned, you are always alive. It is awful to lose someone and worse when the person dies young. Nothing about God or the afterlife improves that: With or without God childhood leukemia and teenage car-accident fatalities are tragic beyond words. An adult who gets a bad diagnosis has reasons to feel sad too. It is sad to leave others behind, but I don’t see anything so sad about going."

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/atheists+this+life+enough/5871784/story.html#ixzz1hqaKvAT8

How to Live Given the Certainty of Death

Watch it on Academic Earth

This is one lecture from a course at Princeton on the subject of death. I quite liked it. The rest can be seen here.

Pale Blue Dot

In my mind the pale blue dot is the most important picture people have ever taken - when I see it it feels almost like the ground has been pulled out from under me.  I can feel my priorities and attitudes shifting, and it has become central to how I think about life.

It is also technically amazing.  Sending a picture back to earth from four billion miles away with technology that was developed fifty years ago is jaw dropping.  And the probe is still out there, sending more data.

Ann Druyan's reflections on Carl Sagan's death

"When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me - it still sometimes happens - and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous - not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful…"

"The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."