{"id":87,"date":"2013-04-09T08:09:34","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T02:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/?p=87"},"modified":"2013-04-09T08:09:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T02:09:34","slug":"life-is-often-good-for-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/2013\/04\/09\/life-is-often-good-for-many\/","title":{"rendered":"Life is often good. For many."},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s all good.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Life is good.<\/p>\n

Everything happens for a reason.<\/p>\n

I get what\u2019s behind these slogans.\u00a0\u00a0Life is sometimes, even often, good and that\u2019s a great joy.\u00a0\u00a0But they court callousness by overstating their case. \u00a0And today they grate more than usual.\u00a0 Our neighbor\u2019s teenage son killed himself yesterday.\u00a0 One of the many cars in front of the house had an \u201cIt\u2019s all good\u201d sticker on it.\u00a0 Yep, it was a Jeep Liberty.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a realist.\u00a0 I\u2019m committed to living in the scientific world of facts.\u00a0 One of my friends told me that one of the perks of being a human was that we don\u2019t have to do that.\u00a0 We have powerful virtual reality generators in our heads that let us live in almost any world we wish.<\/p>\n

I know that and I did that for years.\u00a0 But the older I got, the more socially aware I got.\u00a0 Our world is a cauldron of tensions brought on by this practice.\u00a0 When we go off into our own faith bubbles, we lose touch with one another.\u00a0 Our motivations become like the weather to other people.\u00a0 We can try to understand each other; but when someone\u2019s beliefs are not required to comport with reality, we will always be swimming against the current. \u00a0We try to hide this fact by getting into big faith bubbles with lots of other people. \u00a0But this ignores the fact that our world is full. \u00a0We have to live as one tribe now. \u00a0Religious faith belongs in our insular past.<\/p>\n

Life is often difficult, but we are in it together.\u00a0 We undermine our togetherness when we believe whatever we want.\u00a0 We have a common source of beliefs we can all use:\u00a0 Nature.\u00a0 We may not like the fact that we simply are our bodies and we die with them.\u00a0 But how much easier it would be to face if we simply agreed on this obvious fact.<\/p>\n

Blithe slogans and religious faith can be forms of defection from our human family. \u00a0They seem harmless, but smuggle a troubling message: \u00a0that we can’t be happy in the real world. \u00a0We can and we must. \u00a0We need a common worldview to survive our many challenges. \u00a0Nature is an obvious choice, and science is the best way to learn about it. \u00a0Faith diverges, science converges.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s all good. Life is good. Everything happens for a reason. I get what\u2019s behind these slogans.\u00a0\u00a0Life is sometimes, even often, good and that\u2019s a great joy.\u00a0\u00a0But they court callousness by overstating their case. \u00a0And today they grate more than usual.\u00a0 Our neighbor\u2019s teenage son killed himself yesterday.\u00a0 One of the many cars in front […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/enoughsenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}