"The correspondent was blunt: “Why don’t you atheists just go out and kill yourselves right now?” True, most Christians phrase it rather more delicately, but atheists are regularly informed by a certain kind of believer that our lives can have no value if we do not believe in their God. What is the point, they ask, of being kind or loving, caring about suffering or doing anything at all, if one day we just die?" - Eivind

"This is a perverse view of reality. After all, if the only valuable thing about existence is that God gave it to us, then that must mean the gift is not worth having in its own right. God’s creation would be the equivalent of a shapeless, baggy sweater of dubious color that you would never willingly wear but which you nevertheless can’t bring yourself to throw away because it was a gift from Granny. This approach in effect says you’re grateful for God’s gift, but you don’t actually like it very much; that, were it not for your belief that there’ll be an eternity in heaven to compensate you for having had to endure it, you can see no reason why you’d ever want it." - Eivind

Humanism: "The very fact that this life is all we have makes it even more important to do everything possible to reduce the suffering caused by poverty, disease, injustice and ignorance." - Heather Rantypants

I believe in life before death :) - Eivind

I was raised Catholic. And even after renouncing Catholicism, I believed in some sort of afterlife. I'm not so sure now. And since becoming unsure, it's become that much more important to me to wring what I can out of the life I have. (n.b. When Catholic, I wasn't raised to believe that nothing in this life counted because there was an afterlife...) - Spidra Webster

I think the puritanism and pietism on the Protestant branch of Christianity are much worse than Catholicism when it comes to sucking the fun out of life, Spidra. - Eivind

I would have to agree with that although it seems that since the Reagan era, the more right wing Catholic parishes have been hanging out with the fundamentalist Prostestant sects and picking up more killjoy habits. - Spidra Webster

They still have some work to do to catch up with the Wahhabi, though :) - Eivind

"I would rather belong to that race that commenced a skulless vertebrate and produced Shakespeare, a race that has before it an infinite future with the angel of progress leaning from the far horizon beckoning men forward upward and onward forever. I had rather belong to such a race commencing there producing this and with that hope than to have sprung from a perfect pair upon which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to this." - Robert Green Ingersoll, 1896 :) - Ken Morley