| Original Message |
Kevin Quail (Login rudolfo1)
Posted Sep 4, 2009 7:55 PM
It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
-- H P Lovecraft, In Defence of Dagon (1921), quoted from S T Joshi, Atheism: A Reader, p. 107
We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.
-- H P Lovecraft, letter to Maurice W Moe, 3 August 1931, in August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, ed., Selected Letters 1929-1931 (1971), pp. 390-91, quoted from S T Joshi, ed., "Introduction," Atheism: A Reader, p. 17
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